The Art of Manliness - The Hidden Qualities of Genius

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:10.700 Now, we tend to throw the word genius around pretty casually, saying so-and-so has a genius

00:00:14.700 for a particular skill, or sarcastically pointing out someone's failure by saying,

00:00:18.000 nice work, genius. But what makes an actual genius a genius? My guest today has spent

00:00:22.120 over two decades exploring that question by studying the world's most iconic and original

00:00:25.620 thinkers and creators, both past and present. His name is Craig Wright. He's Professor Emeritus of

00:00:29.840 Music at Yale, who continues to teach a course there called Exploring the Nature of Genius.

00:00:34.020 And he's also the author of the book, The Hidden Habits of Genius Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit.

00:00:38.420 Today on the show, Craig reveals the characteristics and patterns of behavior of true geniuses and

00:00:42.740 begins by answering the questions of whether there's a connection between genius and intelligence,

00:00:46.660 whether genius is hereditary. We talk about several drivers of genius, including situational

00:00:50.900 advantages, a childlike ability to play with possibilities, a keen curiosity, a strong

00:00:55.440 memory, broad interest in vision, the ability to toggle between intense concentration and

00:00:59.260 loose relaxation and keeping a daily routine. We then discuss whether there's a connection

00:01:02.960 between genius and mental health issues and what effect being a genius tends to have on

00:01:06.620 someone's personal life. Along the way, Craig illustrates his points with examples from the

00:01:10.420 lives of Mozart, Da Vinci, Steve Jobs, and more. After the show's over, check out our show notes

00:01:14.540 at aom.is slash genius. All right, Craig Wright, welcome to the show.

00:01:31.600 Hey, thanks very much, Brent, for inviting me.

00:01:33.940 All right, so you wrote a book called The Hidden Habits of Genius, where you look at human history,

00:01:37.960 geniuses in human history, to try to figure out what it was they did that made them a genius.

00:01:42.080 But before we get into those qualities, I think it'd be helpful to note how you defined

00:01:46.440 genius in your research. Because in the book, you note that you can define genius in all sorts

00:01:51.060 of different ways. But in your book and in your research, you have an equation, basically,

00:01:55.820 that defines genius. And here's the equation. Genius equals significance times the number of

00:02:01.620 people impacted by an idea or creation times duration or lifespan of their insight. It's basically

00:02:07.920 a genius creates something of significance that impacts a lot of people for a long time.

00:02:13.260 So I think an important thing to note there, it's not just about being good at something.

00:02:16.360 Like you couldn't, you wouldn't call someone like Michael Phelps a genius, even though he's

00:02:20.000 really good at swimming. But instead, it's about changing the world in some way with your ideas.

00:02:24.480 So with that equation in mind, let's talk about the factors that do or do not impact its components,

00:02:30.120 starting with intelligence. Now, in your study of geniuses throughout history,

00:02:34.160 did you find a connection between genius and intelligence?

00:02:37.700 That was the single biggest misconception when I started this project. I had a stereotype in my

00:02:44.520 head, a genius does this, and a genius looks like this. Maybe somebody that seemed like hugely smart

00:02:51.340 would score 200 on an IQ test, which could just slap the forehead and say, aha, I've got it.

00:02:57.540 And that's not really the way it is. From reading, say, the lives and studying for 15 years,

00:03:02.660 the backgrounds of probably 100 different geniuses, it's much slower. That so-called aha moment is

00:03:10.560 actually the culmination of thinking over a long period of time. It's just the peak, the tip of

00:03:16.940 the iceberg and a great deal of substratum underneath. So that's important that we don't want to

00:03:24.740 overemphasize IQ. And from what I'm able to, they're very interesting tests. California guy at

00:03:32.780 Stanford for decades did a test of some 500 individuals with IQs of 132 or higher. And at

00:03:41.260 the end of the test, not a single so-called genius, no Pulitzer Prize winners, no Nobel Prize winners,

00:03:47.720 no Academy Award winners, nothing. As one of the people working on it said, we didn't have a single

