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| Pablo Picasso immortalized by Ruben Brenner |
What makes a genius being a genius? Is a question that we have been thinking through history. All the world wants to be excellent but only few can achieve it and also we don't understand how someone can achieve what he as. How Picasso did to maintain his high level during all his painting production? How did Stockhausen got the time to create 363 pieces? In which moment Einstein has the idea to write the Theory of Relativity?
There are people who thinks that geniuses are born, not made: Simply it has to be the talent of some specific activity and he only needs to develop it until he achieves excellence. But that's a simplistic vision of realty and is proven by different studies that is false. Also there is no doubt that a genius is a talented person by nature but talent is not the main reason to become one. Here are five things that according to the pattern of several people considered genius have without exception.
1. They are curious and impulsive.
To create his book "Creativity" (Paidós, 2008), the professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed 91 geniuses of all disciplines including 14 Nobel price One of his main conclusion is that the people with privileged minds that achieve exceptional masterpieces have two abundant things: Curiosity and Determination. "They are just fascinated by their work and even that there are smarter people than them their enormous desire of achieve what they want is a decisive factor", according to Csikszentmihalyi.
2. The education is not the key factor, are the hours that they use for their specialty.
We are used to think that the academic profile is a result of excellence but there are things that are not always related. The professor of the University of California in Davis, Dean Keith Simoton, did studies of the academic profiles of more than 300 geniuses born between 1450 and 1850, between them he had people like Leoardo da Vinci, Galileo, Beethoven or Rembrandt. He determined the amount of formal education that they had and measure their levels of excellence through their work. The results where amazing. The relationship between education and excellence when you put it in a graph had form of a bell: The most prominent creators where the ones that had a medium level education. In our times would be something like a diploma. The ones that had higher education or less where less creative.
There is no doubt that the most prominent geniuses where still studying but they where selflearners and also addicted to work. "Geniuses are all the same", V.S. Pritchett, "They never stop working, they don't lost a single minute, it's depressing. The reality is that without effort the talent is useless. The most outstanding inventors are always the ones that have worked more in their specialty and they live for it, they have learn everything that could be learned and they take their passion to the limit.
3. They are huge critics of their own work
According to the Psicologist Howard Garner, Asturias Prince in Social Sciences 2011 Award, the greatest geniuses like Picasso, Freud or Stravinsky they had a very similar pattern of work that was based in try and error: They analyzed a problem, had a solution, they tested it and they had a constant process of feedback. "The creative individuals", according to Garner, "they invest a considerable amount of time in think about what they want to achieve", if they have had success or not, if they have failed what they have to do different to achieve it.
The most creative minds are also the most methodical minds.
4. They are sacrificed, lonely and in occasions neurotics.
The geniuses are all the time thinking in their masterpiece and that has multiple disadvantages. Invest all your time to your work implies and enormous sacrifice and lost of social relationships. According to Csikszentmihalyi, most of geniuses are outcast people during their adolescence, in part because "Their intense curiosity and focused interest are strange for their partners" and also because adolescents are gregarious people and they don't like to waste time being lonely to develop their own talent. "Practice music or study mathematics require an scary loneliness"
Sometimes, the necessary sacrifice for a genius can become a pathological issue. The passion can become obsession: Excellent people are not necessarily happy people. We just have to see the asceticism that was achieved by Freud, T. S. Eliot or Gandhi, or the auto impose loneliness that Einstein developed. A lot of geniuses develop a neurotic personality: their work transform them into maniac or selfish people.
5. They work always for passion, not for money.
The real geniuses they give their life for their work and they never change it for money, only for pure passion and vocation. "The artists that had developed their paint and sculpture by the only pleasure of the activity instead of the monetary reward had produces an art that has been recognized socially superior", according to the thinker and writer Dan Pink in his book "La sorprendente verdad sobre qué nos motiva (Gestión 2000). "Also, are those that are not interested in extrinsic rewards the ones that will receive them".
Translate by: Luis Oscar Mendoza Guzmán from : "Las cinco cracterísticas que cumplen todos los genios (sin excepción)" by Miguel Ayuso
