What can we learn from the secret habits of genius
Book recommendations
- The Hidden Habits of Genius (2020) - An Amazon Book of the Year selection
Summary
Nikola Tesla urged: the boldness of ignorance.
If you can't compose, you perform; and if you can't perform, you teach – that’s the mantra of conservatoires such as the Eastman School of Music.
If you seek the truth, consult the original primary sources; the rest is simply hearsay.
Relentless curiosity.
Leonardo DaVinci - the most relentlessly curious man in history.
Elizabeth I, queen of England, not only read books voraciously (three hours a day was her wont) but also people. She read, she studied, she observed, and she kept her mouth shut (Video et taceo was her motto).
If you are a prodigy with a great gift for something, you can simply do it – yet might not be aware of why and how. And you don’t ask questions. Indeed, the geniuses I met seemed too preoccupied with committing acts of genius to consider the cause of their creative output.
To the simple question What is genius? there is no answer, only opinions. As to what drives it – nature or nurture – again, no one knows.
A genius is a person of extraordinary mental powers whose original works or insights change society in some significant way for good or for ill across cultures and across time.
Not until I’d written my book The Hidden Habits of Genius, did I come to see that this complex verbiage might be simplified into something akin to a genius equation.
Here was a formula that the populace at large could immediately grasp:
G = S x N x D
Genius (G) equals Significance (S) of the degree of impact or change effected (Alexander Fleming’s life-saving penicillin vs Kanye West’s latest style of Yeezy sneakers) times the Number of people impacted (N) (about 200 million lives saved vs 280,000 pairs of shoes sold) times Duration (D) of impact (antibiotics have been around for 80 years; the life of a shoe is use-dependent). Although the genius equation was not a foolproof formula, at least here was a useful way to frame a discussion over the course of an academic term.
As the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi said, for creativity to occur, it takes two to tango: an original thinker and a receptive society. Multiple choice: is an Einstein alone on a desert island a genius, a non-genius, or a genius in potentia? Is the unheeded seer a prophet crying in the wilderness – or a lunatic?
A Japanese student told me of an anti-genius aphorism from his native country: The nail that sticks up the most gets hammered down the hardest. Asian students generally expressed an intense curiosity about Western genius owing to the (for them) novel notion of a single transformative individual.
Many great minds, it turns out, are not-so-great human beings.
Genius is not an absolute but a human construct that’s dependent on time, place and culture. Similarly, genius is relative. Some people simply change the world more than others. Accordingly, genius presupposes an inequality of output (the exceptional thoughts of an Einstein, or the music of a Bach) and generates an inequality of reward (eternal fame for Bach, fabulous riches for Amazon’s Jeff Bezos). That’s just the way the world works. Acts of genius are usually attended by acts of destruction; that’s generally called progress.
What is not pure genius? IQ, it turns out, is overrated and so, too, are other standardised tests, grades, Ivy League schools and mentors.
If IQ is overrated, curiosity and persistence are not. Nor is a having a childlike imagination through adult life, the capacity to relax so as to allow disparate ideas to coalesce into new, original ones, and the ability to construct a habit for work so as to get the product out the door.
Finally, if you want to live a long life, get a passion. Geniuses are passionate optimists who on average outlive the general populace by more than a decade.
A last takeaway applicable to all: be on guard if there’s a genius in your midst. If you work for a genius, you might be berated or abused, or you could lose your job. If someone close to you is a genius, you might find that his or her work or passion always comes first. Yet to those so abused, made miserable or redundant, exploited or ignored, sincere thanks is in order for taking one for the team, the team being all of us who subsequently benefit from the greater cultural good that your genius has done. To paraphrase the writer Edmond de Goncourt: almost no one loves the genius until he or she is dead. But then we do, because now life is better.