00:03:52.660 genius with all these high scores. But by the same token, there are a couple of people that were

00:03:58.260 rejected from this because their IQ wasn't high enough that went on. William Shockley and Luis

00:04:03.420 Alvarez went on to win Nobel Prizes in the sciences, but they've been rejected because they didn't meet

00:04:08.460 the IQ threshold. My sense of this is you have to have a good general IQ. And I would say they're

00:04:15.000 based on the standards of today, probably 110, 115, 120. But once you reach that generally above

00:04:21.900 average, sort of B plus, A minus IQ, then you're in the game. And it's all these other enablers of

00:04:27.720 genius that are going to push you forward. Well, and okay, so that's interesting. So there's,

00:04:32.400 you don't, you don't have to be, you don't have to be Mensa smart to be a genius.

00:04:36.120 No. Okay. Good for you. So you, you know about that. So maybe, maybe you tell us,

00:04:40.500 what the heck is Mensa? You don't have to be Mensa smart. You're absolutely right.

00:04:43.800 Well, is that organization, if you have a certain IQ level, you could say, well,

00:04:46.760 I'm a member of Mensa. Yeah. It used to be, I remember like it was a big deal. I don't know

00:04:50.460 if it's such a big deal anymore. People don't really talk about it.

00:04:52.520 Yeah. I think people catch, maybe this is some, something of a scam. They're sort of catching on

00:05:00.280 to this, that you can do very well in this world without being a member of Mensa. And maybe you,

00:05:06.800 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

00:05:12.560 know, but there is, I think it's, it was founded in England in the 1940s. And so it's been around for

00:05:18.480 about 80 years or so. And you have to have an, a verified IQ of 135, I think is it, but, but maybe

00:05:27.460 it's 132. We'd have to check on that. Okay. So genius intelligence, you just got to be,

00:05:33.140 you know, a minus B plus smart. Another interesting thing you noted is genius isn't

00:05:39.780 really heritable. Like you can't find genius pedigree. You found that geniuses typically

00:05:44.540 don't have parents or grandparents who were geniuses, nor do they have progeny who are

00:05:51.720 geniuses either. What's going on there? You think? I think it's a kind of one-off event. It's something

00:05:57.320 akin to a perfect storm of, you know, let's say of a genetic crapshoot. You've got a kind of

00:06:03.840 reshuffling of genes with each new fertilized embryo, I suspect. And thereafter they can reassemble

00:06:12.520 in some surprising ways. And it's, as I say, something of a perfect storm. It happens,

00:06:20.040 but it's not heritable. Intelligence, a certain level of intelligence, a certain level of curiosity

00:06:27.380 is heritable. These, the enablers, the drivers of genius have to come all together. They have to

00:06:34.680 come all together in, at a particular point, in a particular time, in a particular way. And when that

00:06:40.720 happens, you get this sort of outlier. Psychologists have this fancy word for it,

00:06:45.060 emergenesis, something that just hops out completely unexpected from the genetic pool.

00:06:51.700 And it doesn't happen, doesn't hop out that way in the generation after generation after

00:06:57.020 generation. And very rarely do we have long streams or any kind of strings of genius. So it's a kind of

00:07:03.720 one-off, one-off event. My favorite story here, as you know, from Brent, from taking a peek at the

00:07:11.160 book is the story of the horse secretariat. Now, obviously the horses are not people,

00:07:16.000 but that's a horse that came out of nowhere in terms of its genetic pool. One had only

00:07:21.160 sired 400 offspring. Only one of them ever won one triple crown race, despite the stud fees that

00:07:29.520 were being paid. But that horse still holds the track record, secretariat still holds the track

00:07:36.380 records of the three triple crown races. It was just off the charts. As I say, it was a one-off

00:07:42.420 event, the perfect storm. Right. So there's a genetic crapshoot going on with genius. There's

00:07:47.960 also a circumstantial crapshoot. I think everyone's heard the story about Bill Gates. He happened to go

