The Hidden Qualities of Genius
Episode Stats
Summary
What makes an actual genius a genius? My guest today has spent over two decades exploring that question by studying the world s most iconic and original thinkers and creators, both past and present. His name is Craig Wright. He s Professor Emeritus of Music at Yale, who continues to teach a course there called Exploring the Nature of Genius, and he s also the author of the book The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Now, we tend to throw the word genius around pretty casually, saying so-and-so has a genius
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for a particular skill, or sarcastically pointing out someone's failure by saying,
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nice work, genius. But what makes an actual genius a genius? My guest today has spent
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over two decades exploring that question by studying the world's most iconic and original
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thinkers and creators, both past and present. His name is Craig Wright. He's Professor Emeritus of
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Music at Yale, who continues to teach a course there called Exploring the Nature of Genius.
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And he's also the author of the book, The Hidden Habits of Genius Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit.
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Today on the show, Craig reveals the characteristics and patterns of behavior of true geniuses and
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begins by answering the questions of whether there's a connection between genius and intelligence,
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whether genius is hereditary. We talk about several drivers of genius, including situational
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advantages, a childlike ability to play with possibilities, a keen curiosity, a strong
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memory, broad interest in vision, the ability to toggle between intense concentration and
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loose relaxation and keeping a daily routine. We then discuss whether there's a connection
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between genius and mental health issues and what effect being a genius tends to have on
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someone's personal life. Along the way, Craig illustrates his points with examples from the
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lives of Mozart, Da Vinci, Steve Jobs, and more. After the show's over, check out our show notes
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at aom.is slash genius. All right, Craig Wright, welcome to the show.
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All right, so you wrote a book called The Hidden Habits of Genius, where you look at human history,
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geniuses in human history, to try to figure out what it was they did that made them a genius.
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But before we get into those qualities, I think it'd be helpful to note how you defined
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genius in your research. Because in the book, you note that you can define genius in all sorts
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of different ways. But in your book and in your research, you have an equation, basically,
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that defines genius. And here's the equation. Genius equals significance times the number of
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people impacted by an idea or creation times duration or lifespan of their insight. It's basically
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a genius creates something of significance that impacts a lot of people for a long time.
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So I think an important thing to note there, it's not just about being good at something.
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Like you couldn't, you wouldn't call someone like Michael Phelps a genius, even though he's
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really good at swimming. But instead, it's about changing the world in some way with your ideas.
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So with that equation in mind, let's talk about the factors that do or do not impact its components,
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starting with intelligence. Now, in your study of geniuses throughout history,
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did you find a connection between genius and intelligence?
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That was the single biggest misconception when I started this project. I had a stereotype in my
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head, a genius does this, and a genius looks like this. Maybe somebody that seemed like hugely smart
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would score 200 on an IQ test, which could just slap the forehead and say, aha, I've got it.
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And that's not really the way it is. From reading, say, the lives and studying for 15 years,
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the backgrounds of probably 100 different geniuses, it's much slower. That so-called aha moment is
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actually the culmination of thinking over a long period of time. It's just the peak, the tip of
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the iceberg and a great deal of substratum underneath. So that's important that we don't want to
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overemphasize IQ. And from what I'm able to, they're very interesting tests. California guy at
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Stanford for decades did a test of some 500 individuals with IQs of 132 or higher. And at
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the end of the test, not a single so-called genius, no Pulitzer Prize winners, no Nobel Prize winners,
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no Academy Award winners, nothing. As one of the people working on it said, we didn't have a single
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genius with all these high scores. But by the same token, there are a couple of people that were
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rejected from this because their IQ wasn't high enough that went on. William Shockley and Luis
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Alvarez went on to win Nobel Prizes in the sciences, but they've been rejected because they didn't meet
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the IQ threshold. My sense of this is you have to have a good general IQ. And I would say they're
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based on the standards of today, probably 110, 115, 120. But once you reach that generally above
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average, sort of B plus, A minus IQ, then you're in the game. And it's all these other enablers of
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genius that are going to push you forward. Well, and okay, so that's interesting. So there's,
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you don't, you don't have to be, you don't have to be Mensa smart to be a genius.
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No. Okay. Good for you. So you, you know about that. So maybe, maybe you tell us,
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what the heck is Mensa? You don't have to be Mensa smart. You're absolutely right.
