Likability is a Jail, By Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir

We have today privileged a kind of ease in corporate life, a culture of agreeableness that can move institutions away, not toward, creative output. The impulse—indeed rush—to smooth over any hint of conflict within businesses and government agencies is misguided, leaving many with the misimpression that a life of ease awaits and rewarding those whose principal desire is the approval of others. As the comedian John Mulaney has said, “Likability is a jail.” The casual and unrelenting pressure to revert to the mean, to do what has been done before, to eliminate the wrong types of risks from a business at precisely the wrong times, and to avoid confrontation is everywhere and often tempting. But […] a certain psychological resilience and indeed indifference to the opinion of others are required if one is to have any hope of building something substantial and differentiated. The artist and the founder alike are often “the mad ones,” as Jack Kerouac wrote in On the Road, “the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.” The challenge, of course, is that some of the most compelling and authentic nonconformists, the artists and iconoclasts, make for notoriously difficult colleagues. […] The best investors and founders are sensitive to this distinction […] The act of rebellion that involves building something from nothing—whether it is a poem from a blank page, a painting from a canvas, or software code on a screen—by definition requires a rejection of what has come before. It involves the bracing conclusion that something new is necessary. The hubris involved in the act of creation—that determination that all that has been produced to date, the sum product of humanity’s output, is not precisely what ought or need be built at a given moment—is present within every founder or artist.