Today, genius is all around us, from the helpful employees at the Apple Genius Bar to Baby Einstein products intended to make our kids smarter. The TV reality star Kim Kardashian is called “a business genius” and her husband, Kanye West, is said to be “a jerk who is also a genius.” Alan Turing, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Jobs show up in contemporary films and are called geniuses. Then there are Academy Award−winning actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis and Eddie Redmayne, who portray the brilliant individuals in those films. Are they geniuses, too? The swimmer Michael Phelps is called a “locomotive genius.” The tennis stars Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal hit “genius strokes.” Yo-Yo Ma has been referred to as a “cello genius.” The College of Business Administration of the University of Nebraska at Omaha offers an annual course titled The Genius of Warren Buffett. On May 23, 2019, Donald Trump stood before television cameras at the White House and declared himself “an extremely stable genius.” Not to be outdone, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has dubbed himself “the genius of all geniuses.”
How do we explain this “longing for genius,” as the writer George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) expressed it in 1872?1 Beneath our excessive popular use of this term rests a serious, timeless, and profoundly human desire to understand the unknown. To do so, we simplify, attributing the complex agency of many previous thinkers to a single, exemplary individual: “the genius.” Often the genius assumes the qualities of a savior and thus gives humanity hope for a better world. At the same time, the genius provides solace—an explanation, even an excuse, for our own shortcomings. “Oh, well, no wonder, she’s a genius!” But still we wonder: How is the magic trick done? What is hidden beneath the surface? Discarding the myths surrounding those exceptional individuals, what were or are their lives and habits really like? And what can we learn from them?
In 1951, doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital wired an EEG machine to the brain of Albert Einstein and watched the bobbing needle in an attempt to find the seat of his genius.2 After Einstein died in 1955, an enterprising pathologist, the Yale-trained Dr. Thomas Harvey, extracted his brain and cut it into 240 neat slices that he and others could examine.3 Although every nook, cranny, and sulcus of Einstein’s cerebral matter has now been studied, neuroscientists still can’t begin to explain how his imaginative thought process worked. Forensic pathologists in Salzburg have tried to match Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s skull with the DNA of relatives in that city’s St. Sebastian Cemetery.4 Thus far, however, Mozart’s genome remains elusive. Similarly, scientists in Milan are digging into the DNA of Leonardo da Vinci, but, again, no “genius gene” has been identified.5 Why are we not surprised? Genius involves the complicated expression of too many hidden personal traits to be reduced to a single location and process in our brain or on our chromosomes. How an exceptional individual’s traits work together to produce genius will remain a mystery. What these traits are and how they can be cultivated, however, is the subject of this book.
TO BEGIN WITH: WHAT IS GENIUS? THE ANSWER DEPENDS ON WHOM you ask and when. The ancient Greeks had several words for genius, among them daemon (“demon” or “spirit”) and mania (a creative fury that consumed an inspired poet). We get our English word “genius” from the Latin noun genius, meaning “guardian spirit.” In classical Greece and Rome, everyone had a guardian spirit, who, oddly, did not belong to him. From the Latin word genius arose the French génie and from it, in turn, the English “genie.” Think of the genie waiting to emerge from the magic lantern in Walt Disney’s Aladdin films. Think also of the candles on your birthday cake and the wish you make. Since Roman times, those candles and that wish have served as an annual votive offering to your genie, so that your guardian spirit might then do right by you in the coming year.
The list of recognized geniuses from the Middle Ages—Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Joan of Arc might come to mind—is short. Did the lights go out in the Dark Ages? No. Genius was simply co-opted and “rebranded” by the Catholic Church. In classical times one made a wish to one’s genius; in the Middle Ages one prayed to a spiritual force with the name of a patron saint, not only for salvation but also to cure an illness or to find a lost comb. The great creations of the era—the soaring Gothic cathedrals, for example—were the handiwork of mostly nameless, faceless humans inspired by an external divine spirit, the Christian God.
With the Renaissance, transformative thinkers on earth regained a face and a name: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and William Shakespeare were just a few such geniuses. Some Italian poets and painters were also dubbed il divino, as in il divino Leonardo—the divine Leonardo. Now they, too, like the saints, enjoyed divine powers as semideities. Their hands could shape the ideas that the mind of God might conceive. During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, however, genius and God parted company. God withdrew, leaving the individual as the lone possessor of genius. Genius was now wholly immanent—it came with birth and rested within the individual.
Nineteenth-century Romantic sensibilities caused the face of genius to change yet again, becoming distorted, sometimes bizarrely so. Picture a lone, disheveled, eccentric misfit who suffers for his art. On cue appears Ludwig van Beethoven, the nineteenth-century poster boy for genius. He was, and certainly looked, a bit crazy, singing loudly to himself as he lurched through the streets of Vienna. Around the same time appeared the mad Dr. Frankenstein (in Mary Shelley’s famous novel) and then the deformed genius Quasimodo (in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame). Later, a brilliantly deranged Phantom would haunt the boards of the Paris Opéra—another disfigured genius.
Today, when we see a light bulb light up over a cartoon character’s head, it serves as a visual symbol for that character’s “bright idea.” In truth, that act of genius—the creation of the modern incandescent light bulb—was the product of America’s first research lab, Thomas Alva Edison’s “invention factory” in Menlo Park, New Jersey.6 Now Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine are usually awarded to two or three individuals in each discipline, suggesting that in modern times the scientific team has replaced the once solitary Einstein.
The fact that the word “genius” has changed meaning so often over the centuries tells us that genius is a concept relative to time and place. Genius is whatever we humans want to make it. A “genius” is whomever we choose to so designate. Purists will object to this transitory, populist approach. Is there no such thing as absolute truth and beauty? Are not the symphonies of Mozart and the equations of Einstein universal and eternal? Apparently the answer is no—it depends on whom you ask. The music of Mozart (1756–1791), although still revered in Western concert halls, has no special resonance among the citizens of Nigeria, for example, who have their own beloved sounds and musical heroes, such as the Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti (1938–1997). Einstein’s explanation of gravity is merely one of four to hold sway since the ancient Greeks. Rays of genius in the arts and sciences are bent over time by different cultures and by each new generation that encounters them. Until recently, the history of the genius in the West was populated by “great men” (meaning white men), with women and people of color largely marginalized. But that is changing, and it is up to each of us to decide what constitutes exceptional human accomplishment.
Almost all dictionary definitions of genius include the words “intelligence” and “talent.” We will explore what it means to be “intelligent” in chapter 1. As for “talent” as an essential component of genius, that misconception should be discarded immediately. As we will see, talent and genius are two very different things. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer cleverly made this point in 1819: “A person of talent hits a target that no one else can hit; a person of genius hits a target that no one else can see.”7 A talented person deals skillfully with the immediately evident world. A genius, however, sees what is hidden from the rest of us. In 1998, Steve Jobs was quoted in Business Week as saying “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”8
As early as 1919, Nikola Tesla foresaw radio, robots, solar heating, and a cellular smartphone “not bigger than a watch.”9 Today two-thirds of the people on the planet are connected by the sort of internet phone that Tesla predicted. In 1995, while working at a quantitative hedge fund in New York, Jeff Bezos observed that traffic on the internet had increased 2,300 times over the previous year; he also realized that driving from store to store was an inefficient way to acquire merchandise. He envisioned Amazon and started with books. Twenty years later, his company had grown into the world’s largest e-commerce marketplace, selling nearly every product imaginable. The only absolute in life, it turns out, is change, and the genius sees it coming.
To be a genius, by our modern definition, requires not merely hitting the hidden target but also hitting it first. Originality matters. But it was not always this way in the West. The classical Greeks, for example, thought the capacity to imitate Homeric poetry a mark of genius. Similarly, since ancient times, the Chinese have assessed value according to the degree to which the new emulates the best of the old. And it is interesting to note that in modern Chinese culture, group accomplishment continues to trump individual achievement. Westerners began to see things differently around 1780. Beginning with the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who considered genius to be “the very opposite of the spirit of imitation,”10 and continuing with British, French, and U.S. patent legislators, originality became a litmus test for exceptional accomplishment, one that protected an individual’s intellectual property. Western faith in the “self-made man” and the “rugged individualist” dates from this time, and it maps well onto the traditional notion of genius in the West. But does original genius rest within the society or the individual? Perhaps we need a definition of genius for every culture at every time throughout history.
To set a framework for this book, let me give you my definition for today: 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. In brief, the greatest genius produces the greatest impact on the greatest number of people over the longest period of time. Although all human lives are of equal value, some people impact the world with greater force. I emphasize the words “change society” in my definition, because genius is creativity and creativity involves change. Obviously, it takes two to play this game, an original thinker and a receptive society.11 Accordingly, if Einstein had lived on a desert island and had chosen not to communicate with others, he wouldn’t have been a genius. If he had chosen to communicate with others but they hadn’t listened or had chosen not to change, again, he would not have been a genius. Unless Einstein effects change, he is no Einstein.
With the importance of creativity in mind, we see that many individuals popularly referred to as “geniuses” today are merely celebrities. To identify the true geniuses, we can begin by removing the majority of actors, actresses, and performers. Talented as they may be, those who work through something already formed by someone else—a screenplay or a musical composition, for example—are not geniuses. Creativity and creation are key, which is why Kanye West, Lady Gaga, and Beethoven, but not Yo-Yo Ma, may be considered geniuses. The same goes for most great athletes: as impressive as the record-breaking Phelps and Federer may be, they score no creativity points. Others invented the game. What about billionaire financial wizards, such as Warren Buffett? Needless to say, amassing money is different from effecting change. Money is a fuel of genius but is not genius per se. The genius rests in what is done with the opportunity money affords.
Eliminating all these false positives allows us to focus on the actions of the real geniuses as defined above. What constitutes “real genius,” however, is not always clear cut; never will there be unanimity of opinion. By including Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma (the enterprising Chinese counterpart of Bezos), the entrepreneur Richard Branson, and the abolitionist Harriet Tubman as I do in this book, I may be casting my net too widely. Likely you will not agree with all my pronouncements on genius or on who is and who is not one. If you do not agree—bravo! As we will see, contrary thinking is one of the hidden habits of genius.
THIS BOOK CAME TO BE WRITTEN AFTER A LIFETIME OF OBSERVATION and study. I have spent my career surrounded by people who are exceptionally gifted at one thing or another—math, chess, classical music, creative writing, and other fields of endeavor. Yet I found myself not especially gifted at anything, only a B+. If you are a prodigy with a great gift for something, you can simply do it and may 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. Perhaps only nongeniuses like myself can attempt to explain genius.
“If you can’t create, you perform, and if you can’t perform, you teach”—that is the mantra of conservatories such as the Eastman School of Music, where I began my education as a classical pianist. Unable to compose or to earn a living as a performer, I moved on to grad school at Harvard, earning a Ph.D. and becoming a classroom teacher and researcher of classical music history—a musicologist, as it is called. Eventually, I found employment at Yale teaching the “three B’s” of classical music: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Yet the most fascinating character I met was an M: Mozart. He was funny, passionate, naughty, and hugely gifted, wrote music like no other, and seemed like a decent human being. One of my several trips to Florence caused me to research its native son Leonardo da Vinci. I quickly saw that Leonardo and Mozart had many of the same enablers of genius: extraordinary natural gifts, courage, a vivid imagination, a wide variety of interests, and a “go for broke” approach to life and art.
To how many other geniuses did these common agents extend? Enter Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I, Vincent van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso. Eventually, that cohort of great minds became the basis of a Yale undergraduate course that I created called Exploring the Nature of Genius. Year after year, increasing numbers of students enrolled. As you might expect, Yale students did not line up for the class to hear about a definition of genius or to track the history of the term over the ages. Some wanted to find out if they were already geniuses and what their futures might hold. Most wanted to know how they, too, might become a genius. They had heard that I had studied geniuses from Louisa May Alcott to Émile Zola and had identified a common set of personality traits. They, like you, wanted to know the hidden habits of these geniuses.
But what are they? Here is a preview that summarizes the principal focus of each chapter in this book:
IN ADDITION, THROUGHOUT THESE CHAPTERS, I OFFER PRACTICAL insights about genius such as these:
IN THE END, READING THIS BOOK LIKELY WON’T MAKE YOU A GENIUS. It will, however, force you to think about how you lead your life, raise your children, choose the schools they attend, allocate your time and money, vote in democratic elections, and, most important, how to be creative. Unlocking the habits of genius has changed me and my view of the world. Perhaps a careful reading of this book will change you as well.