“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.” –Schopenhauer
Examining our obsession with genius is painful, or should be, for anyone with a brain. We obsess over IQ and accomplishment in desperate ways, trying to convince ourselves that we do or don’t deserve what’s in our lives. It’s a shorthand look at the whole difficult balance between innate property and external influence, and what the hell we can do here in the middle, as humans, to become who we’d like to be.
The question of genius is slippery, because the definition of genius is slippery. Although it’s a psychological concept, it’s not really a psychological term. IQ itself, one of the main public perceptions of the measuring units of psychology, isn’t a hard and fast concept: we aren’t sure entirely what it measures, or what it’s good for. Every time we think we’ve got it down, drawn into types with predictive factors, we see someone who’s managing just fine on the other side of our bright, shiny lines. If there’s one amazing thing about humanity, it’s how often most of us do just fine.
Still, some things stay the same. Almost invariably, when people speak of genius, they mean, “people whose contributions can’t be matched.” This includes the entire upper swath of whatever area we’re discussing. We speak of the greats: Mozart, Einstein, Calder. We expect greatness and high intelligence to go hand in hand, every time. (Greatness is another issue, to be dealt with at another time.) We tell ourselves that if we, ourselves, were just a little [smarter/brighter/braver/more productive] most of our problems would be gone, so we’re always a little disturbed and grateful to find that the geniuses have even worse troubles. Grateful, because it means that things are still even. Disturbed, because it means that there may well be no magic fix to the mess we’re in.
The debate over how to bring these gifts to the surface is a huge one, causing a lot of stir. On the one hand we have those who believe that achievement can be gotten by practice, and on the other, that even the will to practice is something innate. Even if we acknowledge the partial truth of both these concepts, we’re left with the impossible task of choosing which children would benefit, and whether it’s worth picking them out, and how to best parent most of them so they turn out successful and well-adjusted. The debate over “Tiger Mothers” takes this up handily, as Americans rush to defend the creative genius that they claim the “push to mastery” can stifle. At the same time, we realise that mastery itself takes something beyond the norm.
These are tough personal and public policy questions. They get right to the heart of what we consider a “normal” life and education, from the “Tiger Mother” standpoint to the “precious snowflakes” with their hovering helicopter parents. How much do we let people wander free, to find their own genius? In the US, we have a self-centric approach. Under the right conditions, we theorise, anyone can find their true calling and excel in it. It’s nonsense, but we believe it persistently, hoping that it means we haven’t succeeded because we just haven’t found the right dream yet. (And sometimes, it isn’t nonsense at all.)
In reality, success comes to those who work for it, even the geniuses, and it demands a lot in return. This doesn’t mean that everyone who works hard will succeed, and it doesn’t mean that everyone should be working towards the same goal. I’ve come to the conclusion that not everyone should go to college, that college should be bloody hard, and that those who don’t go deserve quite a bit more respect, because (as it turns out) our reverence for the quest for that perfect social role, the one where we shine, may be a little misplaced.
Before we start this tricky debate of who will succeed- where we should place our bets, and whether the tiger mothering or good-job-for-trying is the best practice, we should talk about the difference between “genius,” “gifted,” and “successful.” They aren’t synonymous, and you don’t always find any of them paired off.
I would call a genius, “a person who, possessing insight, perception, and expressive capability in excess of the norm in a subject area, contributes in a meaningful way to that subject area in a way that significantly advances the field far in excess of the expected human capacity, or creates a new way of experiencing a previously inaccessible concept.”
(I object to the inclusion of sport as genius, unless that sport is somehow interpretive. I certainly would call Tiger Woods gifted and successful, but I wouldn’t call him genius.)
I know, as an operative definition, it leaves a little to be desired. But the point is this: a genius isn’t someone who sees something no one else can see, because we can’t measure that. They may be geniuses, but unless they bring it back for the rest of us, they’re only halfway there. Art qualifies as an area where genius is possible, even though we’ve come to expect perfection from artists on a regular basis. There are still the occasional artistic geniuses being produced. In fact, art is the perfect realm to talk about genius, because it’s the most obvious place where one can witness the difference between raw talent, hard work virtuosos, and the geniuses that leave us all in the dust.
