In 1904, the genius Mark Twain published an essay titled “Saint Joan of Arc” in which he suggested how greatness had come about for this female hero as well as for other transformative minds: “When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent was cradled that explains; it is the training it received while it grew, the nurture it got from reading, study, example, the encouragement it gathered from self-recognition and recognition from the outside at each stage of its development: when we know all these details, then we know why the man was ready when his opportunity came.”1 For Twain, all those external “details” of genius are prerequisites of the last: opportunity. The word “opportunity” derives from the Latin opportuna, a favorable wind blowing toward port. The word “fortunate” descends from the Latin fortuna, meaning “fate” or “luck.” When that lucky wind blows, it will be of greatest fortune only to those fully prepared to sail with it. Genius, greatness, and success arrive in port the same way.
A similar sentiment is conveyed more succinctly in words often attributed to the legendary golfer Gary Player: “The harder I practice, the luckier I get.”2 Who can deny that better outcomes come to the “lucky” ones who work hard, act courageously, or make bold moves? Those moves may be the result of an intelligent decision or an actual physical uprooting. Some lucky breaks attend the genius at the moment of birth; others, strangely, arrive after death. But we start at the beginning, with the lottery of birth.
For a genius, being born rich is not the same thing as being born lucky. Geniuses almost never emerge from conditions of extreme wealth. Charles Darwin, who was wholly supported as a young adult and ultimately inherited a minor fortune, may be the exception who proves the rule. Similarly, geniuses tend not to arise from the aristocracy or the political ruling class. While the genius is hell-bent on changing the world, the aristocrat most often luxuriates in the status quo. Why change anything? In truth, geniuses do not spring from either of the economic extremes of society—with extreme poverty, there is little opportunity; with great wealth, no incentive. Consider these geniuses and the professions of their fathers: Shakespeare (glove maker), Newton and Lincoln (farmers), Franklin (candle maker), Bach (town trumpeter), the Brontë sisters (village parson), Faraday (blacksmith), Edison (tavern keeper), Curie (schoolteacher), King (preacher), Morrison (welder), and Bezos (bike shop owner). With geniuses, to be born lucky is generally to be born in the middle class.
Luck, both good and bad, sometimes attends the genius postmortem, as time and events change the perception of him or her in the eyes of society. In his day, William Shakespeare was a highly successful playwright who captured the imagination of London spectators, but his audience was small. Gradually, during the eighteenth century, as English commercial influence grew, the Bard’s plays were translated into French, German, and Spanish. Today his impact continues to expand, even across Asia, as English becomes the default language of the world.3 The importance of Shakespeare, now viewed as the greatest dramatist who ever lived and a moral compass for all humanity, is partly a consequence of this latter-day linguistic expansion. In Shakespeare’s time only about .8 percent of the world’s population could speak English; today about 20 percent can. Shakespeare was lucky: a rising tide lifted his posthumous boat.
In the early morning of August 22, 1911, a maintenance worker, Vincenzo Peruggia, stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. The story of the heist and a photo of the painting appeared on the front page of major newspapers around the world, and an international art hunt began. “60 Detectives Seek Stolen ‘Mona Lisa,’” blared the New York Times.4 Even Picasso got swept up in the dragnet because antique busts stolen from the Louvre could be traced to his apartment. For a while, Peruggia hid the Mona Lisa under his bed. Two years later, he tried to sell it to agents of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence—not genius, for by now the entire Western world had seen the painting. The police were alerted, Peruggia was arrested, and the painting was returned to Paris. Again more photos and stories appeared in the papers. During its first two days back on display in the Louvre, more than 120,000 viewers came to have a look.5
The Mona Lisa is the one painting that almost everyone in the world can identify, but why? In part, its fame is due to the lasting impact of the art theft; it would be the most sensational news story in the West until the sinking of the Titanic on April 14, 1912.6 In a broadcast commemorating the centenary of the heist, National Public Radio described this as “The Theft That Made the ‘Mona Lisa’ a Masterpiece.” Hyperbole, perhaps, but statistical evidence supports the claim. Using collection data in the Yale University Library, I calculated the number of books and articles listed on the subject of either “Michelangelo” or “Leonardo da Vinci” prior to 1911. They skew 68 percent to 32 percent in favor of the former. But in the entries after 1911, the ratio is about fifty-fifty. Consulting standard reference works on the two artists and the number of words assigned to each, with 1911 again the tipping point, the ratios go from seven to five for Michelangelo to two to one in favor of Leonardo. If public interest be any sort of benchmark of genius, the caper of a museum worker serendipitously enhanced Leonardo’s standing.