00:07:55.160 to a high school where there was a computer or something like that. And if Bill Gates had been

00:07:59.380 somewhere else, Bill Gates probably wouldn't have been Bill Gates because of that environmental

00:08:04.340 factor wasn't there. It's an interesting question and it has to do with luck and genius. There's a

00:08:10.000 fancy word for that called situational advantage, situational advantage. Now I suspect having read a

00:08:18.400 bit about Bill Gates, I suspect Bill Gates probably would have, his exceptional abilities would have

00:08:24.000 manifested eventually. It probably would have taken him more time to find his way to computers. So he had

00:08:30.640 a situational advantage. His, his interest, his passion was sort of jump-started by the fact,

00:08:36.300 one, his parents were rather well off. Two, he had access to materials at the University of Washington

00:08:41.920 there in Seattle. And three, he went to a good, very good school in which they appreciated and gave

00:08:50.040 him access to computers. He probably again would have wended his way in that direction, but it may have

00:08:56.420 taken him longer. How do you get this situational advantage? Generally speaking, you have to move

00:09:03.140 to places to put yourself in, kind of get in the game or get out of the game. In some cases, you have

00:09:12.060 to move to a big city. Let's say you're a tech investor. You may want to be in Silicon Valley. If

00:09:17.740 you're interested in the arts and Broadway theater and stuff like that, you probably want to be in New York.

00:09:22.200 If you're interested in energy production, maybe you want to be in Tulsa. So you have to get to these

00:09:27.460 centers that, where there's an agglomeration of money and where there's an agglomeration of talent

00:09:32.880 and competition and information that you can run with and build off of.

00:09:39.020 All right. So we've talked about intelligence and genius, the connection there, not big connection there.

00:09:44.120 We talked about situational advantage. Let's talk about some of these habits that you've found when you

00:09:48.960 actually looked at the lives of what these geniuses did. And one habit you found amongst

00:09:54.640 all these geniuses you've studied is that they maintain a childlike view of the world throughout

00:10:00.780 their adult life. What does that childlike worldview look like for a genius?

00:10:07.500 It probably looks different for each child, and it may look different based on the emotional

00:10:13.040 context in which that child is being weird. Children have wonderful imaginations. And the curse is,

00:10:23.340 the problem is that in terms of the process of growing up, adults basically, I won't say beat that 0.98

00:10:30.840 out of them, but suck all the, I don't know, suck all the imagination out of them. And I'm just as guilty 0.97

00:10:37.000 of this as a parent of four children as the next. Although I think I've learned a lot,

00:10:44.200 and I think I'm a lot better at it with the seven grandchildren. You know, kids have this

00:10:48.620 fantastic imagination. They don't know what is possible. There's this thing on a table. I've

00:10:54.800 watched this happen. There's a thing on the table, and it could be this long thing with a point and

00:11:00.700 some lead at the end, or it could be this long thing that's very sharp and has another kind of point

00:11:05.540 at the end. And how does the kid know that one is a pencil that they could create a wonderful

00:11:09.400 drawing from? The other is a knife that they could kill the cat with or whatever. So only over time

00:11:15.020 depends. No, no, don't touch it. Don't touch it. So we gradually developed this whole idea of the

00:11:20.080 don't touch that mentality. Don't go there. You can't think that way. So how do you fight against

00:11:25.880 that? Let me indulge myself here and tell you about a couple of stories in my own life. Once on a family

00:11:33.140 vacation, I think we had one son with his three children, then age eight, 10 and 12 out at the

00:11:39.600 beach making sandcastles. They were making up stories and they were playing their sandcastle and

00:11:45.780 they had moats and characters. And there's the 12 year old kind of voicing over this and making up

00:11:51.740 this. Oh, let's do this. I said, well, gee, should this kid, you know, is this appropriate behavior

00:11:56.700 for a 12 year old shouldn't be out there chasing a ball or do, you know, involve some kind of

00:12:01.640 competitive sports or something like that. And then, then fortunately I caught myself and said,

