Nikola Tesla hated round things. Marie Curie, Ben Franklin and Thomas Edison more-or-less abandoned their families. The other high-achievers in Melissa Schilling’s interesting study are Elon Musk, Dean Kamen and Steve Jobs. All were supremely intelligent, often self-taught. All were extremely confident, all rejected authority and convention, all were madly driven, all were working to a higher goal, and all made several breakthroughs. Interestingly all, bar Franklin, were loners, and arguably on the autism spectrum. Schilling’s prose is clear and largely jargon-free, and the individual profiles are excellent. But there is a lot of repetition: her method is to first outline what she’s about to explain, then explain it, then review it for the slower kids. Ultimately, Schilling argues that knowing what made these people tick can help us to nurture our own instincts for innovation.