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Well, is that organization, if you have a certain IQ level, you could say, well,
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I'm a member of Mensa. Yeah. It used to be, I remember like it was a big deal. I don't know
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if it's such a big deal anymore. People don't really talk about it.
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Yeah. I think people catch, maybe this is some, something of a scam. They're sort of catching on
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to this, that you can do very well in this world without being a member of Mensa. And maybe you,
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you get so caught up in it all. I'm so smart and I don't have to do this or do that. Or so I don't
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know, but there is, I think it's, it was founded in England in the 1940s. And so it's been around for
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about 80 years or so. And you have to have an, a verified IQ of 135, I think is it, but, but maybe
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it's 132. We'd have to check on that. Okay. So genius intelligence, you just got to be,
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you know, a minus B plus smart. Another interesting thing you noted is genius isn't
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really heritable. Like you can't find genius pedigree. You found that geniuses typically
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don't have parents or grandparents who were geniuses, nor do they have progeny who are
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geniuses either. What's going on there? You think? I think it's a kind of one-off event. It's something
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akin to a perfect storm of, you know, let's say of a genetic crapshoot. You've got a kind of
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reshuffling of genes with each new fertilized embryo, I suspect. And thereafter they can reassemble
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in some surprising ways. And it's, as I say, something of a perfect storm. It happens,
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but it's not heritable. Intelligence, a certain level of intelligence, a certain level of curiosity
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is heritable. These, the enablers, the drivers of genius have to come all together. They have to
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come all together in, at a particular point, in a particular time, in a particular way. And when that
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happens, you get this sort of outlier. Psychologists have this fancy word for it,
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emergenesis, something that just hops out completely unexpected from the genetic pool.
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And it doesn't happen, doesn't hop out that way in the generation after generation after
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generation. And very rarely do we have long streams or any kind of strings of genius. So it's a kind of
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one-off, one-off event. My favorite story here, as you know, from Brent, from taking a peek at the
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book is the story of the horse secretariat. Now, obviously the horses are not people,
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but that's a horse that came out of nowhere in terms of its genetic pool. One had only
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sired 400 offspring. Only one of them ever won one triple crown race, despite the stud fees that
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were being paid. But that horse still holds the track record, secretariat still holds the track
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records of the three triple crown races. It was just off the charts. As I say, it was a one-off
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event, the perfect storm. Right. So there's a genetic crapshoot going on with genius. There's
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also a circumstantial crapshoot. I think everyone's heard the story about Bill Gates. He happened to go
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to a high school where there was a computer or something like that. And if Bill Gates had been
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somewhere else, Bill Gates probably wouldn't have been Bill Gates because of that environmental
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factor wasn't there. It's an interesting question and it has to do with luck and genius. There's a
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fancy word for that called situational advantage, situational advantage. Now I suspect having read a
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bit about Bill Gates, I suspect Bill Gates probably would have, his exceptional abilities would have
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manifested eventually. It probably would have taken him more time to find his way to computers. So he had
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a situational advantage. His, his interest, his passion was sort of jump-started by the fact,
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one, his parents were rather well off. Two, he had access to materials at the University of Washington
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there in Seattle. And three, he went to a good, very good school in which they appreciated and gave
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him access to computers. He probably again would have wended his way in that direction, but it may have
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taken him longer. How do you get this situational advantage? Generally speaking, you have to move
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to places to put yourself in, kind of get in the game or get out of the game. In some cases, you have
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to move to a big city. Let's say you're a tech investor. You may want to be in Silicon Valley. If
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you're interested in the arts and Broadway theater and stuff like that, you probably want to be in New York.
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If you're interested in energy production, maybe you want to be in Tulsa. So you have to get to these
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centers that, where there's an agglomeration of money and where there's an agglomeration of talent
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and competition and information that you can run with and build off of.
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All right. So we've talked about intelligence and genius, the connection there, not big connection there.
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We talked about situational advantage. Let's talk about some of these habits that you've found when you
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actually looked at the lives of what these geniuses did. And one habit you found amongst
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all these geniuses you've studied is that they maintain a childlike view of the world throughout
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their adult life. What does that childlike worldview look like for a genius?