DNA HAS BEEN CALLED “THE BUILDING BLOCK OF LIFE.”7 EMBEDDED in the nucleus of each cell of the human body, DNA contains hereditary traits in the form of genes, the tiniest of encryptions that drive the growth and development in each living organism. By the early 1950s, the existence of DNA had been known for nearly a century, but scientists did not yet know how DNA was structured, or, more important, how each molecule in the body was able to replicate itself and thereby build out a complete living creature. Therein lay the key to unlocking the genetic code. That key was handed to humanity on April 25, 1953, in the form of a brief scientific paper published in Nature titled “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” the result of research by Francis Crick and James Watson, two young scientists working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England.8 Who should get first billing for what was arguably the single most important scientific announcement in modern times? They flipped a coin, and precedence went to Watson.
Watson and Crick were not the only ones looking to explain life’s hidden processes. In 1944, Oswald Avery had shown that DNA was the “transforming principle,” the carrier of hereditary information. Coterminous with Watson and Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin were working on X-ray crystallography to generate images of a single DNA molecule. In addition, the famed chemist Linus Pauling had produced an (incorrect, as it proved) three-dimensional, three-strand model of DNA.9 Drawing on the work of others and their own intuition, Watson and Crick had put the pieces together and built a molecular model, described in their paper, that accurately represented DNA’s structure: the famed interlocking double helix. The critical piece of information contributing to Watson and Crick’s insight was Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray “Photograph 51” showing DNA’s double-helix design. From the discovery of the structure of DNA emerged, among other things, the sequencing of the human genome, the use of genetic identification in criminal cases, and recombinant DNA research with its gene editing and therapy, all now driving a multibillion-dollar biotechnology industry. In 1962, the Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins. But what had happened to Rosalind Franklin? The answer: bad luck.
Franklin’s important X-ray photographs had been stolen from her. Without permission, Franklin’s supervisors had shown the images to Watson and Crick in February 1953. From the pictures the duo saw that DNA was helical in structure, its dimensions, and how many base pairs per turn it possessed.10 Franklin had earned an undergraduate degree and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cambridge University, perhaps the top scientific university in the world. After moving to London in 1951, she had occupied a postdoctorate research post at prestigious King’s College. Franklin was highly educated, had standing in her field, and was ambitious—all prerequisites for genius. But an obstacle worked against her in that era: she was a woman. Here follows a passage regarding Franklin and her nominal supervisor, Maurice Wilkins, written by Watson.
Maurice, a beginner in X-ray diffraction work, wanted some professional help and hoped that Rosy, a trained crystallographer, could speed up his research. Rosy, however, did not see the situation this way. She claimed that she had been given DNA for her own problem and would not think of herself as Maurice’s assistant.
I suspect that in the beginning Maurice hoped that Rosy would calm down. Yet mere inspection suggested that she would not easily bend. By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. . . .
Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place.11
Franklin refused to project feminine charms and boldly demonstrated that a woman might be a leader in the cutting-edge science of DNA. But “Rosy” wouldn’t play nice with the boys, and in the end, the boys penalized her. She was denied full honors for what she had found—denied not merely by her male counterparts but by a fatal posthumous rule that affects only the unlucky.
The Statutes of the Nobel Foundation contain one or two seemingly arbitrary provisions. Section 4, paragraph 1:
A prize amount may be equally divided between two works, each of which is considered to merit a prize. If a work that is being rewarded has been produced by two or three persons, the prize shall be awarded to them jointly. In no case may a prize amount be divided between more than three persons.12
By no later than 1961, the Nobel Committee had recognized the enormous implications of DNA and its double-helix structure. But to whom should the fame and glory go? Certainly to the principal researchers Watson and Crick; possibly to Linus Pauling for having gotten close; possibly to Maurice Wilkins as Franklin’s ersatz supervisor; or possibly, based on merit, to Franklin herself. But now read Section 4, Paragraph 2: “Work produced by a person since deceased shall not be considered for an award. If, however, a prizewinner dies before he has received the prize, then the prize may be presented.” Four years after her influential work on DNA, yet four years before a Nobel Prize was awarded in the field, Rosalind Franklin died at the age of thirty-seven of ovarian cancer. Fame and glory denied.
