The result appeared on my screen and I had to read it twice.

You are the #Brainchild of Vincent van Edison.

A composite of Vincent van Gogh and Thomas Edison.

Edison — yes. That I could immediately understand. But Van Gogh? The tortured Post-Impressionist who famously sold exactly one painting in his entire lifetime, who spiraled through mental breakdowns, who cut off his own ear? That is supposed to be part of my creative DNA?

I almost closed the browser.

A Pop Quiz, Not a Personality Test

The result came from Mic.com's "Map Your Mind" tool — a feature that ran for a few years on the millennial-oriented culture and news platform before disappearing. While it was live, it was pop psychology at its most entertaining: fun, provocative, and as far as I could tell not deeply scientifically grounded.

I took it on a slow afternoon out of pure curiosity. Here is the irony: I have spent years developing TIPS — Thinkergy's own talent and innovator profiling system, purpose-built for the 21st century. Taking personality quizzes is something I do habitually, partly for self-reflection but also professionally — to dissect their constructs, examine their operationalization, reverse-engineer their logic. The Mic quiz I could not dissect. The methodology was opaque. There were too few hints to trace how the underlying constructs mapped to the famous-figure outcomes. In a strange way, that opacity made the result more interesting, not less.

Different personality frameworks are complementary lenses, not competitors. MBTI (Myers–Briggs Type Indicator) has given us a shared cultural vocabulary for more than eighty years. TIPS was built for a different purpose: innovator profiling calibrated for the dynamism of the Sixth Wave of innovation. Using both is not a contradiction. It is layered insight.

So Edison I understood immediately.

The Edison in Me

Thomas Edison was, by most analyses, a textbook ENTP — the Innovator. Relentlessly experimental. Methodologically structured in his innovative approach, which was a precursor to modern innovation methods like Design Thinking or X-IDEA by Thinkergy, Driven by the question What if? rather than What is? He filed 1,093 patents, reframed every failed experiment as data, and pushed relentlessly to bring his inventions into the world and profit from them in his lifetime. Underneath the drive ran a streak of irreducible individuality — a need to prove something about his singular way of seeing, not merely to achieve.

I recognized all of this. For much of my career I worked and led with the Edison side — deeply competitive by nature, a former middle-distance runner who brought the same intensity into business. I built structured, innovative frameworks, designed new tools, and created creative processes that organizations could adopt and deploy to produce meaningful results. But over time I noticed that the most extraordinary breakthroughs followed a different logic entirely — arising not from structured process but from non-conscious creativity, the kind that surfaces when you are deeply immersed and not forcing anything. That is the territory I explore through Genius Journey, and it pointed somewhere T-dominant thinking alone could not reach.

Which is why I moved gradually from ENTP toward ENT/FP — simultaneously fact and feeling, structured and intuitive. Not a compromise. A synthesis. Cultivating the F side required stepping back from some of that competitive intensity — not abandoning it, but subordinating it to deeper creative work. The F-factor was not a softening. It was a deepening.

In TIPS terms, I am an Extreme Ideator — and this means more than generating lots of ideas. The Ideator profiles are the most progressive of all eleven types: the ones who drive change into societies, create something genuinely new out of nothing, and see around corners others have not yet noticed. Edison, without question, was one. So — as we will see — was Van Gogh.

Edison, yes. That part was always easy.

The Van Gogh Revelation

Van Gogh took longer to understand.

Typically identified in MBTI as an INFP — the Mediator, the Idealist — he was driven by emotional authenticity and a profound need to express his inner world with total honesty. He was also what we would now recognize as a Highly Sensitive Person, whose heightened emotional receptivity was both the source of his creative power and the weight he could never fully put down.

He was, in a sense, the pioneer of the post-impressionistic selfie — painting himself over thirty-five times, not from vanity but from necessity. His paintings were not depictions of the external world so much as transmissions from his interior one. What gets lost in the romanticization of his suffering is the sheer radicalism of his vision. He was one of the most progressive painters in history — achieving his breakthroughs not through systematic method but through direct access to the unconscious, the subconscious, the raw creative sources most people never learn to draw from at all.

When I first got the quiz result, I filed Van Gogh away and moved on. I am not reclusive by temperament. I do not surrender to inner drama as a way of life.

But then life delivered its curriculum.

Business setbacks. Personal setbacks. The kind that do not ask for your permission. Those seasons activated something I had not previously needed to name — not madness, not crisis, but a genuine capacity for inner turbulence, for being shaken at depth. That, I realized, was the Van Gogh signal: dormant, waiting. The pivot toward advanced creativity and non-conscious creative processes also required more Van Gogh. You cannot access the deeper registers of human creativity while keeping the feeling function locked away or while the competitive, systematic mind insists on being in charge.

The quiz result, revisited years later, suddenly made complete sense.

Not Opposites — Two Expressions of the Same Radical Impulse

Van Gogh and Edison are not opposites. They are not even particularly different at their creative core.

