Is youthful pain the key to success?

We know that real success demands strange sacrifices of those who worship at its alter. But do those willing to make those sacrifices possess of a unique kind of obsessiveness, the proverbial fire in the belly, that is often only fueled by youthful pain and determination?

In short, is greatness a kind of OCD run amuck, a kind of mental illness, that in the right mind achieves magnificent feats?  That's the idea behind Joshua Kendall's America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation.

My conversation with Joshua Kendall: