Craig Wright is the Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music at Yale and Academic Director of Online Education. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard and an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Chicago and is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The “Genius Course” is a wildly interdisciplinary one of his own devising that intends to look at the question of exceptional human accomplishment by cutting widely across the arts and sciences
What is a genius? Why is it so fascinating to us? And what life lessons can we non-geniuses learn from the brilliant individuals who have worn this title?
Professor Craig Wright, the creator of Yale University’s popular “Genius Course,” answers these questions through engaging stories about scores of history’s greatest achievers, from Louisa May Alcott to Émile Zola, as he explores the fourteen key traits of genius he has identified in THE HIDDEN HABITS OF GENIUS: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking
the Secrets of Greatness.
Genius is allegedly all around us today, from Apple’s Genius Bar to the Baby Einstein products that are intended to make our kids smarter. Monumental figures like Alan Turing, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Hawking, Virginia Woolf, and Steve Jobs are portrayed in contemporary
movies and acclaimed as geniuses. Then there are “geniuses” proclaimed by popular culture in entertainment, music, sports, business, politics, and the arts, from Oprah Winfrey to Kanye West to Daniel Day-Lewis to Michael Phelps to Warren Buffett.
As Craig Wright points out, the definition of genius has changed so often over the millennia that it is clearly a concept relative to time and place. Until recently, the history of genius in the Western world was populated by “great men” (meaning white men), with women, people of color, and people from non-European cultures almost entirely excluded. But that is changing, and it is up to each of us to decide what constitutes exceptional human achievement.
Drawing on Craig Wright’s decades of study of genius, here is his 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 ill across cultures and time. In brief, the greatest genius produces the greatest impact on the greatest number of people over the longest period of time.
Creativity and creation are essential in Craig Wright’s framework, which is why giants of past centuries such as Einstein, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, da Vinci, van Gogh, Darwin, Marie Curie, Picasso, and
Queen Elizabeth I are undoubtedly geniuses by his definition. Yet he also includes more contemporary geniuses from a wide variety of fields, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Lady Gaga, Jeff Bezos, Toni Morrison, Andy Warhol, and Elon Musk.
But what constitutes “real genius” is not always clear-cut, and there will never be unanimity of opinion. “Likely you will not agree with my pronouncements on genius or on who is and who is not one,” Craig Wright writes. “If you do not agree—bravo! As we will see, contrary thinking is one of the hidden habits of
genius.”
The Fourteen Hidden Habits of Genius
Craig Wright devotes a chapter to each of the fourteen hidden habits of geniuses, offering fascinating and practical insights along the way:
- Work ethic: Why IQ scores and Ivy League educations are greatly overrated, and hard work is underrated. But natural talent versus hard work is not a binary opposition. Genius is the product of both nature and nurture.
- Resilience: Women and minority geniuses have historically needed an extra dose of resilience for their achievements to be recognized. Craig Wright unpacks why hidden cultural biases against women, in particular, are so difficult to discard, and how we can openly challenging these biases in order to defeat them.
- Originality: No matter how “gifted” your children are, you do them no favors by treating them like prodigies, who tend not to fulfill expectations.
- Childlike imagination: If we value creativity and openness to unexpected solutions, as geniuses do, the least helpful thing we can say to our children, or to ourselves, is “Grow up!”
- Insatiable curiosity: Beyond the obvious acts of reading or taking a class to stoke your lust for learning, try something less apparent, like getting lost while wandering in a new city, or asking questions frequently and then actually listening to the answer.
- Passion: Why passion is essential to happiness and human progress (including that made by geniuses). After finding yours, you’ll live a happier and probably longer life.
- Creative maladjustment: There is a correlation between genius and mental disorder. Rather than stigmatizing or medicating neurological differences, let’s learn to embrace them and leverage them to our advantage.
- Rebelliousness: Without rebellion against the status quo, there is no genius. Want to raise a bold, original thinker? Permit your children to explore alone, take risks, and experience failure.
- Cross-border thinking: Geniuses teach us not to specialize too soon or too strictly, in school or on the job. Aspirational young people majoring in the STEM fields would do well to heed the advice of Steve Jobs, who said, “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the
humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.” - Contrarian action: The more a person can exploit the contradictions of life, the greater his or her potential for genius. Awareness of contrarian thinking can help you write a better report, reduce personal bias, and be wittier.
- Preparation: Talent is important, but just as important are favorable circumstances or luck. And luck favors the prepared. In the words of the legendary golfer Gary Player, “The harder I practice, the luckier I get.” Geniuses—and successful people—work to get a “situational advantage.” This
may mean moving to a city or creative epicenter, which many geniuses have done, in order to get the external stimulation necessary to create. - Obsession: Geniuses are obsessed with their personal quest to change the world, often to the detriment of others and many great minds turn out to be not-so-great human beings. The passage of time tends to obscure the personal destruction many geniuses have caused, which may be an evolutionary advantage that enables progress.
- Relaxation: The best way to have a brilliant insight is to engage in creative relaxation: go for a walk, take a shower, or get a good night’s sleep with pen and paper by the bed.
- Concentration: To be more productive, adopt a daily ritual for work, as virtually all geniuses do.
Unexpected outcomes
Early in life, Craig Wright was a talented pianist who hoped to rise to the professional concert level. But during his education at a top music school, he realized that he simply was not talented enough to achieve that goal. His focus subsequently turned to the academic study of music and musical genius, and then to a broader study of genius. While teaching his “genius course” at Yale and writing this book, he experienced many unexpected outcomes, including:
We teach our children to “behave” and follow the rules. But the transformative geniuses of Western culture have done just the opposite.
- The stereotypical notion of the genius as a brainiac who aces all the standardized tests of life is wrong in most cases. Craig Wright’s study of geniuses reveals just as many examples of poor-to-middling students as Phi Beta Kappa candidates. Stephen Hawking didn’t read until he was eight, and 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 were all academic underachievers.
- Genius is not a heritable trait but a “one-off” phenomenon. Successful people may produce successful offspring, but geniuses don’t produce dynasties of little geniuses.
- Successful people need mentors, but apparently geniuses can do without. They absorb material quickly, intuit more, and move rapidly past any mentor. Acts of genius are usually attended by acts of destruction; that’s generally called progress.
- Acts of genius are not sudden, but rather the culmination of years of cerebral gestation. Why, then, does every genius have a sudden “aha” moment in Hollywood films? Because the audience can’t sit and watch for twenty years, or even two.
- Geniuses change the world, but they often do so as an accident or afterthought; sometimes society is made better as a by-product 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, take heart, because it is never too late to be creative: for every youthful Mozart there is an aged Verdi; for every precocious Picasso, a Grandma Moses.
“In the end, reading this book likely won’t make you a genius,” Craig Wright concludes. “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, more 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.”
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