Genius is one percent inspiration . . .

Dirtification Against B.O.

. . . and ninety-nine percent stinky, oily, rancid sweat.

Genius

Genius

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Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent exasperation!

Big Jerks as Great Visionaries? Or Vice-Versa?

Elon Musk
NYT

As I was reading Tony Schwartz's recent article, "The Bad Behavior of Visionary Leaders" (NYT, June 26, 2015), I finally understood why visionaries like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk can be so "unnecessarily cruel and demeaning . . . to the people who helped make their dreams come true." Schwartz helped me see why:

I would argue that most of the bad behavior of these men is fear-based, impulsive and reactive rather than consciously hurtful. It grows not out of a sense of superiority but rather of insecurity.

Still, why the insecurity? They're geniuses. The insecurity comes from the fact that those around them are not all geniuses. Schwartz tells us:

I know well the anxious feeling that can arise when a deal is coming undone, a project isn't gelling or an employee seems to be falling short. I know how frightening it can be to feel out of control . . . . Each of [these three visionaries] . . . was far more likely to act out suddenly and behave poorly when he wasn't getting exactly what he wanted - when he felt that others were failing to live up to his standards.

I finally understood. Great visionaries make great demands. Insanely great demands. They do so for their visions, and if they see their vision fading because of some employee failing to perform in an insanely great fashion, they lose control in trying to maintain control.

I can see how that happens. I understand . . . and I learn something new every day.

Simply in Genius?

Genius at Work
Like the Language of Delirium
Image by Jacob Magraw and Rachell Sumpter
NYT

Joshua Wolf Shenk, writing "The End of 'Genius'" (NYT, July 19, 2014), argues that genius is not individual, despite the shared view of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, whose combined effect is still felt today:

The big change began with Enlightenment thinkers, who sought to give man a dignified, central place in the world. They made man's thinking the center of their universe and created a profoundly asocial self . . . . But it was during the Romantic era that "the true cult of the natural genius emerged" . . . . Today, the Romantic genius can be seen everywhere.

But, argues Shenk, it ain't true:

[T]he real heart of creativity . . . [is] the intimate exchange of the creative pair, such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney and myriad other examples with which we've yet to fully reckon . . . . The elemental collective . . . is the pair. Two people are the root of social experience -- and of creative work . . . . -- most strikingly with Paul McCartney and John Lennon . . . . Why is this? For one thing, given that our psyches take shape through one-on-one exchanges, we're likely set up to interact with a single person more openly and deeply than with any group. The pair is also inherently fluid and flexible. Two people can make their own society. When even one more person is added, roles and power positions harden. This may be good for stability but problematic for creativity. Three legs make a table stand in place. Two legs are made for moving.

Two's company, three's a crowd. Okay, I got it. But I like to see where ideas are stretched to the breaking point, and here's the place:

The pair is the primary creative unit -- not just because pairs produce such a staggering amount of work but also because they help us to grasp the concept of dialectical exchange. At its heart, the creative process itself is about a push and pull between two entities, two cultures or traditions, or two people, or even a single person and the voice inside her head. Indeed, thinking itself is a kind of download of dialogue between ourselves and others. And when we listen to creative people describe breakthrough moments that occur when they are alone, they often mention the sensation of having a conversation in their own minds.

I have italicized and thereby emphasized the phrase "or even a single person and the voice inside her head" because we are here back to the individual genius, even if 'she' is carrying on a conversation in 'her' head. Don't get me wrong. Creativity often does emerge in collaborative pairs. That's how my wife and I work on our translations.

But that's not how I wrote my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer. I worked mostly alone on that, albeit in dialogue with other writers, most dead, but some living.

I'm no genius, of course, but Shenk is basically talking about creativity.

Heavy Disappointment

Deuterium

(Image from Wikipedia)

I sometimes feel disappointment at not obtaining a university position in religious studies, but that's probably at least partly my fault for taking my own sweet irrecoverable time about finishing my doctorate . . . though even more due to my stubbornly following an unconventional path toward foreseeable failure.

