PERSONAL-NOTES, NEW-SCIENTIST

Notes on "How to be a genius"

By my early thirties I saw the obvious: my smarts and “talent” - above average or not - would count for little unless I outworked most of the other writers. Only when I started putting in some extra hours did I get anywhere. Examine closely even the most extreme examples - Mozart, Newton, Einstein, Stravinsky - and you find more hard-won mastery than gift. Geniuses are made, not born.

Perhaps, a gene that’s responsible for not getting frustrated easily is still at play.

“These people don’t necessarily have an especially high IQ, but they almost always have very supportive environments, and they almost always have important mentors. And the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort.”

So still, as it’s the matter of non-equality in intelligence that’s causing people to get sad about their success, even if it’s not the intelligence that’s responsible for one’s success, there are other factors that are, besides their hard-working characteristics.

The world is not fair, and it’s just the way it is.

Take intelligence. No accepted measure of innate or basic intelligence, whether IQ or other metrics, reliably predicts that a person will develop extraordinary ability.

In the complex systems, like society, this can’t be a fair argument. Merely showing a higher probability of success is enough to say that IQ is important.