00:12:07.100 you know, this kind of imaginary play is really good. This is how people, this is how people come

00:12:13.040 up with ideas. Alfred Hitchcock was famous as a director for saying, you know, we're pressing too

00:12:19.600 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

00:12:25.000 there, be crazy. Do any, do any, like I said, make a fool of yourself. Just release your inner 1.00

00:12:30.660 creativity. Don't set up these barriers. Recently with one grandchild, I have found myself climbing

00:12:37.980 up and at my age, it's something of a, of a challenge, but climbing up into a tree fort,

00:12:42.880 tree forts are really cool, but you can go in there and you go up in there and you can play and imagine

00:12:49.240 things. You can imagine pirates. You can imagine rocket ships. You can think up characters. You can

00:12:54.400 think up imaginary friends. There's no reason that we should necessarily have to stop doing this as

00:13:00.600 we grow up. Maybe the worst thing that we can say to a child is, oh, grow up because maybe those

00:13:09.580 creative fantasies or fantasies that they're having will lead to better ideas because the mind of the

00:13:19.300 child is not an ultimately the adult is not so constricted. All right. So make time for play.

00:13:25.360 I think you've highlighted, there's several geniuses that still played even as adults. I think Richard

00:13:30.640 Feynman, he did magic, which you typically think of as like, well, magic, that's what you do when

00:13:35.140 you're 12. You stop doing that when you're 18, you're getting serious with life, but now the guy

00:13:39.780 kept doing magic tricks. Yeah. That's a, that's a very good point. You know, to be honest with you,

00:13:44.020 good for you, Brett. I'd, I'd actually forgotten that Feynman did that. So Brett won Craig nothing

00:13:49.980 on the magic, magic score. Good for you. Keep going. No, yeah. Well, I mean, I think of other

00:13:57.160 ones. I mean, like, okay, this is a debate. If he's a genius, not Theodore Roosevelt, you know,

00:14:01.720 he continued to explore and have fun even as, as, you know, as an adult. And even after he was

00:14:07.580 president, he kept doing new and different things. Well, Mozart's a perfect example of that. I mean,

00:14:12.420 his sister said in an obituary for him, he was always the eternal child. He would never,

00:14:17.440 he would never grow up. Yeah. He would write like a, he liked potty, like he liked potty

00:14:23.620 language. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Potty talk. He couldn't, he didn't make the distinction. He said

00:14:29.440 a lot of stupid, silly things and drove his father crazy. But then at the same time, he's writing these 1.00

00:14:34.760 operas, such as the magic flute. We were talking about magic there and it's populated with all these

00:14:39.540 imaginary characters. He's 35 years old when he wrote this. He has imaginary friends. He writes

00:14:45.540 letters in which he refers to this imaginary friend, that's imaginary friend. And my daughter,

00:14:52.020 maybe you have children also, but we all know friends who have imagined children have imaginary

00:14:57.320 friends. That's a good thing to have. But Mozart, some of these minds and Einstein was sort of,

00:15:01.460 sort of the same way too. They talked about one famous physicist talks about the endless childlike

00:15:07.420 mentality of Albert Einstein. And if you want to envision new things, this is probably a good

00:15:15.780 way to do it. So I guess caveat to parents, don't clamp down on your kid. If you think they're being

00:15:22.300 silly and immature, cut them a break, let them explore. We're going to take a quick break for 0.99

00:15:28.460 your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So one genius you explore in the book is

00:15:36.240 Da Vinci. And you go into depth on him to explore this idea of geniuses. One of the habits they have

00:15:42.520 is they maintain an intense curiosity and a lust for learning their entire life. How did that manifest

00:15:49.480 itself in Da Vinci? Da Vinci was fearless. He was interested in everything. He would climb

00:15:57.500 mountains. He would dive into swamps. He would cut up bodies to find out how they worked. And okay,

00:16:07.200 big deal. We have people working in pathology these days and coroners that do biopsies, but they're

00:16:14.280 operating under refrigeration and they're operating with air conditioning where the tissues doesn't

00:16:20.640 degenerate. Can you imagine doing this back in the 15th century where this doesn't smell particularly

00:16:28.620 good and you start cutting it up and this tissue is degenerating into muck? And by the way, the church

00:16:35.640 thinks that this is illegal and may come along and arrest you for this. So you've got to do it at night

00:16:41.520 when you can't really see very well. You've got to be really interested in what you're doing.

