I believe this really depends on the field you're looking at. In pursuits where extraordinary levels of raw ability is absolutely paramount, precocity will be there 9/10 (or more). The best example is the quintessential chess genius. It's hard to find a chess champion who wasn't a precocious talent. It's the same with concert pianists.
In other fields, some raw ability (but not necessarily an obvious precocious talent) is still necessary but other factors are also paramount. In the field of literature, richness of experience and maturity can take an author to a higher level. In various fields of scientific research, decades of accumulated knowledge/experience can be pivotal to success.
My point is that in some fields, it makes complete sense to equate genius with precocity, but in others it makes little sense.
> "The best example is the quintessential chess genius. It's hard to find a chess champion who wasn't a precocious talent."
Hold on a second there. Becoming a chess champion is effectively a full time job, and it takes a tremendous amount of work to acquire the skill to do so. Who, as an adult, is going to pursue that as a career if they haven't been playing chess tournaments since childhood? I would argue that there really isn't a path to becoming a chess champion except via being a precocious talent. Without that hope the family and the individual isn't going to pursue it as an option. Nobody is out there earning degrees in professional chess and then going into office work or silicon valley or what-have-you, it's just an extremely specialized field.
I agree, the causation is likely due to the fact that kids who are good at playing chess early on keep playing chess, which by default gives them years of additional training and experience more. As opposed to someone who has only started at 18, they are going to have a hard time competing not due to their intelligence or genius-factor, but lack of training.
My kid is 2 years old and knows the names of like 40 different dinosaurs. Does that mean he's a precocious paleontological genius? If I tell him he's a dinosaur genius and enroll him in paleontology training classes and encourage him to spend every waking hour learning more about dinosaurs to the exclusion of everything else, he surely would be, no?
I recently had the pleasure of reading the book Outliers, also by Malcolm Gladwell. In this book, one of his techniques is to present the typical "genius" or "rags-to-riches" type story and pick it apart, showing that success comes more frequently from environment and having the opportunity to work hard than from some innate genius. Here he uses the same technique. He presents the popular conception of Ben Fountain's story - a man quits his job and becomes a successful author through talent and motivation. Then, throughout the rest of the article, he adds nuance and exposes some of the overlooked details - that man was supported financially by his wife, had free time throughout the day to work, developed his talent excruciatingly slowly and took almost twenty years to catch his first break. While the focus of this article was more to discuss what it means to be or become a genius, I find it refreshing to think that these kinds of success stories often have hidden details that allow them to feel more realistic and attainable.
On a more personal level, I really appreciated this article. I recently made the decision to study music at a conservatory rather than go into programming as I had originally planned. Programming has always been something I've been naturally good at (I used to think of myself as a very technical, STEMmy kind of person - I laugh at that now), whereas performing music is a passion I've only recently rekindled. As a result, I've had a few doubts about my ability to become a good musician or whether I've made the right choice. This article, however, reassures me that being born with innate talent is not the only path to becoming a good musician (although it sure would have been nice).
You can be the most skilled musician in the world, and still not have a job. Luck and politics matters a lot in music, and the margins between the best musician and everyone else is such a small percent that the king makers (record labels, opera houses, etc.) can afford to not have the most skilled musician if they see fit.
A lot in music depends on the kind of music you want to make. Certain music genres are able to support a much larger section of musicians, regardless of their innate talent. A top 10% violinist doesn't have as many opportunities as a top 10% EDM producer.
Music is also strange that you can be a top 1% musician (in terms of sales and popularity) without having the skills of a top 1% musician. As long as you can write pop hits (which doesn't require the strongest technical skills, that is.
>>> a man quits his job and becomes a successful author through talent and motivation. Then, throughout the rest of the article, he adds nuance and exposes some of the overlooked details - that man was supported financially by his wife, had free time throughout the day to work, developed his talent excruciatingly slowly and took almost twenty years to catch his first break.
A friend of mine was an "overnight success" as an electronic music producer. I hung out with him at a festival in europe and all these other djs were telling him what a genius he was, and how it's amazing that his "first song" was such a huge success.
They didn't know that A) he'd been working producing music for 15 years, since he was in high school. B) He quit his job as a software developer to work on music full time and was supported by his girlfriend who is a doctor and C) had already released 5 or 6 songs over the course of five years in a different genre and under a different alias and fizzled out D) only got his big break because he handed his song to a famous DJ at a gig through a friend.
I think he's an absolutely brilliant producer, but it's not because he had any inherent musical ability at all. He just worked his ass off for over a decade and eventually got really good at it, and more importantly got to know the right people who could do something with his music when it was good enough.
Thanks for this. It sounds like a good reason to read Outliers. I've seen it recommended a lot but haven't wanted to read it because I really struggled to get anything out of The Tipping Point (I thought it was a cliched version of the non-fiction category: a couple of ideas repeated over and over, full of anecdotes and trying to connect unrelated things… completely unscientific).
I've read all of Gladwell's books (with the exception of his collection of essays), and found most of them to be similar to that. Just lots of semi-unrelated points that halfway got brought together into a somewhat coherent argument.