This will get personal. Bear with me.
As a teen—an underachieving, disadvantaged, and highly unmotivated teen—I was conscripted into my high school’s “Gifted And Talented” (GAT) program, along with five beautiful and intelligent young women. The audition was simple: get an honors level NMSQT score, and write an essay in an hour. I showed up late, I didn’t realise we could choose from the two subjects. I wrote two essays.
Yeah, they let me in.
I spent the next three years on cruise control in advanced classes, failing and flailing with abandon. They bumped us up into sophomore English, where I met a whole new set of bullies and brigands. I alternated between the relative safety of high school, despite my abuse-addled narcoleptic haze, and my horrific home life. No one had any doubt that I was gifted, and they had no idea how much I was and wasn’t like the other five students.
Those students. Oh, my goodness. Let me tell you about those five women. Sa, who went on to become Dr. Sarah, with a doctorate in communications, specializing in gender in media. She’s poised to become one of the nation’s foremost thinkers on the subject, and she has no idea that she’s so bright she can make the paint melt off your mind. More on Sa’s particular genius later. Daphne, beautiful, sunshiny Daphne, whom I thought of as some kind of alien goddess for how real and earnest and intent she was. Still as beautiful and sunshiny as ever; now a dentist, successful, married, beautiful children. Kate’s out there somewhere; she was the most like me, only grounded, brave, and gorgeous. Jennifer was a hardworking, bright person, willing to tackle any subject. She and I almost never spoke. I’m told she may work in a publishing company now, I don’t know. Lynda, the daughter of my guidance counsellor, the same counsellor who later stepped in as a mother figure for me. Success doesn’t cover it—she’s a brilliant (accountant, I think?), who married an international businessman, and continues to be logical and clever and healthy in spectacular ways. Lynda intimidates the hell out of me. She should. She’s incredible.
And then.. me.
No one was ever quite sure about me. Not even I knew what to do with me, back then.
I spent the English class writing poetry and falling in love with the girl who sat next to me. Awful poetry, but gloriously free of the usual teenaged brooding ravens and loopy letters. I couldn’t help it; I was insane. I was living with hell at home and untreated narcoleptic problems by day; I actually wrote my locker number (not just the combination, but the number of the locker) down on a notebook so I could find it every day. I passed English almost literally with my eyes closed, but got near-fails in other courses. A teacher’s greatest nightmare, a bright student who wouldn’t do the work. I wrote essays in leaps and bounds and homework in ten minutes. It would be fair to say that I didn’t get everything out of the GAT program that it had to offer, but the administrators made the decision to let me remain in it.
It didn’t work, but I got something out of it, just the same. I met a science teacher who told me something that’s changed my view on the program, and my place in it, forever.
“You’re not here for the same reason they are,” he said, candidly. “You’re here because you have to learn to think like them. You can’t be like them, that would be like trying to make a bent- no, not bent, you’re not broken. But a curved rod, and trying to make it straight, or a straight rod curved. You’re here to learn how to think logically, do the work, and meet expectations- they’re here to learn science. If you can do it, if you can pull it off, you’ll have your side and theirs. Don’t worry about the science. Learn how to think like them, because you’re going to need that.”
I’ve never forgotten that. It was the first time anyone had told me, point-blank, that being gifted wasn’t enough, but that I had a chance anyway.
The others worked hard, and working hard worked well.
When I moved in my senior year, to escape the home environment I was in, the new school put me back in freshman English, since I’d never taken it. So much for gifted. I worked nights, and my grades reflected it. My Latin teacher made me a deal: don’t show up for the exam, and I’ll give you a D. I accepted.
The remaining girls were called the “fab five,” after I left.