00:16:46.800 Find about how the human body works, cutting up eyeballs or cutting out hearts and guts and all

00:16:52.040 of this in the middle of the night under the most horrific conditions. Was that courage or was that

00:16:58.240 curiosity? Did they go hand in hand? Could he even smell the stench? Maybe he was so curious, he was so

00:17:06.060 driven, so passionate by what he was exploring that he didn't even notice. That's an interesting

00:17:12.540 possibility. So they are curious. Another, I don't think I got to this or maybe I did. Yes,

00:17:18.660 I think, I guess, is Isaac Newton, when he's working on his theory of light and color, he takes

00:17:24.000 this thing called a bodkin, which is a big knitting needle, and he sticks it in his eye and he starts

00:17:30.640 wiggling it around to see the effect of pressure on color perception. I'm not curious enough to want to

00:17:38.640 undertake that particular task. I don't know about you, Brad. Do you want to try that at home this

00:17:42.800 afternoon? No, I remember reading about that. I took a history of science class and we studied

00:17:48.000 Newton. And yeah, when I read that, I was like, I would never have done that. Oh yeah, that must

00:17:52.020 have been a really enlightened instructor there because that's not a terribly well-known anecdote.

00:17:57.700 Well, good for you. Yeah. Yeah. And another thing about Newton is, okay, and sort of this

00:18:03.560 connected to this idea of curiosity and how it can maybe help your main pursuit when you're trying

00:18:10.620 to be a genius. And like, a lot of people don't know this about him, but he was really into, okay,

00:18:14.940 he's the father of physics, basically what we have, Newtonian physics. But while he was exploring physics,

00:18:21.820 he was also really into alchemy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the occult. Now, in fairness to Newton,

00:18:31.020 alchemy back in the day was about as close as they got to chemistry. So, but a lot of this wasn't

00:18:39.760 chemistry. A lot of it was just superstition and astrology and things such as that, that he was

00:18:46.100 playing off of. He wanted to find a way of turning mercury into gold. So he was playing a little bit

00:18:52.740 with that. He thought that this could be a real moneymaker, but he actually had more books on alchemy

00:18:58.620 and astrology and sort of pseudoscience in his library than he had on physics. And for, I think,

00:19:06.700 about a 20-year period, that's really what he was most interested in. He went over into the dark side,

00:19:13.000 almost a kind of conspiracy theory with regard to, I wouldn't say bogus, fraudulent, scientifically

00:19:21.360 incorrect ideas, or at least things that in the course of time have proved to be scientifically

00:19:26.180 incorrect. So I guess the genius doesn't get it right all the time. Isaac Newton got it wrong with

00:19:34.600 regard to alchemy for about a 20-year period of his life. But I think the idea there is be curious,

00:19:41.500 like don't be afraid to just, I think a lot of times people think they have to stick with one thing.

00:19:45.500 You can have multiple interests. I mean, I wouldn't say go start studying alchemy so you can make the

00:19:51.100 philosopher's stone, but it's okay to have multiple interests because that can somehow,

00:19:55.160 it might carry over. You might make connections you otherwise wouldn't have made if you had just

00:19:58.840 stuck to one domain. Yeah, that's the thing. That's the advantage of being the fox, you know,

00:20:05.780 thinking laterally in the story of the fox and the hedgehog. Rather than going a thousand miles deep,

00:20:12.180 you go a thousand miles wide. Why do you do that? Because you see a lot of stuff. Yes,

00:20:16.720 you got to pay your dues. Usually as a young, you know, you got a little good, but maybe if you want