To gain a better understanding of the fateful story of the discovery of DNA’s structure, I sat down to lunch in March 2017 with Scott Strobel, Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale and currently Yale’s provost. Strobel began by pointing out to me that Watson and Crick had been lucky and Linus Pauling unlucky. Had Pauling seen Franklin’s photos, the discovery might have been his. But traveling through London early in 1953 with the express aim of seeing Franklin’s images, Pauling was denied a visa that would have allowed him to leave Heathrow Airport to meet her. Strobel also emphasized that the discovery of the double helix had been a team effort. As he explained it to me, “Observational science is becoming more and more complex, and no one person can control all of any one field. Increasingly, scientific discoveries are the product of communal labs. The unintended consequence is that the solitary genius is relegated to the endangered species list.” As for the possibility of a future Nobel Prize being awarded for the discovery of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR), the exciting new field in genetic science, Strobel noted the irony: “One leading candidate is my former collaborator Jennifer Doudna at Berkeley. The problem is that there are so many candidates for the Nobel for CRISPR—at Berkeley and MIT and elsewhere—that the Nobel Committee may have trouble winnowing down to three winners. The prize for CRISPR may be delayed.”13
PERHAPS WE ALL MIGHT JUST AS WELL BECOME FATALISTS, SUBSCRIBING to the notion that our destiny rests posthumously in the hands of Lady Luck. The point of this chapter, however, is to suggest exactly the opposite: that although serendipity may play a role, the genius habitually makes conscious decisions that lead to significantly better outcomes.
Queen Elizabeth I was lucky in 1588 when a freak hurricane wrecked the Spanish Armada before it could reach English shores; but for the previous thirty years her foreign policy had been one of nonengagement so as to allow the enemy to self-destruct. Wilhelm Röntgen was lucky in 1895 when he happened to leave photographic plates in his lab while experimenting with a cathode ray tube and later saw streaks of light imprinted on the plates. But as a physicist studying high-energy waves, he immediately understood what others would have missed—why the rays had been able to penetrate some objects and leave an impression of others: the phenomenon of the X-ray. Percy Spencer got lucky in 1945 when a candy bar melted in his pocket as he stood next to a magnetron. But being a trained electrical engineer, he understood the thermal power of microwaves within a metal box, soon experimented with popcorn, and then went on to patent the microwave oven. Louis Pasteur got lucky in 1879 when he accidentally left a culture being used to eradicate chicken cholera unattended for a month and then discovered, and subsequently exploited, the fact that only the “spoiled” batch proved to work as a vaccine. But as an experienced microbiologist, Pasteur had learned long before the lesson he had articulated when addressing a medical conference in Douai, France, in 1854: “In the observational sciences, luck (le hazard) favors only the prepared mind.”14
FIRST CHICKENS, THEN HUMANS: ALEXANDER FLEMING’S DISCOVERY of penicillin is said to be the most famous example of “accidental genius” in medical history. But was it wholly an accident? Fleming was born the son of a farmer in rural Scotland in 1881, and at the age of thirteen he moved to London, where he eventually earned a medical degree. In 1921, he discovered the antiseptic enzyme lysozyme (from which we get the product Lysolac) and then went on to experiment with the process by which one bacterium might destroy another. Fleming had a habit of keeping a messy lab, and before leaving for a month’s vacation in August 1928, he stacked, but did not clean, a set of bacteria-laden petri dishes. Upon returning, he found bacteria growing robustly in all the dishes except one. The one with little surviving bacteria, it turned out, was inhabited by a mold called Penicillium notatum, spores of which had blown in by accident from a neighboring lab and landed in the dish.
A colleague of mine at Yale, chemistry professor Michael McBride, once said to me, “Scientists don’t have ‘eureka’ flashes. Rather, they experience ‘My, that’s strange’ moments.” Upon seeing the strange condition of the one petri dish, Fleming muttered, “That’s funny”15 and asked himself what was killing the bacteria, before quickly determining that it was the errant penicillin mold. He then began to speculate on the therapeutic powers of the mold, and from that lucky break emerged the miracle drug penicillin. Scientists consistently rank the discovery of penicillin among the top three medical advances in history, along with Pasteur’s recognition of germs (pathogens) and Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA. With the arrival of penicillin—the first antibiotic—Western medicine entered the modern age, and countless millions of lives were saved. If genius manifests as world-changing insight, such an insight was born serendipitously in Alexander Fleming’s lab. That, at least, is the story.