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It probably looks different for each child, and it may look different based on the emotional
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context in which that child is being weird. Children have wonderful imaginations. And the curse is,
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the problem is that in terms of the process of growing up, adults basically, I won't say beat that
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out of them, but suck all the, I don't know, suck all the imagination out of them. And I'm just as guilty
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of this as a parent of four children as the next. Although I think I've learned a lot,
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and I think I'm a lot better at it with the seven grandchildren. You know, kids have this
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fantastic imagination. They don't know what is possible. There's this thing on a table. I've
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watched this happen. There's a thing on the table, and it could be this long thing with a point and
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some lead at the end, or it could be this long thing that's very sharp and has another kind of point
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at the end. And how does the kid know that one is a pencil that they could create a wonderful
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drawing from? The other is a knife that they could kill the cat with or whatever. So only over time
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depends. No, no, don't touch it. Don't touch it. So we gradually developed this whole idea of the
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don't touch that mentality. Don't go there. You can't think that way. So how do you fight against
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that? Let me indulge myself here and tell you about a couple of stories in my own life. Once on a family
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vacation, I think we had one son with his three children, then age eight, 10 and 12 out at the
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beach making sandcastles. They were making up stories and they were playing their sandcastle and
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they had moats and characters. And there's the 12 year old kind of voicing over this and making up
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this. Oh, let's do this. I said, well, gee, should this kid, you know, is this appropriate behavior
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for a 12 year old shouldn't be out there chasing a ball or do, you know, involve some kind of
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competitive sports or something like that. And then, then fortunately I caught myself and said,
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you know, this kind of imaginary play is really good. This is how people, this is how people come
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up with ideas. Alfred Hitchcock was famous as a director for saying, you know, we're pressing too
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hard. We've got to relax. We've got to play. We've got to have fun. We've got to imagine. So go out
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there, be crazy. Do any, do any, like I said, make a fool of yourself. Just release your inner
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creativity. Don't set up these barriers. Recently with one grandchild, I have found myself climbing
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up and at my age, it's something of a, of a challenge, but climbing up into a tree fort,
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tree forts are really cool, but you can go in there and you go up in there and you can play and imagine
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things. You can imagine pirates. You can imagine rocket ships. You can think up characters. You can
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think up imaginary friends. There's no reason that we should necessarily have to stop doing this as
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we grow up. Maybe the worst thing that we can say to a child is, oh, grow up because maybe those
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creative fantasies or fantasies that they're having will lead to better ideas because the mind of the
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child is not an ultimately the adult is not so constricted. All right. So make time for play.
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I think you've highlighted, there's several geniuses that still played even as adults. I think Richard
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Feynman, he did magic, which you typically think of as like, well, magic, that's what you do when
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you're 12. You stop doing that when you're 18, you're getting serious with life, but now the guy
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kept doing magic tricks. Yeah. That's a, that's a very good point. You know, to be honest with you,
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good for you, Brett. I'd, I'd actually forgotten that Feynman did that. So Brett won Craig nothing
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on the magic, magic score. Good for you. Keep going. No, yeah. Well, I mean, I think of other
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ones. I mean, like, okay, this is a debate. If he's a genius, not Theodore Roosevelt, you know,
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he continued to explore and have fun even as, as, you know, as an adult. And even after he was
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president, he kept doing new and different things. Well, Mozart's a perfect example of that. I mean,
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his sister said in an obituary for him, he was always the eternal child. He would never,
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he would never grow up. Yeah. He would write like a, he liked potty, like he liked potty
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language. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Potty talk. He couldn't, he didn't make the distinction. He said
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a lot of stupid, silly things and drove his father crazy. But then at the same time, he's writing these
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operas, such as the magic flute. We were talking about magic there and it's populated with all these
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imaginary characters. He's 35 years old when he wrote this. He has imaginary friends. He writes
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letters in which he refers to this imaginary friend, that's imaginary friend. And my daughter,
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maybe you have children also, but we all know friends who have imagined children have imaginary
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friends. That's a good thing to have. But Mozart, some of these minds and Einstein was sort of,
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sort of the same way too. They talked about one famous physicist talks about the endless childlike
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mentality of Albert Einstein. And if you want to envision new things, this is probably a good
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way to do it. So I guess caveat to parents, don't clamp down on your kid. If you think they're being
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silly and immature, cut them a break, let them explore. We're going to take a quick break for
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your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So one genius you explore in the book is
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Da Vinci. And you go into depth on him to explore this idea of geniuses. One of the habits they have
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is they maintain an intense curiosity and a lust for learning their entire life. How did that manifest
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itself in Da Vinci? Da Vinci was fearless. He was interested in everything. He would climb
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mountains. He would dive into swamps. He would cut up bodies to find out how they worked. And okay,
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big deal. We have people working in pathology these days and coroners that do biopsies, but they're
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operating under refrigeration and they're operating with air conditioning where the tissues doesn't
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degenerate. Can you imagine doing this back in the 15th century where this doesn't smell particularly
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good and you start cutting it up and this tissue is degenerating into muck? And by the way, the church
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thinks that this is illegal and may come along and arrest you for this. So you've got to do it at night
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when you can't really see very well. You've got to be really interested in what you're doing.
