Geniuses

Often when I hear people at public events talking admiringly about geniuses I would like to close my ears. I think in the media there is the image of the child genious, of "the gifted," which were given something by some divinity (or genes) that normal people don't have. I have the impression that many people are too willing to repeat this vision that justifies their denial of the fact that they didn't take responsibility for their life and didn't work as hard as the so-called genius.

I think the word genius is devoid of meaning or rather for me it tells more about the speaker than about the object. I prefer the rags to riches archetype, "if you work hard enough, you can make it" (whatever "it" refers to; I never read any novels by Horatio Algers), though I recognize there are many factors to becoming good at something. Francis Galton's exhibition in heritary genius forms the other extreme of this conceptual dimension. According to this second view, we are born with a talent (more general: IQ) or not. If we are not, then that's the end of the story, some people are and they are famous, such as Mozart (the incarnation for many of the child-genious).

Malcolm Gladwell's book was a discussion of the idea that I had needed. In outliers he brings forth the argument that so-called geniuses, such as Mozart or others (he gives more examples: the Beatles, Bill Joy, Bill Gates - admittedly I didn't like that last example, because of Microsoft's negative corporate image and the perceived worth of their products), could only be successful because of a mix of cultural and family background, hard work, and timely opportunities presenting themselves.

With hard work Malcolm Gladwell refers to the 10,000 hours rule, which says that you need about 10,000 hours to become very proficient in a field. 10,00 hours that's about 3 hours daily for 10 years (forget about holidays, you can slack off about every second sunday). To make the 10,000 hours in about 3 years (say for PhD) you would need 12 hours daily to make it in little more than 3 years (with free weekends). Go to work!