Learning From Literature

The Hidden Habits Of Genius by Craig Wright

Cover of The Hidden Habits Of Genius by Craig Wright

The Hidden Habits Of Genius by Craig Wright is a self-improvement / biography book published in 2020.

After examining Einstein, Mozart, and Da Vinci’s brains and genes, scientists haven’t found evidence of anything biologically predicting their future successes. Genius involves the complicated expression of too many hidden personal traits to be reduced to a single anomaly in our brain or chromosomes. As Wright describes, “How an exceptional individual’s traits work together to produce genius remains a mystery. What these traits are and how they can be cultivated is the subject of this book.”

After studying dozens of commonly agreed “geniuses” from Mozart and Shakespeare to Picasso and Da Vinci, Yale professor Craig Wright isolated the shared qualities between these great individuals and created The Hidden Habits Of Genius based on his findings.

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Enjoy!

Table of Contents

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In The Time Of The Revolution by Alan Axelrod

Hitting the Hidden Target

“A person of talent hits a target that no one else can hit; a person of genius hits a target that no one else can see”

Schopenhauer
  • Genius ≠ Talent
    • Elite Performance → involves “performing” – working through something that someone else has already formed
    • Practice makes the old perfect
    • Geniuses invent something new & transformative
    • Read the quote above
  • Genius → person of extraordinary mental powers whose original works / insights change society in some significant way for good, across cultures and time
  • Common Personality Traits:
    • Work Ethic
    • Resilience
    • Originality
    • Childlike Imagination
    • Insatiable Curiosity
    • Passion
    • Creative Maladjustment
    • Rebelliousness
    • Cross-Border Thinking
    • Contrarian Action
    • Preparation
    • Obsession
    • Relaxation
    • Concentration
Gift or Hard Work?: IQ or Many Q’s?
  • Genius = nature AND nurture
  • A genius is usually born with special talents, but not inheritable
    • Most geniuses come from average parents & upbringing
    • Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Newton, Franklin, Tesla, Tubman, Einstein, Van Gogh, Curie, King, etc.
  • IQ tests, SAT scores, & academic grades do not predict genius
    • Rarely assess creativity, leadership, emotional intelligence, etc
    • Logic ≠ Creative Ingenuity — geniuses need to think outside the box
    • Examples
      • Beethoven → couldn’t multiply
      • Picasso → couldn’t remember the alphabet and saw numbers as literal representations (2 as a bird’s wing, 0 as a body, etc)
      • Jobs → left high school with a 2.65 GPA
      • Disney → below-average student who often fell asleep in class
  • Einstein — “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
Genius and Gender: The Game Is Rigged
  • Women have an uphill battle due to stereotypes, biases, and unfavorable work environments
    • Observed in almost every commonplace process, such as job applications
  • Throughout history, women have had many more barriers to success (socially & legally)
    • Women couldn’t vote in the US until 1920
    • 1960 – Harvard had one female professor (Yale / Princeton = 0)
    • Women couldn’t enter an undergraduate at Princeton & Yale until 1969
    • Harvard didn’t officially merge with female sister school until 1999
  • Genius is not gendered → women have the same capability for genius
    • How stupid is it to ignore the intellectual potential of half of humanity?
    • Only 3% of the most noteworthy political figures are women — 1% in science & 10% in writing (a “female-friendly” domain)
    • Now, women have fewer role models & mentors in historically-restricted fields (think STEM) and therefore less motivation to enter these domains
Avoid the Prodigy Bubble
  • Most geniuses were never prodigies + most prodigies never become geniuses
    • Geniuses create
    • Prodigies merely mimic – extraordinary performers at an early age
  • Don’t try to train your child (or yourself)
    • Establish an independent, questioning mind 
    • Develop capacity to deal with failure
  • Albert Einstein → Not a single teacher would write a letter of recommendation. He hated them and vice-versa
Imagine the World as Does a Child

“The secret of geniuses is to carry the spirit of the child into old age.”

