What is Genius?

There has been a quote I have been thinking about for some time now. The one from Thomas Edisson where he said "Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration". Its not one of those quotes that just hits you as immediate truth or as i like to say "Shows you the light". Its one that makes you think, it gives a different perspective on a topic in our society that many of us think is inborn, rare and special, but this quote nudges you to think otherwise. It says we can all attain this rare staus by just working hard.

Yes I know you have met people with extra ordinary skills, people that could multiply 325 by 672 in their head in a minute or even seconds and then you ask, how are these people not born like this, how can you say they are not talented or given a gift from God. But from observation I have seen those such people are those who have worked the hardest. They are the people while you party they are writing computer code, while you sleep they are reading. Definitely at the end of the day it is going to show. No I am not saying that people are not gifted differently in intelligence, what I am saying is that the skill or the ability we call Genius (Which is defined as: someone who has exceptional intellectual ability and originality ) is attained through hard work and is not just randomly assigned. In order to confirm my thoughts on this i did a little digging and I came up with this article (From New Scientist).

Basically What it says is that if we look at all the people we call geniuses in different fields, from Mozart to Einstein, what brought them fame was not the inborn intelligence but the work they put in. That hard work broke ground and led them to come up with things that no one thought about. According to the article IQ does not assure greatness. There was an elementary school in New York where the requirement to get in was an IQ score above 130 (Which only 1 percent of the world is on that level of intelligence) but when these students were watched although they had satisfactory/successful lives, none of them came out with a Pulitzer prize or a Nobel prize, very few of them are even recognizable by name today.

If you look today at who is making the news and actively changing our world, Bill Gates, Micheal Dell, Steve Jobs and co, these are all college dropouts. That leaves me asking, what about those kids that get 4.0 in MIT and Harvard? where are they? what companies do they lead? I personally believe the brain is a muscle, the more you task it and test it, the more powerful t would be, and the closer to genius you will be (If that is your desire).

You are REASON.

I was listening to a song (Soundtrack in the movie "Stranger Than Fiction") that said you are what you do. I found that interesting and for a moment true, but as i thought about it, the truth behind that statement began to fade.

To say we are what we do means that all the actions we take in our lives are just minor phrases or adjectives to define who we really are, meaning that we can never be fully described until the end of our lives. This makes perfect sense, because if you have ever been at a funeral when people come up and give eulogies of the recently deceased, a lot of their actions and achievements come into focus and then you actually see the true goodness or evil of the person thats has passed away.

My problem with that saying is that, many human actions if taken out of context can mean something totally different from what was intended. Take this scenario, Two eight year old boys steals a cupcake from a bakery. Without hesitation it is easy to call them thieves, but if we investigate the reasoning behind their actions we might see things differently. In one case the boy stole the cupcake because he was hungry and has not eaten for days and in the second case he stole the cupcake because he wanted to prove to his friends he was fearless. Knowing the reasoning for these actions would you punish both boys the same way? I wouldn't think so (The same logic is used when someone pleads insanity in court when they killed someone and rather than going to jail they go to a mental health facility) but taking the story out of context puts both boys on the same level and they are seen as the same.

My point here being that if we were to judge both boys and base who they are on their actions alone we would be very wrong, but if we are to understand their reasoning it would help us come closer to how they work, what drives them and who they really are. Hence if we can be judged by our actions it is not what we do that defines us but the way we reason.