Outliers was the exception, even though it does follow the same mold in a lot of ways (it is, after all, written for a general audience) Mainly because he does break it down, and shows that the people we usually think of as having "big breaks" and such really had opportunities that most other people won't get to have. For instance, he goes on to deconstruct the whole "Bill Gates dropped out of college" cliché by stressing that Gates had unprecedented access to computers when he was younger, thanks to having a well-connected and well-off family and friends. This led to him being able to acquire the skills he needed without college, etc. etc. It was nice to see that story turned on its head instead of being used to tell people that "Hey, you can be rich too and you don't need college" (granted, not everyone needs to go to college, but too often this was used to justify talking people out of going, from my perspective).
He also uses the book to discuss the 10000 hour rule towards mastery, and it is fun in light of that.
I think our educational system is flawed as well. I know a lot of talented people who would be able to do great things in science and research if there was a way for them to enter academia after they’ve become full fledged adults.
Often it’s people who matured late or spend their youths trying to figure out what they wanted, and now they can’t really enter into academia because the institutions were build to educate the same way we educate children.
I know there are masters programs, but a lot of those, and a lot of people who take the time to re-educated, are solely focused on getting more valuable for business, not for research.
It’s a shame, because I think we lose a lot of potential by almost entirely focusing our higher learning systems on young people.
It is flawed, flawed to the point of being broken. What education should be: teaching children to become mature adults and functional members of a cooperative society, teaching coping skills for adulthood, cultivating and encouraging a sense of curiosity and interest in reading, learning, etc. What education tends to be: a brutal factory that is not unlike prison that babysits children until they are legally (but not emotionally or intellectually) adults while burning out every ounce of curiosity in science and learning in all but a precious few individuals.
There are tons of ways the system can be improved. One little thing I'll point out is that in school the expectation is perfection and deviation from "perfection" (orthodoxy, memorization, etc.) is punished. If you "fail" a midterm or a big project but end the course with a high degree of mastery of the material you are punished with a lower grade. If you excel in certain subjects but only passably good in some others then you are again punished. Which is exactly the opposite of the way real life works. If you are a superstar (perhaps literally) in even just one area (science, music, art, writing, comedy, machine tools, what-have-you) whereas in other areas you merely have a basic level of competency, well in that case you can become hugely, wildly successful. And yet the educational system would lead you to believe that you would have a dim future in that case and you should stop focusing on what you are best at and most passionate about to improve your "grades" on everything else.
>educational system [...] stop focusing on what you are best at and most passionate about to improve your "grades"
Yes. Precocious boys follow a sequence of obsessions. The way to foster achievement, then, is to find out what a child loves and help him to do more of it. Ultimately this may involve finding a master who can act as mentor. It's not going to happen in conformity factories dominated by ideologies (and often policed by bullies).
That is not true. Kids who develop abilities or inclinations at an earlier age than is usual or expected don't necessary follow obsessions. Their brains often simply develop a bit faster then brains of other kids, hence sooner abilities and inclinations.
It does not mean they will end up more skilled in adulthood nor that they are necessary obsessed types.
Conversely, obsessed personality types are not always that much better then others if their obsession is not channeled in an effective way. The obsession is not necessary combined with larger talent or effective learning methods.
Well I'm not talking about obsession in the sense of a mental disorder -- but in the sense of that one thing X that a particular person happens to be in love with at the moment (could be piano, could be tennis, could be computer programming or could be something socially disapproved of like pokemon or skateboarding or whatever). The obsession creates a depth of knowledge. Even when you try to make such people do other stuff, they'll still be daydreaming about X. So better to work with it.
Obsession creates time spent by topical activity. If does not create depth of knowledge unless channeled right. Kid won't go far in piano or tennis or math unless having good teacher no matter how obssesed. All those fields are too competitive for that.
> Even when you try to make such people do other stuff, they'll still be daydreaming about X. So better to work with it.
That is point where it is approaching mental problem. Most kids, evenovanej those with strong hobbies are fully able to learn other things too.
Also, the competition winning programmers among my peers had wide knowledge in non coding areas. Then again, our environment and camps encouraged that sort of thing.
This is my take as well. The current system is well suited for the world that is resource-constrained and more or less designed to actively weed out students from reaching mastery. In other words, it’s not necessarily designed for optimal dissemination(and creation) of knowledge.
Yes, but genius should be not synonym with exceptionally talented. Although anything useful including natural perseverance or optimism and motivation should be called a talent.
An idea can be called genius. Often it requires knowledge and experience and coincidence for a genius idea (innovative idea, wise idea, disruptive idea).
Often it requires many years of efforts to create or to discover something new or great or genius.
A genius is a person who displays exceptional intellectual ability, creative productivity, universality in genres or originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of new advances in a domain of knowledge. Despite the presence of scholars in many subjects throughout history, many geniuses have shown high achievements in only a single kind of activity.[1]
"Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values."
More interested in why we need to believe in genius in the first place.