00:20:21.400 to be a petroleum engineer, maybe you've got to study chemistry very heavily in school and then

00:20:27.060 maybe go to a business school or something like that to see how the business of petrochemical

00:20:32.820 production works or how oil companies ship things around the world, whatever. Yeah, you got to learn

00:20:37.480 some specifics, but actually over time, it probably would be useful to study other kinds of things,

00:20:43.320 maybe ocean currents, maybe geography, maybe weather patterns, things like this. And gradually you

00:20:49.700 broaden out your point of view. How does this give you a leg up? Why is this a good idea? I think

00:20:55.100 it's because it allows you to combine things. If you've seen a lot of stuff, you have a greater

00:20:59.920 chance of combining disparate things into new ideas. And that's what Steve Jobs was always

00:21:08.420 trumpeting. He said, you know, that's how smart people get where they get. They just see things

00:21:13.520 because they have the capacity of combining things. But in order to see things, you got to be, you know,

00:21:19.520 combine things. You've got to be able to, one, seen a lot of stuff and two, have a reasonably good

00:21:24.300 memory so you don't forget stuff. If you see something and forget its importance or forget how it works,

00:21:28.980 then that's not going to be much help. So you have to have a, again, like intelligence,

00:21:32.940 you have to have slightly above average memory, but that combined with a wide lateral vision can

00:21:40.040 be a very powerful tool. Yeah. Speaking of Steve Jobs, like the thing,

00:21:44.760 sort of the story that he did, how he was a fox and able to combine things to make Apple was

00:21:49.040 that he took that calligraphy class in college or just, I don't even know if it was in college.

00:21:53.220 I think it was just as an adult, he did it for fun. And that gave him the inspiration of,

00:21:56.960 oh, we should make computers that are visually appealing, have a visually appealing interface

00:22:01.540 when someone uses it. And that's how you got the first Mac.

00:22:06.940 Yeah. And he studied Zen, kind of the philosophy of it and how you think within yourself and how you

00:22:13.500 stay in your zone and how it's possible to develop self-confidence that way. Chinese calligraphy

00:22:21.220 and Zen Buddhism are not the kinds of things that you immediately associate with a computer

00:22:26.380 engineer. And it's these rather different combining mindsets from two rather different

00:22:31.260 spheres of activity that allow the individual to have unusual and perhaps unique insights.

00:22:38.220 All right. So you want to be a fox, have different interests, but also what geniuses were able to do,

00:22:42.220 they were able to switch into hedgehog mode when they needed to. And so hedgehog is this idea where

00:22:47.320 you just focus on one big thing. Geniuses often did that.

00:22:52.740 Yeah, they did, but sometimes it didn't work out so well. Generally speaking, as I look at this over

00:22:58.920 time, geniuses start small and narrow or go down deep, and then they broaden bigger out into bigger,

00:23:07.040 bigger projects, whether it's Shakespeare and the type of drama that he's writing, whether it's Mozart

00:23:12.440 and the type of opera that he's generating, or Wagner and the type of opera he's generating,

00:23:18.460 or George Lucas and that these big, massive film projects that go on that encompass a number of

00:23:25.140 volumes. The same thing with J.K. Rowling, a number of volumes of that sort of thing. And it doesn't

00:23:31.240 always end well for them. There's this expression that I've come to be paying attention to called

00:23:36.860 Sunk Cost Syndrome, where you think, and I suspect that Isaac Newton experienced Sunk Cost Syndrome

00:23:46.820 with regard to alchemy. You get going down a particular road of investigation. Great case here

00:23:53.980 is Thomas Edison with direct current, as opposed to Nikola Tesla's alternating current. Edison started

00:24:00.340 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 0.61

00:30:57.860 geniuses tend to have some sort of mental illness. Have you, as you studied the lives of geniuses,

00:31:04.760 did you find that connection?

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, 0.98

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

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The Art of Manliness - April 26, 2021

The Hidden Qualities of Genius

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