Boundlessly worse, perhaps, is the disappointment suffered by one who has greater promise . . . yet blocked opportunities through no personal fault. David Harris, of St. Anthony's College, Oxford University, writes of his father's disappointments in "Secrets of a Disappointed Life" (International Herald Tribune, June 21, 2010). Sent off from Berlin at age eleven to an aunt for safekeeping in Vienna when Hitler came to power in 1933, Eric Harris found early refuge in science but had to give up that interest after the Anschluss in 1938. He never spoke of his scientific dreams to his son, David, who only found the remarkable documentary evidence of his father's scientific talent in a box left behind by his father after dying in 1998:

It contained a diploma, written in German. My father had been awarded an honorary doctorate, in 1975, by the Institute of Chemistry in Vienna. The degree was presented for his work at the institute from 1936 to 1938 on "synthesis of the heavy hydrogen atom." As he was born in 1920, he was cited for cutting-edge research pursued between the ages of 16 and 18!

No one knows, of course, what might have happened in Mr. Harris's life, had Hitler not come to power. He probably wouldn't have found opportunity to synthesize any deuterium outside of Vienna. He might not even have gotten involved in science at all. Or he might have started off in science but lost interest and pursued an utterly different path anyway. Or he might have encountered an unexpected barrier even absent the rise of National Socialism. Not one of us has satisfactory control over our lives.

I used to imagine that I could achieve anything if I put my mind to it, but that was before I put my mind to it and discovered that what I had imagined was, in a real sense, merely imaginary.

But I never had Mr. Eric Harris's genius, so his disappointment must have been harder to bear, though we'll perhaps never know since his son tells us that "about himself, . . . he said characteristically little."

Unlike me with my blog . . .

Manny's Unconquerable Mind?

Manny Pacquiao and Freddie Roach

(Image from New York Times)

The sports writer Greg Bishop has some surprising facts to share about Philippine boxer Manny Pacquiao in an article for the New York Times, "Out of Chance Meeting, a Formidable Pairing," which is something of a human interest story about the fighter and his American trainer, Freddie Roach.

I don't keep up with professional sports despite having played basketball and baseball as a kid, and later a year of judo and a semester of badminton at university. My older brother can recall specific details of athletes' achievements that he saw on television or read about, but he's got brains to spare for that sort of thing. I save my brain space for history and literature because I don't have as much volume, apparently.

But that's what interested me in the article by Bishop, who makes Manny sound like a wunderkind:

The boxer has taken months off, recording music and running for political office, and he returned to each camp stronger, as if the training never stopped . . . . [He] possesses an innate ability to block out the world, to box for millions of people but not feel their collective weight. Inside the Thai restaurant [near Roach's gym], with fans pressed against the glass outside, Pacquiao strummed his guitar, surrounded by his entourage yet very much alone. This complex world suits a complex man. Pacquiao dabbles in darts, basketball and billiards. He has a photographic memory, learned to play the piano in one week and, when he is not training, often sleeps only three to four hours a day.

My first question: Is this hype? Or does Pacquiao truly have a 'photographic' memory? Did he really learn to play the piano in one week?

My second question (actually, my fourth): How is the name "Pacquiao" pronounced? Apparently, "pa'kjaw." (But how is that pronounced?)

And about his ability to go without training and return stronger, I also wonder (hence his wunderkind status). Is he some sort of superman? A Nietzschean Uebermensch?

I recall from the early 1980s reading a newspaper article -- I think that the paper was the San Francisco Chronicle -- about a scientist working in his Bay Area laboratory who would take two weeks off every summer to climb Mt. Everest. The peculiar point was that he never trained for the climb. He would simply fly to Nepal, join his climbing team, and ascend to the highest point on earth as if out for a mere stroll. Fellow scientists who studied such things told him that what he was doing was impossible. But he did it anyway.

I've forgotten the man's name. Wish I had Manny's unconquerable mind so I could recall.

David Galenson on Genius: Two Types?

David Galenson

"A Youthful-Looking Experimentalist"

(Image: University of Chicago Experts Guide)

A young man named "Nathaniel" who is studying literature and has recently started his own blog happened to read my entry on "Prodigies" and post a comment:

I think you might be interested in a story Wired did last month called "What Kind of Genius Are You?" It's basically a comparison of two styles of creative achievement: the conceptualist variety that hits people when they're young, but exhausts itself early (examples are Picasso and Ezra Pound); and the experimentalist type that's slow to mature and rises "asymptotically" (the article points to Cezanne and Robert Frost here).