No, actually they were called that before I left. There were six of us, but when the guys in the sophomore class started that up, they didn’t count me. It was cemented after I left, and those five shot to the top of everything they tried. I envied them, I hated them, they will never know, ever, for the rest of their lives, how much I loved them and everything about them. They were good people, who worked hard. I am glad the world has them.
By contrast, there’s me. Genius or not remains to be seen, as it does with anyone- there have been lots of late bloomers in our society. Don’t get me wrong. The world is better with me in it, if you ask me, and I so love the world. But my track record doesn’t remotely compare to the expected trajectory of a GAT student. I’m in college now, at night, at 34. That’s right, I’m the gifted and talented who never made it to school, skewing the curve completely. I spent my twenties wildly spinning until I got sick, and then I spent ten years in physical and emotional recovery. That experience gave me the one thing I’d been missing back then, the determination to do the hard work.
The point of this little stomp down memory lane is this: the gifted and talented are good, but only become great through effort. They were able to put in the effort, and I wasn’t. I may not be genius. But I have a wild streak they didn’t have, one that my damaged home life and damaged brain left room for in great broken chasms, and the same ‘gifted’ talent in one person presents in a completely different way in another.
None of it is genius. It’s important that we remember that. The GAT program wasn’t intended to cultivate genius, train it, or reflect it in any way. They let me stay in it only because they realised that my small streak of creativity might qualify, and should I learn to do the work, my work would be at the expected level. I never did, and everyone was very disappointed. I had to take honours level classes again after failing them, only allowed back because I promised to pass this time. (I didn’t, of course. When taken to task for it, I pointed out that I was too busy trying to find a place to live, and the silence that sentence produced has stayed with me for decades. No one knows what to say when you have a real problem in the way of “gifted,” and that’s one of the biggest challenges that education faces today.)
So if none of that was genius, what is?
Synthesisation. The ability to understand, to interpret, and to explain. What made Einstein a genius wasn’t just that hee put things together, but that he did what the other mathemeticians and scientists working on the same problems at the time couldn’t. He made it accessible to the rest of us. What he did was take concepts no one else was ready for, and put them together in a way that made sense we’d never seen. That’s genius.
What Calder did, what Mozart did, and Bach and DaVinci and all the others did, that made them geniuses, was to take all of their comprehension and curiousity, work like hell to get good at it, and then represent it in a way that the rest of us could reach. Talent reaches the stars; genius brings them to earth. They boiled it down, built it up, and ended up able to grasp complicated things that no one else could grapple with. They were willing and able to spend the time on it, and they turned that power to parts of the world beyond just getting by. They had a fire in them that made them work for it beyond talent, beyond gifted, sometimes well into the realms of obsessed and insane.
Emily Dickinson did the same thing. Geniuses are often broken, but not everyone broken has genius. You have to be broken a little bit to be a genius; you can’t devote your life to something without leaving other fields untended. But there are many who are geniuses and get by just fine. It seems like the artistic run the highest risk of mental illness, but I think this is partly because the gifted potential geniuses with the highest risk of mental illness gravitate to fields where their nonconformity is more likely to grant success. Geniuses who can remember to wear ties go into business. Geniuses who can’t remember what they had for breakfast, but understand black holes, go into astronomy or physics. Geniuses who look through you and see how crunchy purple it is when you talk about roses- they have to go into the arts, or there’s no other place for them.
So how do the gifted become geniuses, if they ever do? How does a hard-working child prodigy (and that would be you, fab Five, who remain Fab long after the “five” part drifted apart) turn into genius? It’s not something necessary or warranted. The world doesn’t actually need geniuses, the whiz kids who can ace tests but don’t remember to wear socks. The world needs brilliant, successful, functional people. A genius can plot out the science behind space travel, but it takes fifty bright, dedicated people to bring those ideas all the way into fruition. One genius in a century is enough to turn things around. It takes society a long time to absorb ideas, to govern itself by right ones, to figure out what’s worth using right now out of its geniuses’ hard work. A good, solid scientist can be worth a thousand geniuses, because you never know when a genius will have their next idea.
