We teach our children to “behave” and to follow the rules. Many of our kids will continue on to college, where they will take courses from professors, such as myself, centering on those great minds who, it turns out, didn’t “behave” and who broke the rules—the transformative geniuses of Western culture. This is just one of the many unexpected outcomes that have emerged during the dozen years that I have spent teaching my “genius course” at Yale and through the process of writing this book. Here are a few others in no particular order.
At the beginning of this project, I had in my mind a picture of the genius: someone with a superhigh IQ who, even as a youth, has sudden “aha” insights, yet is eccentric and unpredictable. Every feature of this stereotypical image, I have now learned, is wrong or inaccurate in most cases. Take, for example, the notion that the genius is a brainiac who aces all the standardized tests of life. In truth, my study of geniuses reveals just as many examples of poor-to-middling students as Phi Beta Kappa candidates. Hawking didn’t read until he was eight, and recall that Picasso and Beethoven couldn’t do basic math. Jack Ma, John Lennon, Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Walt Disney, Charles Darwin, William Faulkner, and Steve Jobs likewise were all academic underachievers. These great minds were “smart,” but in very unstandardized, unpredictable ways. Thus, my cohort of geniuses has taught me that it is impossible to predict who will become a genius; no longer will I make the mistake of judging a young person’s potential based on standardized tests and grades, or even prodigious acts. Indeed, I would caution all parents against pushing their children along the prodigy track. Let’s all check back in twenty years to see if that prodigy has begun to change the world—few do.
Other unexpected revelations: Successful people may produce successful offspring, but geniuses, it turns out, don’t produce dynasties of little geniuses—genius is not a heritable trait but a “one-off” phenomenon. Successful people need mentors—we all know that—but apparently geniuses can do without. Geniuses generally absorb material quickly, intuit more, and move rapidly past any mentor. True, genius by definition presupposes an inequality of outcome (the exceptional thoughts of Einstein or extraordinary music of Bach) and it generates a concomitant inequality of reward (eternal fame for Bach, fabulous wealth of Bezos); that’s just the way the world works. Similarly, acts of genius are usually attended by acts of destruction; that’s generally called progress.
Genius also proves not to be sudden. That “aha” moment is really the culmination of a lengthy period of cerebral gestation. Remember, Albert Einstein wrestled with general relativity for two years before having his “happiest thought”; Nikola Tesla took seven years before envisioning the induction motor; and Otto Loewi needed nearly twenty before having his nocturnal epiphany about acetylcholine. Why, then, does every genius have a sudden “eureka” moment in Hollywood films? Because the audience can’t sit and watch for twenty years, or even two.
“All geniuses die young,” said the comedian Groucho Marx. But statistically that proves not to be true; obstinate obsession drives them on. Geniuses change the world, yes, but they often do so, it turns out, accidentally; sometimes society is made better as an unintended consequence of the creator’s need for self-salvation. How many masterpieces are created for the benefit of the psyche of the painter? How many great books are written more for the author than the reader?
Finally, my Yale students and I have experienced one enduring insight that we perhaps should have seen coming: Many great minds turn out to be not-so-great human beings. At the beginning of the course, I invariably ask the students, just to get a laugh and provoke discussion, “Who here is a genius? All geniuses, please raise your hands.” A few souls do so timidly; the class clowns elevate emphatically for all to see. Next I ask, “But if you are not already a genius, how many of you would like to be one?” To this about three-quarters of the class responds affirmatively. In the final session of the course, I ask, “Having studied all these geniuses, how many of you still want to be one?” Now, only about a quarter of the group says, “I do.” As one student volunteered on the point: “At the beginning of the course I thought I did, but now I’m not so sure. So many of them seem like obsessive, self-centered jerks—not the kind of person I’d want as a friend or a suitemate.” Point taken: obsessive and self-centered. As much as we stand to benefit from the habits of genius, be on guard if there is one in your midst. If you work for a genius, you may be berated or abused, or you may lose your job. If someone close to you is a genius, you may find that his or her work or passion always comes first. Yet to those so abused, made redundant, exploited, or ignored, we offer sincere thanks 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.