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Find about how the human body works, cutting up eyeballs or cutting out hearts and guts and all
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of this in the middle of the night under the most horrific conditions. Was that courage or was that
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curiosity? Did they go hand in hand? Could he even smell the stench? Maybe he was so curious, he was so
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driven, so passionate by what he was exploring that he didn't even notice. That's an interesting
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possibility. So they are curious. Another, I don't think I got to this or maybe I did. Yes,
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I think, I guess, is Isaac Newton, when he's working on his theory of light and color, he takes
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this thing called a bodkin, which is a big knitting needle, and he sticks it in his eye and he starts
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wiggling it around to see the effect of pressure on color perception. I'm not curious enough to want to
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undertake that particular task. I don't know about you, Brad. Do you want to try that at home this
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afternoon? No, I remember reading about that. I took a history of science class and we studied
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Newton. And yeah, when I read that, I was like, I would never have done that. Oh yeah, that must
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have been a really enlightened instructor there because that's not a terribly well-known anecdote.
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Well, good for you. Yeah. Yeah. And another thing about Newton is, okay, and sort of this
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connected to this idea of curiosity and how it can maybe help your main pursuit when you're trying
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to be a genius. And like, a lot of people don't know this about him, but he was really into, okay,
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he's the father of physics, basically what we have, Newtonian physics. But while he was exploring physics,
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he was also really into alchemy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the occult. Now, in fairness to Newton,
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alchemy back in the day was about as close as they got to chemistry. So, but a lot of this wasn't
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chemistry. A lot of it was just superstition and astrology and things such as that, that he was
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playing off of. He wanted to find a way of turning mercury into gold. So he was playing a little bit
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with that. He thought that this could be a real moneymaker, but he actually had more books on alchemy
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and astrology and sort of pseudoscience in his library than he had on physics. And for, I think,
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about a 20-year period, that's really what he was most interested in. He went over into the dark side,
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almost a kind of conspiracy theory with regard to, I wouldn't say bogus, fraudulent, scientifically
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incorrect ideas, or at least things that in the course of time have proved to be scientifically
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incorrect. So I guess the genius doesn't get it right all the time. Isaac Newton got it wrong with
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regard to alchemy for about a 20-year period of his life. But I think the idea there is be curious,
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like don't be afraid to just, I think a lot of times people think they have to stick with one thing.
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You can have multiple interests. I mean, I wouldn't say go start studying alchemy so you can make the
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philosopher's stone, but it's okay to have multiple interests because that can somehow,
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it might carry over. You might make connections you otherwise wouldn't have made if you had just
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stuck to one domain. Yeah, that's the thing. That's the advantage of being the fox, you know,
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thinking laterally in the story of the fox and the hedgehog. Rather than going a thousand miles deep,
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you go a thousand miles wide. Why do you do that? Because you see a lot of stuff. Yes,
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you got to pay your dues. Usually as a young, you know, you got a little good, but maybe if you want
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to be a petroleum engineer, maybe you've got to study chemistry very heavily in school and then
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maybe go to a business school or something like that to see how the business of petrochemical
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production works or how oil companies ship things around the world, whatever. Yeah, you got to learn
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some specifics, but actually over time, it probably would be useful to study other kinds of things,
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maybe ocean currents, maybe geography, maybe weather patterns, things like this. And gradually you
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broaden out your point of view. How does this give you a leg up? Why is this a good idea? I think
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it's because it allows you to combine things. If you've seen a lot of stuff, you have a greater
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chance of combining disparate things into new ideas. And that's what Steve Jobs was always
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trumpeting. He said, you know, that's how smart people get where they get. They just see things
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because they have the capacity of combining things. But in order to see things, you got to be, you know,
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combine things. You've got to be able to, one, seen a lot of stuff and two, have a reasonably good
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memory so you don't forget stuff. If you see something and forget its importance or forget how it works,
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then that's not going to be much help. So you have to have a, again, like intelligence,
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you have to have slightly above average memory, but that combined with a wide lateral vision can
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be a very powerful tool. Yeah. Speaking of Steve Jobs, like the thing,
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sort of the story that he did, how he was a fox and able to combine things to make Apple was
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that he took that calligraphy class in college or just, I don't even know if it was in college.
