1. They don’t care what others think of them.

When Henry Ford proposed his idea of making a “horseless carriage” people thought he had gone insane. If he had listened to the naysayers he would never have begun production on the world’s first car or introduced the assembly line and revolutionized the manufacturing industry.

People with crazy minds succeed in life because they don’t let what others think about them hold them back from achieving their goals.

2. They don’t let other people tell them what to do.

During development of the first iPod, Steve Jobs met with the designers who showed him a prototype. After holding it in his hands, examining the weight, and testing it out, he deemed it too big. One of the designers promptly explained that it would be impossible to make the iPod any smaller than it already was. Looking down at the iPod and at again at the designer, Jobs silently walked over to an aquarium in the room and dropped the iPod in the water. Everyone’s mouths dropped open. As the iPod made its way to the bottom of the tank, bubbles floated to the top. “See those air bubbles,” Steve said. “That means there’s space in there. Make it smaller.”

People with crazy minds don’t take “no” for an answer. In fact, when they hear someone say something is not possible, that just pushes them harder to figure out a way to make it happen.

3. They don’t let their fears control their actions.

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” – J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling, who you may know as one of the most successful writers of our generation, was not always so accomplished. At one point in her life, Rowling was a single mother on unemployment and collecting welfare checks to survive. In her commencement address at Harvard University she reflected on that time by saying, “Failure meant a stripping away of the essential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and I began to direct all my energies to finishing the only work that mattered to me.” That work eventually became the Harry Potter series.