Run both through TIPS, and they land in the same place: Extreme Ideators — the most progressive profiles in the system, the ones who drive change into societies and create something genuinely new where nothing existed before. Both were decades ahead of their cultural moment. Both possessed an almost pathological commitment to their vision. Both carried a need to express a singular way of seeing that could not be borrowed or imitated.

The divergence in their outcomes was not a personality difference. It was a strategic difference.

Edison competed, monetized, and played the game of recognition brilliantly — becoming famous, wealthy, and consequential while still alive to witness it. Van Gogh surrendered to his inner drama, gave his demons more real estate than his ambitions, sold one painting, and died at thirty-seven largely unrecognized. Fame came posthumously. Recognition arrived too late to matter to him.

Same creative fuel. Two progressive pioneers. Different engines for bringing it into the world.

I have found an unlikely companion for this thinking in the song Retro by E-Z Rollers, a vocal edit of a jazzy drum and bass track from the late 1990s that I return to from time to time. Without reproducing its words, I will say it captures something essential about the renegades who powered culture forward and never made a dime — the true rebels who walked alone because there was no alternative. A meditation on unjust invisibility, and an argument for why you do it anyway.

The Sixth Wave Changes the Equation

We are living through a period of technology-driven change unlike anything in modern history. The Sixth Wave of innovation is powered by the convergence of digital technologies, clean and sustainable technologies, and human-centered technologies. Every industry is affected. Every business model will need to be rethought. And crucially: this wave is approximately eight times faster than the Fifth Wave — the internet era, which was itself the fastest wave of transformation in the preceding two centuries. The compression is historic. Things that once took decades to move from visionary fringe to mainstream adoption are now moving in years, sometimes months.

Van Gogh's tragedy was partly a tragedy of timing. Post-Impressionism was too far ahead for the taste of a society that moved slowly. Edison had the good fortune of being progressive in an era where industrial capitalism could absorb and reward his inventions almost as fast as he produced them. That alignment between visionary and era is what the Sixth Wave now makes possible again — more broadly and more rapidly than ever before.

When technology moves this fast, society is forced to catch up. The progressive pioneer who builds something genuinely ahead of its time today stands a real chance of being understood and rewarded in their own lifetime — not because the world has become more enlightened, but because the pace of change leaves it no room to lag indefinitely.

This is the time for creative leaders who are asking the questions everyone else is not yet asking. What are the directions that current conventional wisdom ignores, but that the converging forces of the Sixth Wave are quietly making inevitable? Where are the spaces where breakthrough creativity — not incremental improvement, but genuine leaps — will generate the most meaning and the most value?

These are the questions I have oriented my work around. Empowering creative leaders and their teams to win in the Sixth Wave through breakthrough creativity is not a niche. It is, I believe, one of the most consequential spaces anyone can work in right now.

The Dual Mandate: Playing the Edison Side — While Holding the Van Gogh Truth

The answer for any creative leader who recognizes themselves in this archetype requires holding two mandates simultaneously.

Commercially, be Edison. Build, scale, compete, and monetize — make meaning and money in the same motion. The Sixth Wave window is open. It will not stay open indefinitely.

But creatively, be Van Gogh. Systematic innovation based on conscious creativity alone is no longer sufficient for the bold leaps this age demands. The breakthroughs that define the Sixth Wave will come from drawing on the same deeper sources Van Gogh accessed instinctively — the unconscious and superconscious mind – the non-conscious creative wellspring beneath the rational mind. Advanced creativity requires the F as much as the T, the receptive as much as the relentless.

The true rebels sometimes die before the world catches up — and other times, the ingenuity of their contributions is never realized in a world calibrated for the average. I do not know yet which side of that ledger I will land on. I do not think anyone can know in advance, especially in light of the tsunami of disruption awaiting us over the next ten years.

What I do know is that authenticity — Van Gogh's insistence on expressing inner truth regardless of reception — and ambition — Edison's insistence on bringing that truth into the world in a form that could be received and rewarded — are not opposed values. They are the two poles of the same creative life.

I have come to understand that I live between these poles by design — structure and flow, logic and magic, the system and the spark. That is not a tension to resolve. It is the creative condition itself.

I am Vincent van Edison. Not a perfect hybrid, but a real one. More Edison. Enough Van Gogh to keep me honest — and, it turns out, to keep me creative in the ways that matter most.

I walk the path with resilience, persistence, passion, and authenticity.

And I walk it forward.

• Curious about how you profile in TIPS? Buy a TIPS test coupon at half price — just USD 44.44 instead of the regular USD 88.88” (type "VvE2026" into the coupon field; valid until December 31, 2026).
• Curious about Genius Journey? Check out the Genius Journey website, download the Genius Journey booklet, or read about creative leadership and Genius Journey in Chapter 7 of my Unleashing Wow! book. 
• Curious to learn more about the Sixth Wave? We’re in the layout design phase for my upcoming new book Surfing the Sixth Wave of Innovation. Contact us if you want to be notified when it’s ready for release. 

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2026.

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