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I think it was just as an adult, he did it for fun. And that gave him the inspiration of,
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oh, we should make computers that are visually appealing, have a visually appealing interface
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when someone uses it. And that's how you got the first Mac.
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Yeah. And he studied Zen, kind of the philosophy of it and how you think within yourself and how you
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stay in your zone and how it's possible to develop self-confidence that way. Chinese calligraphy
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and Zen Buddhism are not the kinds of things that you immediately associate with a computer
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engineer. And it's these rather different combining mindsets from two rather different
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spheres of activity that allow the individual to have unusual and perhaps unique insights.
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All right. So you want to be a fox, have different interests, but also what geniuses were able to do,
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they were able to switch into hedgehog mode when they needed to. And so hedgehog is this idea where
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you just focus on one big thing. Geniuses often did that.
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Yeah, they did, but sometimes it didn't work out so well. Generally speaking, as I look at this over
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time, geniuses start small and narrow or go down deep, and then they broaden bigger out into bigger,
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bigger projects, whether it's Shakespeare and the type of drama that he's writing, whether it's Mozart
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and the type of opera that he's generating, or Wagner and the type of opera he's generating,
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or George Lucas and that these big, massive film projects that go on that encompass a number of
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volumes. The same thing with J.K. Rowling, a number of volumes of that sort of thing. And it doesn't
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always end well for them. There's this expression that I've come to be paying attention to called
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Sunk Cost Syndrome, where you think, and I suspect that Isaac Newton experienced Sunk Cost Syndrome
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with regard to alchemy. You get going down a particular road of investigation. Great case here
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is Thomas Edison with direct current, as opposed to Nikola Tesla's alternating current. Edison started
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with direct current and began wiring Manhattan with direct current and was expensive, and he's building
00:24:05.380
all these generators. It turned out not really to be necessary if you had alternating current, but he
00:24:10.380
was so deeply into both the science and into the expense of it that he couldn't cut his losses.
00:24:16.400
And finally, as a result of that, it cost him control of what was Edison Electric, which became
00:24:23.580
General Electric, and the bankers eased Thomas Edison out of it because he'd bet on the wrong pony there.
00:24:29.640
He'd bet on direct current and didn't know when to pull the plug. And for so many of us in life,
00:24:36.120
myself included, that's the dilemma. You want to be passionate. You want to be persevering. You want
00:24:41.800
to have grit. You want to stick it out to the end. But supposing you're wrong, this isn't going to work
00:24:48.160
out. How do you know when that moment arrives? How do you know when it's time to pull the ripcord on
00:24:54.100
your great passion in life because it's just not going to work out and go on to other things?
00:24:59.560
That's a really difficult moment, really difficult thing to know. The only consolation is if you've
00:25:06.820
studied a lot of things, you can then go on to something else where if this is your only pony
00:25:14.580
in the race of life, then you may be in trouble. I think what I was getting at with that geniuses
00:25:20.500
get into hedgehog moon. I mean, I was confusing just being able to concentrate for a long time
00:25:25.740
on a particular task or thing. It doesn't necessarily mean you're concentrating only on
00:25:32.160
a single domain, but it's just like the geniuses you highlight often able to just, they had like
00:25:35.980
these immense power of concentration. They can just sit for hours if they needed to, to really think
00:25:41.460
through a problem until they got to a solution. Like you highlight Da Vinci when he was working on
00:25:46.160
the last supper, sometimes he'd go in and just stare at the wall for four hours and not do
00:25:52.720
anything. And then he'd make like just a few strokes and that was it for a day. That was, that was work.