Genius is, at its heart, a compromise. Not the usual tradeoff of who you are versus who you have to be, but a compromise between the solitary nature of truth and how you relate to the people you need to explain it to. Genius is being gifted in a direction that DOES something, and then doing it, however long it takes to get good at it, good enough to go on to invent in it. Ten thousand hours, according to Malcolm Gladwell, is what it takes to master something. I think that’s a nonsense number, but he’s right about the hard work. And the virtuoso of ten thousand hours, or the gifted fab five, are endlessly more valuable to the world than the genius of a thousand hours. Fifty virtuosos is an unbelievable symphony. One genius can write one; fifty geniuses is a catfight that could destroy whole cities in its wake. Neither gifted nor genius is worth anything without work. Part of the work is finding out how to apply it (the so-called “emotional intelligence” factor.) By defining genius as IQ, Gladwell may be missing the point of genius as a descriptor.
I believe that late bloomers do better if they’re genius than if they’re gifted, though. At some point, the head start of those ten thousand hours wears off, and the ones who learn the fastest at that point , the most madly motivated and internally driven, come out on top. Starting at the late mark, the passion and fire and raw creative intellect of someone beyond gifted pay off, because the gifted are running at a steady speed in a fixed field with a late start- but the genius is bringing random quantum leaps of insight into the equation. A gifted steady worker has to start those ten thousand hours early, because they can’t make it up later: a genius with five thousand hours will beat the hell out of a similar, merely above-average late bloomer with matching practice time. Neither may ever match the gifted with the early start, or the genius who’s been taught to work like the gifted.
If you don’t catch the geniuses and potential geniuses early (and they are not just going to be the child prodigies, but can be anyone) you miss the chance to really capitalise on their potential. When you do that, the geniuses may make good on it anyway, because that’s what genius is, the ability to go to those unknown places whether the bus carries you or not… but they won’t beat the ones already halfway there. One thing we overlook is that the geniuses were already working, though. It’s one thing to say that Einstein worked in a patent office; another to point out that he worked there responding to questions regarding electrical signal transmission and time synchronisation. He never left his area of interest; he was working on it the whole time. This is a secret to late-blooming gifted and geniuses that works to their advantage. They weren’t doing nothing, all that time. A lot of times, the field of interest comes late and strikes the spark. For others, they spend that time learning to get by in the world before starting to harness their spark. (Come on—it’s my only hope.) But for many, the piece that they learned late wasn’t how to do what they’re doing, but how to use it in the world to reach success, an entirely different measurement altogether.
For my part, I may not be genius, but I’m certainly on the track of what I love. I’ve discovered the madness, the drive, early, but now I have the ability to do the work. Remember, I wasn’t doing nothing while I failed English. I was writing. Whether I am gifted or genius lies in what I do from here. Not in my genes, not in my environment (though both play a factor) but in my choices. I don’t feel unsuccessful, having found something that works. Either way, I’m a late bloomer, still a definite example of gifted who had to learn to function in the world before any flowering could come to pass. Even the emotional damage didn’t stop me, and this is another important idea where genius and giftedness are concerned.
We talk about mental illness a lot in the context of genius. The link between the two is well established. Genius is a maladaptation, just enough off the norm to provide new insight, and not quite enough to render one unable to survive. Most of the time.
We hope.
Not enough of a disruption to kill you before the math and science get out, at least.
We talk about “spark.” We talk about greatness. We talk about virtu, a certain something almost palpable about a person. The lights are on, and by all that’s interesting in the world, someone is freaking home in there. We’re talking about someone so far off the norm that they’re beyond “highly functional” in an area. We forget that the norm in society isn’t, “highly functional,” but, “functional enough to get by.” Those are the ones most likely to survive- the ones just above the waterline, the ones able to get by and not passionate enough to disrupt their lives for it. The Gifted and Talented are the ones in the next cut- most likely to thrive, to succeed, to improve.