Nathaniel was right -- I was interested. I've passed the link on to others, including the novelist Olen Steinhauer over at Contemporary Nomad, who found the article "[r]eally interesting," probably because he and the other nomads and blog readers had been discussing whether or not Orson Welles was a genius, a discussion triggered by an LA Times article, "Delusions of genius," by Richard Schickel, who argued that Welles was no genius because:

...he could not submit his wayward spirit to institutional discipline.... The rebel pose makes for fine romantic copy, but the fact is that genius in the movies is the antithesis of genius as Welles flightily defined it. It is akin to an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Every great director I've ever known spends months in the editing room, more months on the dubbing and scoring stages, driving themselves and everyone around them crazy with their slavish devotion to detail. When they're not doing that, they're wheedling money out of their backer or fending off suggested improvements. It is how great movies are made.

I didn't enter into this debate over Welles's putative genius because although I've seen and appreciated Welles's great film Citizen Kane, I've never been a Welles fan. I remember too clearly those commercials that he did for Paul Masson Winery back around 1979, authoritatively intoning:

"Paul Masson will sell no wine before its time."

Welles sounded convincing, but he was a talented actor, so of course, he sounded convincing, but it's still a ridiculous thing to say.

But I digress. My point was about the two types of genius that Nathaniel indicated, the conceptual and the experimental. The article to which he linked, "What Kind of Genius Are You?," was written by Daniel H. Pink about the Chicago economist David Galenson, who has worked out a theory of genius in his recent book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (Princeton University Press, 2006):

What he has found is that genius -- whether in art or architecture or even business -- is not the sole province of 17-year-old Picassos and 22-year-old Andreessens. Instead, it comes in two very different forms, embodied by two very different types of people. "Conceptual innovators," as Galenson calls them, make bold, dramatic leaps in their disciplines. They do their breakthrough work when they are young. Think Edvard Munch, Herman Melville, and Orson Welles. They make the rest of us feel like also-rans. Then there's a second character type, someone who's just as significant but trudging by comparison. Galenson calls this group "experimental innovators." Geniuses like Auguste Rodin, Mark Twain, and Alfred Hitchcock proceed by a lifetime of trial and error and thus do their important work much later in their careers. Galenson maintains that this duality -- conceptualists are from Mars, experimentalists are from Venus -- is the core of the creative process. And it applies to virtually every field of intellectual endeavor, from painters and poets to economists.

Note that Welles makes the cut and is classed among the conceptualists, which suggests that Richard Schickel is a bit one-sided in his criticism because he faults Welles for not fitting a category of genius that sounds more like Galenson's experimentalist sort.

Anyway, these finding by Galenson are fascinating -- and his conclusions cohere with my own impressions over the years about two different styles of learning -- but I wonder if some geniuses might encompass both conceptualist and experimentalist styles and thus constitute a third category. Milton, for instance (whom, you may recall, I've occasionally blogged about), strikes me as fitting both categories. He showed extraordinary ability from an early age and wrote some excellent, groundbreaking poetry as a young man and would have been remembered as a great literary figure even if he had died young, but because he lived on to an old age and wrote the epic Paradise Lost, he's remembered for that work of genius more than for his youthful ones.

So ... perhaps Galenson still could do some experimental tinkering on his conceptual scheme...

Prodigies

Gaussian Distribution

Colors Delineate One Standard Deviation

(Graphed by Wikipedia)

Wednesday's hardcopy of the International Herald Tribune (Seoul) featured Matthew Gurewitsch's NYT article, "A 14-year-old composer's sophisticated debut" (August 23, 2003), on the young musical prodigy Jay Greenberg, who already has his own CD:

A first CD on a major label is validation a classical composer may never live to see. For Jay Greenberg, the big day has come. Last week, Sony Classical released his 34-minute Symphony No.5, recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra under José Serebrier.

That's quite impressive. Child prodigies fascinate me, perhaps because my older brother Pat was something of a prodigy. According to my mother, Pat was speaking very early, and one of my uncles, who was skeptical upon first hearing that Pat could speak, confirmed that Pat was speaking understandable sentences at 6 months.