00:25:57.740
Yeah. Or, or he could be overworking on another project and suddenly just drop it and race across
00:26:03.760
town, go up to that, go up to that, in this case, the last supper and paint a couple of strokes there
00:26:09.640
and go back to the other job. In other words, he's probably, he's multitasking, but he has the
00:26:14.060
capacity to concentrate intensely, even though physically he may be somewhere else. It's a very
00:26:20.000
interesting case, but it's the interesting kind of dichotomy between relaxation and creativity
00:26:26.880
as opposed to concentration and then getting the product out the door. So we want to have these
00:26:34.600
ideas that are original, maybe by combining things, maybe by having a great night's sleep where we're
00:26:40.260
dreaming and we get at this wonderful new idea, but how is this going to work out? Is this machine
00:26:44.900
really going to work? Or what are the negatives here? Can you think of all the reasons? Can you
00:26:49.760
concentrate on how this will work and why it might not work and just sit there for four hours and work
00:26:56.020
through these kinds of things? So they go hand in hand in a strange way. You, I think that these great
00:27:01.760
minds have the capacity to toggle, and maybe that's the key word here, toggle back and forth,
00:27:06.940
toggle back and forth between relaxation and imaginative insight and focus, execution. How will
00:27:15.700
this work? Let me make this work. Let's get this work done. So at different stages of the creation,
00:27:24.200
process of creation, I suppose different sorts of expertises are needed.
00:27:28.680
No, yes. Oftentimes geniuses kind of, they figured out that they had to plan their, I mean,
00:27:34.720
maybe they weren't even planning their day, but they figured out a rhythm to their life where
00:27:39.120
they'd have intense periods where they're just thinking, working, et cetera. And then they knew,
00:27:43.760
well, if I'm going to get a solution to this, I got to put that aside, go do something else,
00:27:47.860
and then I'll probably get an answer just popping my head when I'm relaxing.
00:27:52.660
Yeah. I think, I think they do do that. And there's so many cases like that. That's why,
00:27:58.220
you know, you have kids and one thing you should never say to a kid is grow up. Maybe another thing
00:28:03.580
you should never say to a kid is stop daydreaming, get back to work. My mother used to say that to me
00:28:09.340
all the time in the kitchen when I'd be sitting there in the dining room doing my homework and
00:28:12.980
clearly not doing my whole homework. So it is, it is this kind of tension between the two and you
00:28:22.500
have to have relaxation to give you the insights and you have to be able to concentrate to execute
00:28:27.420
the insights and, and in a number of different ways. It helps also to have a, to have a habit and,
00:28:33.960
and, and maybe one of the habits of genius is they have a habit. They have a schedule.
00:28:38.680
Do you have a schedule for your, for your life, Brett? I do have a schedule. Yeah. And so why,
00:28:45.900
why do you do that? Well, I mean, first I have, you know, with kids, you kind of have to have a
00:28:50.820
schedule because they have to be at school at a certain time. So that's helpful. And then they're
00:28:56.020
going to be home at a certain time. And so you got to get the work done before they're home and,
00:29:00.400
you know, starting distracting, you got to hang out with them. So, I mean, that's part of the reason,
00:29:04.160
but also it just gives some rhythm. Like I know when I wake up, here's one, here's the sequence
00:29:08.920
of things I'm going to do today. And so, so there you are, you, you woke up and you say to yourself,
00:29:15.180
well, maybe I'll go exercise first today, or maybe I'll go out and garden and mow the lawn today.
00:29:21.640
Maybe I'll go off play golf today, or maybe I'll go work today. No, you probably are going to do the
00:29:26.920
same thing at roughly the same time every day, because that's an efficient way of operating. You don't
00:29:32.820
waste a lot of time considering your options. You just go there. And once you're in your study or
00:29:38.460
wherever your workroom is, your studio or your lab, then what else are you going to do? At that,
00:29:44.340
at that point, you can't mow the lawn. You can't play golf. So you're served. And it,
00:29:49.640
so having a habit makes you a heck of a lot more productive.
00:29:53.740
No, and it's, it's funny. I don't think you've talked about this in your book, but it's interesting to
00:29:57.980
read some of the strange things that geniuses have done to get work done. There's some writer,
00:30:03.560
I forgot who it was, or maybe it was a musician or I can't remember who it was, but like when he
00:30:08.180
didn't want to work, he would put himself in his room and like strip himself naked and like give
00:30:13.820
his clothes to his, his servant, whatever. And said, don't give me my clothes until a certain amount
00:30:20.800
of time. Cause he, and he just wanted to be able to sit and, and work. I think that's, I mean,
00:30:25.800
it's interesting that you see that with a lot of geniuses.
00:30:29.000
Yeah. That's interesting. If you can find that one, send me, send that my way.
00:30:33.040
I'm going to send, yeah, I'll send that your way. Cause I remember reading that.