But the history of Alexander Fleming’s fortuitous discovery of penicillin involves far more than serendipity. Winston Churchill once said of his role in World War II, “I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.”16 Fleming, too, was well prepared. Unknown to him at the time, he had been training for his “lucky break” during nearly thirty years of professional activity. He had developed the observational skill and scientific knowledge to apprehend and exploit the import of what was before him. The medical historian John Waller summed it up succinctly when he said, “Fleming had the genius to see what others would have ignored.”17
Fleming’s preparation and previous breakthrough with lysozyme also gave him standing within the scientific community, meaning that others would pay attention to him. In truth, someone had already discovered the therapeutic powers of penicillin, but no one had noticed. In 1897, Ernest Duchesne (1874–1912), a student at a military university in Lyon, France, sent a thesis to the Pasteur Institute in Paris describing much of what Fleming would later discover.18 But the twenty-three-year-old Duchesne was unlucky. He was not favored with so much as even an acknowledgment, subsequently entered the army, and died young of tuberculosis (which an antibiotic might have cured). Thirty years later, Fleming’s well-earned status as a world-class bacteriologist with connections within the scientific community caused people to listen to him. Duchesne hit a hidden target—but he had no standing, so no one noticed and nothing changed.
Finally, Alexander Fleming himself did not bring the wonder drug penicillin to market; that occurred over the course of more than a decade at Oxford University and involved a team of bacteriologists led by Howard Florey. But Fleming was ambitious enough to maintain a proprietary interest in what he called “my old penicillin.”19 With the war effort in Europe ongoing, and Great Britain in need of a “magic bullet” to benefit troops and boost morale, Fleming eagerly became a poster boy for the new drug. When the Nobel Committee of medical scientists gave its award in Physiology or Medicine in 1945, it went to three people: Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey, and fellow Oxford University team member Ernst Chain.
So why do we remember only Fleming? Because the tale of a “lucky find” makes for a captivating, albeit overly simplified, story. Obviously more than luck was involved. Fleming was well prepared, he worked to maintain his image as the “great man” behind a great cause, and a conscious team effort brought his initial hopes to fruition. Thus to Louis Pasteur’s boyish aphorism “Be prepared” can be added two others relevant to greatness: “Step forward” and “Don’t lose what you find.”
“FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD” IS A SAYING THAT IS AS OLD AS ANCIENT Rome, being ascribed variously to Pliny the Elder, Terence, and Virgil. To be bold means to be willing to take a chance. But what does it mean to take a chance? Does it mean that one is willing to make a move when the outcome, although uncertain, can be quantified—as in a fifty-fifty chance? Or does it mean simply to trust to pure serendipity—as in “That was pure chance”? Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, has shown himself daunted neither by calculated risk nor by serendipity.
If genius can be measured by impact on society, then Zuckerberg can scarcely be denied the label. Granted, Zuckerberg has recently run afoul of privacy experts, the Federal Trade Commission, and the attorneys general of forty-seven U.S. states (see also chapter 12). Nonetheless, today almost 2 billion people spend nearly an hour each day engaged with his creation: Facebook.20 In 2010, Time named Zuckerberg Person of the Year; at age twenty-six he was at the time the second youngest person to be so honored. Preparation—he was a computer programing prodigy—and limitless ambition mark Zuckerberg. The risky moves he undertook before the age of twenty-one show the extent of his capacity for bold, if sometimes illicit, initiatives.
RISKY MOVE NO. 1: HACK INTO THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY COMPUTER SYSTEM AND “BORROW” STUDENT DATA FROM FACE BOOKS.
(The name “Facebook” is derived from Harvard “face books”—catalogues of photos of and information about each student organized by “houses,” the elegant dorms in which students reside.)
On the evening of October 28, 2003, Mark Zuckerberg sat down at his desk in Suite H33 of Kirkland House for a long night of programming. Earlier that semester, he had created CourseMatch, which enabled Harvard students to know which courses their friends were taking and perhaps form study groups. But now Zuckerberg was onto something far more daring: an online “hookup” site that would enable Harvard students to see other students and determine whether they were “hot or not.” At first he even considered posting photos of students next to farm animals to invite comparisons, but then thought better of it.