The geniuses are far out in deep waters, or way up on land. They’re unsuccessful until they learn to function, or so highly functional in their area that they ignore the conventions altogether. They don’t go from “gifted,” to “virtuoso.” They go from, “gifted,” to “Oh my gods.” If you can find a young, innate gifted who does the work and makes the creative jump into mad passionate exploration, you’ve unleashed a Mozart.
If you get a genius who can’t be gifted and do the work, they become a Van Gogh, living with it till it kills them.
In between, you get Einstein, willing to work, unable to stop thinking, unbelievably bad at daily life, but ultimately able to explain his wild visions and still get by.
Fortunately, the world doesn’t need many geniuses to survive. It sounds heretical, but it’s true. The hardworking gifted make things work. The J. K. Rowlings, the Stephen Kings, the bright and talented musicians who create sturdy, pleasant music that boosts an era- they’re a part of daily life in a way that Mozart and Tolkein aren’t. Our reverence of genius is misplaced. They help, but we don’t need many, and the truth is that focusing on the gifted and talented yields better results. If you happen to strike a genius, great. If not, the genius will have the passion to get by, or it will kill them, but they aren’t what keeps society afloat. they inspire, they direct, they contribute- but the odds are that focusing on the bright and motivated will net more overall productivity and better social results. Our program got five amazing and one okay. Focusing on only one genius in the school (if they could have found one) would not necessarily have resulted in anything at all.
I don’t feel that I let the GAT program down, despite my life history and late blooming. I couldn’t be reached because of what I was experiencing, not because they didn’t try. Their decision to keep me in it taught me how successfult he kids who do the work are, and it put me in contexts that changed my life, like putting me in classes with Sa. She is brilliant, does the work, and supported my writing. She’s a large part of why I still write. They missed a lot of opportunities to turn me into a worker. They were scanning for something other than me. I was a fluke, and while I’m a little sorry to have wrecked their averages, I’m more sorry that there wasn’t more use in it for me.
I’ve dealt with the wreckage left in my life. I’m now free to try to get the education that I should have started with. I love school every bit as much as everyone always expected I would, and my narcolepsy is treated, leaving me able to experience my intense mental life more gently and evenly. I get A’s, but I work like hell for them. I do homework now. I don’t write stories or poetry in class (most of the time.)
I still write them. I wonder sometimes if that wasn’t what I really got out of GAT: Sa’s support changed my life, and motivated me to get good at it. It wasn’t intended to support the side of me that might succeed in non-traditional ways, but it accidentally threw me in with people who did just that. It was the first real validation I got, and leaving me in the program while I was failing classes taught me that people really did want me to succeed in a way that met conventional definitions. The others got what they were there for: education, the ability to do the hard work and meet the challenges, and success as they chose to define it. I got something out of it, too… They never dropped me out, which would have told me that they thought I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, live up to their bet about my worth. That they left me in (and I know it was a couple of people fighting hard for it that resulted in those decisions over and over) showed me that they really did think I could be one of them, one day, and that even if I couldn’t, I was still in the calibre of student that could get something out of it. It was a gift they gave me for being bright, because they knew I wasn’t going to pay them back. Not yet. It wasn’t fair to the others to leave me in; it was an insult to their hard work and brilliance. I knew this, they knew it, we all knew it. But they made a bet on who I’d become, and the race ain’t done yet.
Maybe one day. Maybe now. It’s never too late to be gifted, or start to become a master. I may not be a Mozart, or an Einstein- hell, I’m not even a Sa, or a Lynda- but it’s never too late to get hold of that spark, that flailing energy and passion that lives in me, and harness it hard. I live in awe of the Fab Five, for their hard work, for their character, for their exploration of life. I may not be one of them, but I have one more experience to share that I got solely because of the GAT program and one of the FF.