Aldous Huxley
  • “Growing up” encourages loss of creative imagination but creativity is required for innovation
    • Picasso — “When I was a child, I could paint like Rafael, but it took me a lifetime to paint like a child”
    • Jeff Bezos — “You have to have a certain childlike ability to not be trapped by your expertise”
  • Mary Shelley → 18 year-old with no formal education — during a stormy dinner party, each guest told a ghost story & within a few minutes, she had the idea for Frankenstein (terrifying all the other guests!)
  • Albert Einstein → Envisioned imaginary moving objects and only later (“maybe”) tried to attach formulas to them
Develop a Lust for Learning

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education “

Mark Twain
  • The key → Curiosity + Lifelong Learning
    • Einstein → “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious”
    • Michelangelo, Ben Franklin, Beethoven, Thomas Edison, Pablo Picasso → never went beyond elementary school
    • Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bob Dylan, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Nikola Tesla → dropped out
    • These figures were able to learn what they needed to know
  • 2 Methods
  • Leonardo da Vinci (no formal education) → His One-Day To-Do List below includes themes of urban planning, hydraulics, drawing, archery + warfare, astronomy, mathematics, and even ice-skating
    • Took apart machines, examined fossils, dissected bodies, and left 100,000+ sketches of different ideas
    • 1st to identify arteriosclerosis, recognize the whole retina processes light, discover the heart has 4 chambers, and why the aortic valve in the heart closes (not confirmed until 1968). Modern science only caught up 450 years later with the invention of MRI / CAT scans
  • Nikola Tesla → As a child would steal his dad’s books and candlewick to read through dawn. Self-learned physics, math, electrical engineering, philosophy, and literature
    • Responsible for alternating current & induction motor
    • Visionary for solar heating, x-rays, radio, MRIs , robots, cell phones, and Internet
Find Your Missing Piece
  • Geniuses cannot accept the world as described to them
    • Each sees a problem and cannot rest until things are put right
    • You could find your passion quickly or take almost a lifetime
  • Geniuses were driven (some arguably on the dark side of obsession)
    • Everyday passions may be unique, but not transformative
  • Isaac Newton → Stayed in his room for days on end obsessing over a problem while eating little (even then, he ate standing up to not break “the flow”). When dining at the cafeteria, he sat by himself and other people learned to leave him to his solitary thinking
  • Thomas Edison → Averaged 18 hours a day at his desk. Didn’t go home for days at a time to eat or sleep. Has 1,093 registered patents
Leverage Your Difference
  • Geniuses don’t have a habit of being unbalanced but it is more common
    • Out of ~100 geniuses considered in this book, at least 1/3 were seriously affected by mood disorders
  • Disability is a difference, not a deficit
    • Can be viewed as opportunities from which original thinking can emerge
  • Vincent Van Gogh → sliced off his left ear when his romantic partner was leaving him, was put in a mental institution (where he painted The Starry Night), killed himself at age 37 (stabbed in the stomach)
  • Virginia Woolf → had schizophrenia & bipolar disorder, killed herself at age 59 (filled her pockets with rocks & walked into the river)
  • Beethoven → attempted suicide multiple times, increased difficulty hearing at age 20, completely deaf by age 47 (but wrote his most popular works during this time)
Rebels, Misfits, and Troublemakers
  • Willing to defy convention & authority to explore new ideas and get to the truth
  • Without going against the status quo, there is no genius
    • Makes us see the world differently
    • Not every disruptive idea is a bright one
  • Genius isn’t always universally beloved
    • Socrates was forced to drink poison
    • Martin Luther and Galileo were subjected to house arrest for life
    • MLK, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi were imprisoned
    • Joan of Arc was burned at the stake
  • Acceptance can be long in coming
    • Geniuses make people uncomfortable and force change – Change requires work
    • Only in 1820 did the Church of Rome officially accept the Sun is the center of the solar system
    • In 1796, Edward Jenner did injections from cowpox-infected cows… by 1980, smallpox was eradicated
  • Galileo Galilei + Nicolas Copernicus → 1st to say Earth revolves around the Sun, referred to the Pope as a simpleton, forced to face the Inquisition, placed on house arrest for the remainder of life
  • Harriet Tubman → rebelled against the Confederacy, helped build the Underground Railroad, led 13 rescue missions & liberated 70+ slaves, leader of military assault freeing 750 more slaves
Be The Fox

“They were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things”