To build the program, theft—or at least an unauthorized taking—was involved. Zuckerberg gained access to Harvard servers and downloaded student images and data from the house face books. To quote Ben Mezrich in The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal, “Sure, in a sense it was stealing—he didn’t have the legal rights to those pictures, and the university certainly didn’t put them up there for someone to download them. But then, if information was getable, didn’t Mark have the right to get it?”21 In the early morning hours of the twenty-ninth, Zuckerberg launched what he then called Facemash.
The impact was immediate. So many students joined Facemash that the Harvard servers began to slow down. Women’s groups protested. The university demanded that Zuckerberg shut the site immediately and that he appear before the Harvard College Administrative Board, Harvard’s venerable disciplinary committee. He did both. In the end, Zuckerberg was reprimanded only for hacking Harvard’s computers and stealing student data.22
RISKY MOVE NO. 2: DOUBLE-CROSS YOUR HARVARD COMPETITORS.
The Facemash fiasco made the five-foot, seven-inch Mark Zuckerberg a big man on campus, and that development caught the attention of two bigger men, a pair of six-foot, five-inch identical twins named Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. They were well known at Harvard for their prowess as two-man scullers, and they would go on to make the 2008 U.S. Olympic Rowing Team. But in November 2003, the Winklevoss twins had something else on their minds, plans for a new social networking site that would expand around the country: Harvard Connection. To do the last bit of programming, the twins verbally engaged Mark Zuckerberg, who agreed to work on the needed computer code and graphics. The twins and Zuckerberg met and exchanged fifty-two emails.23 He looked at their code and gave them the impression that he would help them. But on February 4, 2004, he launched his own competing site: Thefacebook.com. Six days later Zuckerberg was again before the Harvard College Administrative Board, this time accused by the Winklevoss boys of violating the student honor code by stealing their idea. The Winklevosses’ lawyers also served Zuckerberg with a cease-and-desist order, essentially charging him with theft of intellectual property. Seven months later, the duo sued Zuckerberg. They settled out of court in 2008 with the twins reportedly awarded 1.2 million shares (worth $65 million) of what was by then called “Facebook” stock.24 Their lawyers urged them to cash out, but the twins boldly held on to the Facebook stock and eventually became billionaires themselves. They have subsequently entered a more risky venture, moving into the blockchain economy, where, as the company Gemini (Latin for twins), they intend to make Bitcoin the virtual currency of the world. As for Zuckerberg, he held on to what he founded, instituting a corporate governance structure at Facebook that ensures he can’t be ousted no matter what goes wrong at the company.25
RISKY MOVE NO. 3: LEAVE COLLEGE AFTER YOUR SOPHOMORE YEAR.
Zuckerberg did just that. Imagine how the news must have been received by his parents: “Mom and Dad, I’m dropping out of Harvard to form my own company.” But a precedent for such a bold move existed. In the fall of 2003, Zuckerberg had attended a computer science lecture by Bill Gates at which Gates had said that “the great thing about Harvard is that you can always come back and finish.”26 Both moved away and never went back, except to receive subsequent honorary degrees from the school. Their gutsy moves had paid off.
RISKY MOVE NO. 4: AT AGE TWENTY, MOVE TO CALIFORNIA ON YOUR OWN.
Having left college, Mark Zuckerberg now doubled down on his bet and left his family’s comfortable home outside New York City to move to Palo Alto, California, the epicenter of Silicon Valley. It was another courageous move but perhaps a logical one, owing to the area’s reputation as a mecca for computer engineers and venture capitalists. As Zuckerberg later reflected, “There’s a feeling in Silicon Valley that you have to be there, because that’s where all the engineers are.”27 The bold moves made by the titans of tech—Larry Ellison, Musk, Brin, Bezos, Gates, and Zuckerberg—all required a change of venue for their perpetrators.
SHAKESPEARE ONCE SAID, “FORTUNE BRINGS IN SOME BOATS THAT are not steer’d” (Cymbeline). However, it brings in no boats that are so securely anchored that they don’t move. A hidden habit of geniuses? They all move to a metropolis or to a university to further their goals.
