Shoutout to the Readup Archives for resurfacing this one 🔥

Humble yet confident reflections on a course about geniuses and the concept “genius”. Great read! Elon Musk might fit the bill for genius as described at the end too.

Excellent! This one caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting such depth. I particularly loved the equation, and the candid exploration of tradeoffs that geniuses must make.

Worth reading if you're working on big, game-changing ideas.

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.

Excellent, Well-Rounded Read on Genius.

Take, for example, what I learned from young members of Native American descent. I remember in particular students from the Navajo Nation and from the Shoshone Tribe who had a similar – but, to me, radically new – way of thinking of human accomplishment, one that could be boiled down to ‘the genius of the community’. To them, the woman who designed a rug pattern, now replicated for generations, was a genius, but no one knew her name. Then there was the Olympic medal-winner in the class. He confessed that he believed his accomplishments were due to natural gifts, but that his Chinese mother, he later reported, thought them mostly the result of hard work. Similarly, several Chinese students independently informed me that Thomas Edison is still held in great esteem in that country because of his aphorism that genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration. Meanwhile, the brilliant conceptual scientist Nikola Tesla, who disparaged Edison’s lumbering unscientific ways, is little-known there.

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. Yes, more and more I came to see that genius is indeed cultural; the notion of individual immanent genius seems to have emerged during the 18th century, in part because it mapped well on to a Western, expansionist, capitalist ideal under which individual property, especially intellectual property, could increasingly be generated and would enjoy legal protection. I was never averse to any of that but now, at least, I was more mindful of the historical basis and bias of my intellectual leanings. And thus, my student-provided education went.

In the end, what had begun, for me, as a stereotypical view of the flamboyant genius – usually a male brainiac with a super-high IQ who, even as a youth, has sudden ‘Aha!’ insights, and is perhaps a bit crazy and certainly eccentric – had evolved into a more sober, sometimes philosophic assessment.