00:30:35.280
Even if you have, even if you have to make it up, give us a good example of creativity and
00:30:39.740
creative imagination here, make up a plausible story. Cause it sounds like a really good plot.
00:30:44.740
No, yeah, I know it's not, it's definitely, I've, I've read this somewhere. I know I've read this.
00:30:49.140
No, no, I'd love to hear about it. Cause that's one I've missed.
00:30:53.320
Something we haven't talked about that is, I think people have this idea of genius is that
00:30:57.860
geniuses tend to have some sort of mental illness. Have you, as you studied the lives of geniuses,
00:31:06.480
Yeah, I think that, I think, yeah, let's call it mental discords. They're somewhat off kilter
00:31:12.800
with the rest of the population. But, but remember geniuses are supposed to think outside the box.
00:31:18.720
Geniuses are not ordinary people. They don't have a typical mindset. So if this manifests as some kind
00:31:25.780
of seeming psychic disorder, then that's not entirely unexpected. And people, you know, I'm
00:31:31.500
no expert in, in psychology and I'm not a psychiatrist, no training in this whatsoever,
00:31:36.280
but there are people, Nancy Anderson at the university of Iowa, Kay Jamison at Johns Hopkins that
00:31:42.780
have written extensively and well about this particular topic. And what they see is a correlation
00:31:48.040
between mental disorder and particularly artists. Top of the list are poets and writers, poets at the
00:31:56.180
very top of sort of, we won't let's call them imbalanced. Let's say imbalanced, a mental imbalance
00:32:02.800
with poets and writers, musicians and painters, and on it goes. Once we get to the scientists,
00:32:09.600
not so much the idea of a, the mad scientist, maybe something of a, of a fiction of some
00:32:17.180
semi-disordered writer. Well, that was the Mary Frankenstein lady. Yeah. Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley.
00:32:25.220
Right. So, so, so she created, she created the, that's absolutely right here. She created the
00:32:30.260
archetype of the mad scientist, Dr. Frankenstein, but she, she was a writer. She was not a scientist.
00:32:37.480
So scientists have a much lower factor of psychic disorder compared to the other sorts of, of artists.
00:32:47.160
And there are lots of interesting questions about that, how it worked out. And so oftentimes it works
00:32:52.380
out by way of an advantage. Deafness was an advantage in a strange way to Edison. And what did he invent?
00:32:58.240
The phonograph. So we could, so we could hear things. Beethoven's music is so revolutionary in part
00:33:03.660
because he was hearing the world differently. We mentioned Isaac Newton. He probably had, was autistic,
00:33:10.520
maybe Asperger's, we don't really know. And obviously Asperger's has been backed out of the autism
00:33:16.620
spectrum. But the point is that he could really, really concentrate in an almost maniacal sort of way,
00:33:23.740
but seemed totally clueless with regard to personal empathy. So there are characters and they have
00:33:29.620
these special personal characteristics. And it's interesting to note how oftentimes they seem to
00:33:36.160
intersect with a different creative vision of the world. What role trauma plays in this is very
00:33:43.420
interesting to note, to think about a kind of psychic trauma is having a happy childhood.
00:33:50.760
Dylan Thomas said, the only thing worse than having an unhappy childhood is having a too happy childhood.
00:33:57.460
In other words, you're not going to be a creative spirit if you had a very happy, unblemished sort of
00:34:04.460
well-centered childhood. I don't know that that's true, but it's a very interesting theory. And it's
00:34:10.640
interesting to think about all of the individuals over the centuries who lost a parent at a very early
00:34:18.380
age, whether it's Bach or Virginia Woolf or Picasso lost a sister, Tesla lost his older brother,
00:34:26.740
all his children. Mozart was his mother at an early age. Beethoven may have mentioned Beethoven's
00:34:32.740
mother. He had to go back and help raise the younger siblings. So that's interesting. And it'd be worth
00:34:40.980
having somebody pursue that a bit more. Another thing with genius you explore in the book is,
00:34:46.500
do geniuses have happy persons? Is there a cost to being a genius? And a lot of these geniuses we've
00:34:53.640
talked about, they did significant work that's impacted the lives of millions, billions of
00:34:59.280
people. But if you look at their personal lives, oftentimes, I think with a few rare exceptions,
00:35:04.360
it was a mess. Family life was in discord or it's not happy.
