I Am Become Genius

As follow-up to my previous post, I would like to share an article that’s made the rounds on the internet recently. “How to get to Genius,” an excellent synthesis of key ideas for success, correlates with themes from Pragmatic Thinking and Learning.

The working definition for “genius” is “the extreme form of insight…in terms of perspective,” or similarly, the intuition an expert has gained from many years of deliberate study (Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule). A genius has internalized a system so much that he is effectively part of that system. A genius/expert’s perspective separates the novice because the latter does not understand either the rules of the system or the broad implications of why the system exists. It’s the “ability to notice these vague connections amongst all the noise, amongst all the internal chatter going on inside your head, [that] separates the insightful from the unaware, the unobservant."

With evidence from neuroscience about brain plasticity, and using the computer/brain metaphor from Pragmatic Thinking, each read is a write, meaning that the act of remembering changes the memories of the brain and that constantly recalling information will write this information more permanently to memory, we bring together the necessity of much deliberate practice and seeing patterns within a system. The long hours thinking and practicing something will ingrain what’s learned deeply in the mind, creating greater understanding and recall of the rules. This in turn grants the ability to understand more of what we study, and thus we can gain a broader perspective. With these tools, it becomes possible to see something different than if we were to only focus our attention on small details. Thus, becoming a genius, while certainly not easy, is, conceptually, simple and, more importantly, possible.