Think of the geniuses in this chapter and their opportunistic moves: Shakespeare, Franklin, and Fleming to London; Watson and Crick to Cambridge University; Pasteur to Lille and then Paris; Zuckerberg to Silicon Valley. Each as a young adult moved to a metropolitan region or to a university, or to a university within a metropolis. “I don’t believe in luck,” said Oprah Winfrey in 2011. “Luck is preparation meeting the moment of opportunity.”28 True, but first you have to get to the meeting. Winfrey moved to Chicago.
Think of the geniuses mentioned in this book and the cities where they did their great work. Athens: Socrates and Plato were born there, but Aristotle moved there at age seventeen. London: Faraday was born there, but Shakespeare, Dickens, and Woolf were newcomers. Vienna: Schubert and Schoenberg were natives, but Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler were immigrants, as was Freud. Alexander Hamilton emigrated to New York and distantly inspired the extraordinary Hamilton, a work by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the son of another immigrant. And what would the world of postmodern art be without the New York arrivistes Kusama, Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Warhol? As Kusama said about her move from rural conservative Japan to New York City in 1953, “I had to get out.”29
As to the university: Newton had his Cambridge and Einstein his Max Planck Institute in Berlin before his last days at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Tech gurus Musk, Brin, Larry Page, and Peter Thiel spent varying amounts of time at Stanford. Geniuses don’t stay home; they move to where circumstances are more favorable.
Let’s call this automotive imperative the “Genius Anti-inertia Law.” There are, of course, exceptions to the law, such as the Wright brothers, who stayed close to small-town Dayton, Ohio. The botanists Gregor Mendel and George Washington Carver needed access to open fields. Naturalists, such as Darwin, and plein air painters, such as Claude Monet and Georgia O’Keeffe, are, owing to professional necessity, also exempt from the law. But as a rule, geniuses don’t stay down on the farm. Even the painter of The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh, said as a young man, “I don’t think that you can reasonably ask me to go back to the country for the sake of perhaps 50 francs a month less, when the whole stretch of years ahead is so closely related to the associations I have to establish in town, either here in Antwerp or later in Paris.”30 In 1886, van Gogh moved to Paris.
So, too, around that time or shortly thereafter, did Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Braque, Constantin Brancusi, Joan Miró, and Diego Rivera among painters; Claude Debussy, Stravinsky, and Aaron Copland among composers; Ezra Pound, Guillaume Apollinaire, Joyce, Stein, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald among poets and writers. “If I had not gone to Paris, I would not be who I am,” said Chagall. “We always returned to Paris, no matter who we were,” said Hemingway.31
What is it that pulls a genius to a metropolis such as Belle Époque Paris, mid-twentieth-century New York, or the megalopolis of Silicon Valley? Creative cities have historically been situated at crossroads where diverse peoples—often recent immigrants—with dissimilar ideas gather.32 The newcomers sow fresh ideas within the existing intellectual climate, and thus are born new ways of thinking. Silicon Valley draws the best tech minds from around the world by an aggressive use of the H-1B visa, known as “the genius visa” because it allows for the immigration of highly skilled foreign workers. “Nearly all the great advances in civilization . . . have been during periods of the utmost internationalism,” said the historian Kenneth Clark.33 Do we still feel the same about that southwest border wall in the United States?
Finally, to cross-pollinate, diverse ideas must flow with little governmental censure. “Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom,” said John Stuart Mill.34 And it must be encouraged. Silicon Valley investors provide more venture capital than any other place in the world, their largesse in 2018 ($10.5 billion) being more than three times that of their nearest competitor (Boston with $3 billion).35 Financial support, access to new ideas, freedom of expression, competition, the chance to test oneself against the very best—these are all gravitational forces.
How big must the city be? Big enough to attain a critical mass. A composer needs theaters, performers, producers, audiences, and critics. A painter needs not only fellow artists for support but also agents, galleries, festivals, exhibition spaces, and patrons. A tech engineer needs other tech engineers, equipment, and research money. They all need competitors, and they all need jobs. Agglomeration of opportunity is what compels geniuses to move.
And like geniuses, these creative epicenters are always moving. Historically, they have progressed from east to west, from China to the Near East to Europe and the United Kingdom to the U.S. East Coast and then the West Coast. Where will the next Silicon Valley arise? Will genius go full circle back to Asia? Has it already emerged in Singapore? Where will the next center of innovation be, now that Paris is overrun with tourists and rents in New York City are astronomical? Follow the restless genius for the answer. Better still, figure out which way the favorable wind is blowing, pack a bag, and get there first.