Steve Jobs
  • Geniuses roam widely in curious, random, sometimes uncontrolled ways
    • Natural inquisitiveness pushes them beyond their primary interest (Da Vinci, Einstein, Musk)
  • The biggest contributions require knowledge of multiple domains
    • Narrowly-focused experts are worse problem-solvers than wide-ranging generalists
    • Range – “If you are too much of an insider, it’s hard to get good perspective”
  • Cultivate diversity within yourself
    • Wander widely, combine things, cross-train
  • Lady Gaga → composer, choreographer, cosmetics, creator, fashion designer, actress, record producer, philanthropist, and social activist
  • Benjamin Franklin → a few interests include whirlwinds, Franklin stove, bifocals, lightning rod, glass harmonica, swimming flippers, the long arm, medical catheter, daylight savings time, Franklin phonetic alphabet, the Gulf Stream, & public libraries
Think Opposite
  • If you want to better understand an object / concept, consider the opposite
    • If you want to better understand how a machine is put together – disassemble it
    • If you want to achieve a particular result – define the end goal & create steps leading back to the beginning
  • MLK → passive resistance & non-violence as a weapon against violence
  • Henry Ford → amazed at how efficient slaughterhouses were at “dissembling” an animal, reversed it to put together & mass produce the Model T Ford
  • Albert Einstein → how can stasis (no movement) & motion exist at the same time?
Get Lucky
  • Geniuses usually do not come from economic extremes
    • Extreme poverty → little opportunity
    • Extreme wealth → little incentive
  • Give yourself the opportunity for luck to play a part
    • Develop the skills and knowledge to exploit what is revealed
  • Geniuses move to a metropolis or a university to further their goals
    • Historically where diverse people with dissimilar ideas gather, introducing fresh ideas & new ways of thinking
  • Alexander Fleming → had a messy lab, did not clean petri dishes before a month-long vacation, returned to bacteria growing on all except one that was inhabited by a mold blown in by accident, began to test the therapeutic bacteria-killing powers & discovered penicillin
  • Da Vinci & the Mona Lisa → 1911 Mona Lisa was stolen and a photo of the painting appeared on the front of major newspapers around the world, during the first two days back on display 120,000+ people came to look
Move Fast and Break Things

“Destruction is more than just an unfortunate side effect of creation. It is part and parcel of the same thing”

Alan Greenspan
  • The standard for genius is based on accomplishment, not character
    • Many geniuses are not good people
  • Geniuses regularly end up destroying things, for better or worse
    • To create new requires old to be destroyed
  • Steve Jobs → “arrogant asshole” (self-described), needlessly humiliated all (whether CEOs or waitresses), refused to acknowledge his daughter until court, felt rules didn’t apply to him – parked in handicapped spots, refused to use a license plate, “sometimes… decided not to pay for things at the very last minute. Walking out of restaurants without paying the bill”
  • Thomas Edison → semi-forced a 16-year old girl to marry him, ignored wife and kids for days at a time, electrocuted dogs and even an elephant
  • Pablo Picasso → emotionally & physically abused his wives / mistresses including burning their faces with cigarettes and making them fight each other — his first wife went psychotic & died, his mistress hanged herself, his second wife shot herself, his other mistress underwent electric shock therapy and joined a convent
Now Relax
  • Creative ideas arise most when engaged in relaxation / play
    • More people get creative inspiration in the shower than work
    • Exercise enhances cognitive function
    • Essentialism explains how “Play” is necessary in our adult world to engage the creative mind & promote efficiency
    • Perhaps the most important — Sleep
  • Einstein → brought his violin everywhere and would play while thinking through breakthroughs
  • Nikola Tesla → thought of alternating current (AC) when walking through the park reciting Faust from memory with a friend 
  • Otto Leowi → woke up in the middle of the night and scribbled an idea down – when he woke up, he realized it was the idea to artificially chemically start a heart with injections
Time to Concentrate!
  • Analysis & concentrated hard work needed before ideas have transformative impact
    • Conceived when relaxed or not, ideas must then be realized 
  • May require mentally constructing your own psychological space to think without interference
    • Every genius has his / her unique way of concentrating
  • Stephen Hawking → average student before, with ALS was forced to concentrate & hold problems in his mind, doing physics entirely in his head (and not just 3-D problems, but on multiple dimensions of space-time)
  • Mozart → constantly working even at outdoor gatherings with friends, wrote string quartet No.15 K421 while his wife was giving birth to their first child
  • Einstein → would be holding the baby on his knee in the middle of a party scribbling equations on a napkin
  • Da Vinci → would spend three or four days just studying & imagining a subject, not even touching a brush and then would paint without stopping, eating, or moving

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