My brother has gone on to become quite successful as a "senior vice president and director of Housing, Technology and Planning" for the Federal Home Loan Bank in Topeka, Kansas. I knew that his job often requires him to travel to the East Coast -- sometimes to New York City, sometimes to Washington, D.C. -- to confer with banking officials and legislators, respectively. I just didn't know his precise title until I looked my brother up on the internet. According to the same site, Zoom Information Inc., my brother has done "post-graduate work in finance at Princeton University." Princeton, eh? I didn't know that. My brother did mention to me that he has a masters degree and several credit hours toward a Ph.D., and he's done this without trying very hard even as he's pursued his fulltime banking career.

Pat found his career almost by accident. He and a couple of other dropouts from college left Arkansas for Springfield, Missouri to seek work. They noticed that a local bank was hiring. Pat wasn't interested, but his two friends were. Those two got all serious, prepared for the interview, spruced themselves up, and were heading out the door when Pat decided that he'd tag along and do the interview, too, just for the experience.

He got the job.

At first, he worked as a teller, but his employers recognized his potential before he did and gave him more responsibilities. At some point, they asked him to write a report. Word came back to him that the bank president had been "very impressed" with his report. My brother was surprised because he hadn't put much work into it. He re-read his own report and thought, "No, it's nothing special." But it was far beyond what his co-workers had produced, and the very positive reaction of his employers came as a revelation to him.

He decided to see how far he could go. Good decision, too, for it led him to his current success.

Odd, to think that a whim of the moment landed him his job. Just a chance opportunity. Almost random. But given his chance, he had the intellectual gifts to learn quickly things that I'd never master even after years of study. I sometimes wonder what my brother might be doing if his pronounced mental abilities even as an infant had been supported with education from an early age.

Even the gifted need direction. Gurewitsch's article on the 14-year-old musical prodigy makes the point that even he needs to be taught by the right people:

Whatever Greenberg's symphonies may sound like in his head or in electronic approximations, there are lessons only live musicians in real time can teach him.

Gurewitsch then asks:

How far will Greenberg go? "Some prodigies become better and better," said Serebrier, the first conductor of Greenberg's Fifth Symphony, "and others disappear."

Indeed, that's the danger, as Grady M. Towers notes "three sorts of childhoods and three sorts of adult social adaptations made by the gifted" in "The Outsiders" (Gift of Fire, Issue No. 22, April 1987; hat tip, Dennis Mangan):

The first of these may be called the committed strategy. These individuals were born into upper middle class families, with gifted and well educated parents, and often with gifted siblings. They sometimes even had famous relatives. They attended prestigious colleges, became doctors, lawyers, professors, or joined some other prestigious occupation, and have friends with similar histories. They are the optimally adjusted. They are also the ones most likely to disbelieve that the exceptionally gifted can have serious adjustment problems.

The second kind of social adaptation may be called the marginal strategy. These individuals were typically born into a lower socio-economic class, without gifted parents, gifted siblings, or gifted friends. Often they did not go to college at all, but instead went right to work immediately after high school, or even before. And although they may superficially appear to have made a good adjustment to their work and friends, neither work nor friends can completely engage their attention. They hunger for more intellectual challenge and more real companionship than their social environment can supply. So they resort to leading a double life. They compartmentalize their life into a public sphere and a private sphere. In public they go through the motions of fulfilling their social roles, whatever they are, but in private they pursue goals of their own. They are often omnivorous readers, and sometimes unusually expert amateurs in specialized subjects.

...

And finally there are the dropouts. These sometimes bizarre individuals were often born into families in which one or more of the parents were not only exceptionally gifted, but exceptionally maladjusted themselves. This is the worst possible social environment that a gifted child can be thrust into. His parents, often driven by egocentric ambitions of their own, may use him to gratify their own needs for accomplishment. He is, to all intents and purposes, not a living human being to them, but a performing animal, or even an experiment.

The gifted composer Greenberg seems to fit the first category, but my brother doesn't seem to fit any of the three. My mother once told me that Pat's IQ had tested at over 160, but she found it unbelievable even though her own IQ was also very high. Now, I'm not especially impressed by high IQ scores, but they do say something about high intelligence despite the fact that some kinds of intelligence escape quantitative measurement. Anyway, having a gifted mother would put Pat in the first category, but being from a lower socio-economic class would put him in the second. He's pretty clearly not the third category despite at one point being a dropout.

In short, my brother doesn't fit any of the three categories, but that shouldn't surprise us since -- as everybody knows -- child prodigies and geniuses are misfits.