00:35:10.640
Yeah. They seem to be happy in their own world, but they bring discomfort and unhappiness around them.
00:35:18.000
Generally speaking, there are a few exceptions. I can't say that I would say that about Bill Gates.
00:35:23.860
One hears about Elon Musk and his antics. One reads about Steve Jobs and his behavior.
00:35:30.460
What a, you know, they would, well, we can't say this on the air or anything like this, but he was
00:35:36.160
called lots of, lots of names. And my, the quickest way to make the point is to say that the biography of
00:35:42.340
Steve Jobs is the only biography I've ever read where there's an index entry under the title,
00:35:49.780
despicable behavior of. And so that's the kind of, that's Walter Isaacson's book,
00:35:55.340
biography of Steve Jobs. So those are some of the kinds of issues in play here. The problem is that
00:36:03.100
they're so obsessive. They're so one tracked in getting the job done. They may be peripheral thinkers,
00:36:09.240
but they're not going to rest until they've changed the world, whatever their vision of the
00:36:13.520
change world may be, that everybody else is kind of roadkill, collateral damage as they race forward
00:36:20.920
to change the world. They are not empathetic characters with their colleagues, with their
00:36:28.140
coworkers. And most of all, they're not empathetic with the family members, the wives, the spouses,
00:36:34.120
husbands, children of the genius. So what do you hope people walk away with thinking after they
00:36:41.620
finish your book? You know, that's a good question. I think it surprised me what people walk away
00:36:49.300
thinking. I hope they walk away thinking, hey, I read this book and I'm going to start leading my life
00:36:56.020
in many different sorts of ways. I'm going to be not so worried about my kids' grades or SAT scores.
00:37:02.900
I don't really care if they get into Harvard or Yale. If they could go to the University of
00:37:06.440
Oklahoma and still, there's nothing to matter with the University of Oklahoma. I was actually
00:37:09.960
born in Oklahoma, born in Lawton, Oklahoma, Fort Sill. So I think there are a lot of misconceptions
00:37:16.820
here. And I hope I've allayed some of these misconceptions or exposed some of these misconceptions
00:37:22.200
and allow parents to allay some of the fears that they may have about failure and all this sort of
00:37:27.420
thing. I hope they come away thinking, hey, I could lead my life very differently with
00:37:32.760
regard to relaxation. And I could turn relaxation into a way that makes me very productive and very,
00:37:39.640
very creative. I think what they say, ultimately, what I've been surprised by
00:37:44.920
is the following. People read this book. I thought they might come to me first and say,
00:37:50.460
you know, I never thought of a genius quite like that. Or I learned so much about,
00:37:54.540
and I'm going to become, I think I can become a genius. What they say is, you know,
00:37:58.780
I really like this book because of the stories of all of the lives here. These are very, very
00:38:05.440
interesting people. So in a strange way, this is like reading a hundred great novels, or I'm
00:38:11.820
extracting the high points of a number of maybe as many as a hundred human stories here relevant to
00:38:18.500
exceptional human accomplishment. And maybe that's why I'm a humanist rather than a scientist.
00:38:23.720
It's not so much the specifics that interest me, but the people that are the geniuses that interest
00:38:30.680
me. Well, Craig, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book
00:38:34.780
and your work? You can just go to Amazon, which is a creation of Jeff Bezos, a genius par excellence,
00:38:41.960
changing the world for all of us every day. If we needed proof of how a genius changes things,
00:38:48.280
we need only go to Amazon and buy Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius. It comes in hardcover,
00:38:55.740
it comes in a Kindle edition, comes in audio format, and you can also go to a public library
00:39:01.740
and get it there too. I was pleased to even walk into my little local bookstore the other day and
00:39:07.180
there it was sitting on the shelf. So I think it's available virtually everywhere. And thanks very
00:39:11.120
much, Brett, for asking about that. Well, Craig Wright, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:39:14.620
It's been my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me again, Brett. Appreciate it.
00:39:19.060
My guest today was Craig Wright. He's the author of the book, The Hidden Habits of Genius. It's
00:39:22.780
available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work
00:39:26.140
at his website, craigwrightgeniusmusic.net. Also check out our show notes at aom.is
00:39:30.940
slash genius, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.
00:39:34.140
Well, that wraps up another edition of the A1 podcast. Check out our website at artofmanlios.com
00:39:45.540
where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written over the years
00:39:48.500
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00:40:13.060
As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Remind
00:40:16.480
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