I find it can be a kind of secular sainthood that has a mythology around it that serves as a post-hoc justification of certain social outcomes. Few understand the contributions of minds like Feynman, Davinci, Einstein, but we hold them up as symbols of a kind of mystery cult around science, which should make people at least a bit curious.
There are a lot of prolific artists who aren't included in the genius canon, and it's an almost exclusively masculine archetype, which means it either tells us something about who we are, or it's the noisy artifact of a crude model. My bet is on the latter.
While the particular acumen for appreciating and operating on abstractions is probably pareto distributed (like everything), what it represents is much more interesting.
When you believe in genius, you likely believe it is meaningful that there are people you will never compare to, who have advantages you are physically incapable of obtaining, who were chosen to receive a gift while you were not, that there are people whose nature or perceived potential means they should be held to different standards, or that someones success can be less legitimate because of a perceived intellectual advantage. Not saying any of those statements are true, but they are definitely the effects of how people relate themselves to the belief in genius.
Without those beliefs, we've got some much harder questions to answer. Personally, I think precosity can be cultivated and refined into something great, but genius itself is an artifact reflected from others beliefs, and not an intrinsic quality.
>Without those beliefs, we've got some much harder questions to answer. Personally, I think precosity can be cultivated and refined into something great
Very much so, and sometimes ascribing genius is just shorthand for "I don't plan to try".
More insidious is "talent", also held to be an intrinsic quality. But it turns out that "talent" is a trap for those who are talented.
Talent is a trap: I came across this when watching a digital painting video, the host was relating how some of the people in art school were obviously talented and some were just slugging it out like he was. He noticed over time that the talented ones were more likely to give up at some point, and the sloggers were more likely to keep going and become successful making art a profession.
The problem is that the talented are characterized by things seeming to come easily, but it's not an infinite ability and sooner or later they come up against some technique or assignment that is a problem and that will take real patience and work to get through. That comes as a real shock that can shake your confidence in your "talent", which was an illusion anyway.
The sloggers have the advantage of always having to work hard to make progress, so everything is a struggle and the only surprises are when something goes easily. Those kind of expectations set you up better for success in a profession, which is just hard work in the end.
My two biggest counter examples when people say that geniuses are not born are John von Neuman and Srinivasa Ramanujan. These two were surrounded by other people who were regarded as geniuses in their own right, and yet these people viewed von Neuman and Ramanujan as being on a completely different level.
Warren Buffett is an interesting example of specialized genius. He has a gifted memory and based on what has been described about him in several books, from birth he was of a certain emotional tilt that would serve him very well in consistently not making investment decisions based on emotion across decades. Buffett is an investment/financial genius, whose quite abnormal birth traits were a prerequisite to his extreme success in the investment world.
I favor the notion that genius potential is a combination of specific narrow traits, such that if you swap any of them out, you're very likely to lose the genius outcome (rather than the pop caricature that genius is mentally broad; ie if someone says: he/she is a genius! - the only proper response is: in what narrow regard?). The popular successful genius outcome then further requires a number of external environmental factors, such as luck (where you were born, who your parents were, who you went to school with, who your friends were, what time in history you were born, all the way down to the tiniest of minutia).
Like the saying goes "better lucky than good." Being born a white man in America at the time he was to a politically connected, financially stable family were all things that benefited him greatly and which he had 0 control over.
The older I get, the more of a fatalist I become. The whole universe is just luck and entropy, and anyone telling you otherwise is probably just trying to sell you something.
Media plays such a huge part in this. How often do we see young people saving the world versus old people? I like the Marvel movies because the protagonists are mostly reasonably aged.
I try to remind myself at times that Gaston Glock didn't design his first gun until age 52.
Because it's a lot easier for someone to convince himself that "genius" is a born trait, lest he look in the mirror and ask himself why he's not working harder to achieve something.
Precocity means early identification of potential in a given field.
Early identification of that potential means individuals and institutions around the individual start to dedicate resources towards their development.
Having resources dedicated to that development means such individuals can specialize and focus without having to spend as much (or, perhaps, anything) in terms of time/resources on normal life-supporting activities.
Early identification also means investment of attention which accrues in reputation (and probably compounds in much the same way early financial investment does), which means less time spent having to convince people to give you opportunities.
Basically: there's a path-dependent element to success / prestige. Precocity is not the only route but it helps so much that of course it's often correlated with recognized genius.
I'm not sure if this is true. For example, Nobel prizes are usually assigned at quite an old age, and this leads people to think the opposite. Also people usually associate the word "professor" with an old guy. The picture of Einstein that people have in their minds is not of his younger years. Etc. etc.
But the relevant research is usually done when these people are much younger. Einstein has made his major contributions to physics by the time he was 36. Fame and prestige are lagging indicators.
In other fields, some raw ability (but not necessarily an obvious precocious talent) is still necessary but other factors are also paramount. In the field of literature, richness of experience and maturity can take an author to a higher level. In various fields of scientific research, decades of accumulated knowledge/experience can be pivotal to success.
My point is that in some fields, it makes complete sense to equate genius with precocity, but in others it makes little sense.