As a student, I was teased mercilessly, mostly by the boys in the junior class. I didn’t know how to handle it, because what the hell, I had all the social skills of a rat in a Skinner box. I couldn’t function anywhere, what was I supposed to do? So I just wrote my poems and went on with life. I showed them to the Fab Five, partly as a way of justifying my presence.
Kate, whom I will hold in grateful reverence forever, showed them to the teacher. The teacher had a policy of not reading student work (a policy I emulate today, mostly because my writing is not a social act.) Kate convinced her, somehow, lobbying hard for her to make an exception.
Now, my poetry is awful. And I mean appalling; I specialise in bad poetry. When I die, I mean to leave a terrible pile of it for the world to deal with. I want people to be staggered by the pile of bad poetry I leave behind. It was even worse, back then. But the teacher asked me to take a day out of our class, and read them aloud and answer questions.
To the class. The same boys who called me names, took my books, teased me about my height, and the girls who didn’t know me from a stone. I remember contemplating suicide that night (not an unusual idea for me, back then.) I thought hard about it. I was terrified; here was my alternate life, the one I was unable to stop myself from working on full-time, being dragged into the academic arena where I was failing hard. Can genius justify lack of hard work? Never. We all knew it, even then. But I was working hard—just not on the assigned curriculum. I was working on survival and I was pouring it all onto paper.
I said yes. Of course I said yes. And I did it. I took my pages, and I started to read aloud, and that was the day I learned what the phrase, “Could hear a pin drop,” really meant. I can’t ever forget it, because that five seconds after I stopped was the longest year of my life.
Kate clapped. Out of the darkness from the blurring sides of my vision, Kate put her hands together and broke the silence. For the rest of my life, I will always be the first to applaud, because of Kate. She may never know that she changed my life forever, but she did. She altered permanently the course of my existence and my career, even my academic and work career, because she (whom I looked upon as some kind of strange angel, for being able to do normal work and hand it in) acknowledged my real life, the one I was living while I tried to get by. Publicly. She changed it from a freak show to an academic exposition. Everyone else clapped after she did. I read, it was still terrible, but nothing will ever be as terrible as those first five seconds.
That was when I realised that whatever I was doing, it was all right for it to be mine. VALID. Real. It may not be genius, but it’s that spark everyone keeps talking about, the one that drives you to do the hard work. It’s what Tiger Parenting can’t instill and soft cuddly false esteem can’t temper into success.
It’s what the difference is between gifted and successful. Skill, plus the ambition to make it survive, and the means to use it, becomes success. They had giftedness. They just had the ability to turn it in the direction of actual academia, and to do the work while they found things they liked to do. Sa has a passion for movies and gender comprehension that burns laser-bright. Her job is her dream job, she watches movies and talks about sex. Each of those Fab Five were gifted, in their own way. Lynda has a mind like a computer: its exactness and precise function has always made me gasp. She found a spot that suits her. This is what we look for, in our self-based society- the combination of ruthless tiger parenting (though their families were more supportive than fierce in some cases) and individual drive. And not everyone has it, or ever will.
That’s why they included me. I have the drive now. Whether it pays back disappointed teachers or not, I found it, that ruthless little drivetrain that doesn’t sleep. Lately I’ve found out how to do what they were doing back then (after only two decades worth of struggle with it.) I’ve figured out how to use it to actually succeed in school. I don’t know where I’ll go now, but wherever it is, I will have that spark for company, as I turn everything into its fuel.
Genius is worthless. Yes, it’s contributed to our society time and time again. It matters, but in daily life? Learn to work. Respect work. Work hard. Have passion. Bring your passion to everything you do- don’t hold out for the dream. Get to work and build it, because those ten thousand hours may “only” give you mastery, but you have no excuse for ten thousand hours of idleness. It will not make you smarter, it will not make you stronger, it may not even make you successful. But you have no excuse not to try, and neither do I. Genius will not help you if you can’t do the work, and a late-blooming hard worker is better than nothing (and may lead to late-blooming genius.) Don’t mistake giftedness for genius, or genius for success. Whether it comes from genes or not, only choice can shape you now.