Define the problem of the text and make a concept map There seems to be a human desire to place ourselves at the foot of creative genius. Whether it's Jobs, Picasso, or even Kanye, it's an alluring idea that brilliant individuals teams of hardworking people with good fortune -
rather than
are behind the world's most significant
ingenious findings. The idea that there are near-Gods of creativity amongst us is a potent one, particularly in a world that feels increasingly unpredictable; if we can't have the stability of God, at least we might have people who appear to approach something close to it. But is it
Historically, the lone creative genius wasn't always so. Prior to the Enlightenment, individuals were rarely referred to as "geniuses."
Rather they had geniuses — as in,
supernatural or divine forces that gave them their ideas and creativity. With the Renaissance, however, as Europe moved away from religion and toward humanism, the idea of the lone genius became important in putting man at the center of the world. In 1710, England passed its first significant copyright law for writers, which made authors the sole owner of their works
- further placing individuals, rather than any divine inspiration or borrowings from other works, at the heart of the creative act. The trouble, of course, is that creative genius is inextricably wrapped up in societal biases.
Those with strong educations, socioeconomic support systems, and social-professional connections tend to be overrepresented as geniuses, not because they're necessarily intrinsically smarter, but because they have more opportunities than their poorer, less-socially-connected kin. That being said, it's hard to say whether genius is something people are born with and can cultivate or whether creative genius is achieved purely through hard work.
The ancient Greeks tended to believe the former — that creative genius was physical. Black bile in the body created melancholia, i.e., depression and delusion, which in turn gave way to creativity, Aristotle reasoned. In 1790, Immanuel Kant put forth the first formal philosophy that genius is innate.
Things began to change in 1916 when Lewis M. Terman, a psychology professor at Stanford University, invented the IQ test. Studying the lives of over 1,500 children with very high IQs (140 or higher), Terman reasoned that most of them would make major contributions to their chosen professional fields as adults. By the time the kids he'd selected were in their 40s, a few had written books and important academic papers. But most of Terman's 140-plus IQers had lived professionally unexceptional lives. Some of the children Terman had tested who had not met his IQ threshold - but who were still followed in the study - had gone on to achieve huge awards, like winning the Nobel Prize. Terman was dead by the time the results were ready, but his work essentially proved the opposite of his thesis. Childhood IQ is an unreliable test for future success; that is, creative genius is probably not innate.
A more recent theory is that lone geniuses are simply hard workers, notably expressed in the
"10,000-hour rule". The problem is that while the theory - popularized by writer Malcolm Gladwell — still gets touted from time to time, it's since been disproved. Practicing for 10,000 hours isn't a guarantee of creative genius any more than to whom you're born or what your IQ is. Gladwell clarified his idea and conceded: "Practice isn't a sufficient condition for success. I could play chess for 100 years and I'll never be a grandmaster. The point is simply that natural ability requires a huge investment of time in order to be made manifest." But relentless practice can also have a negative effect: practicing only one musical instrument or painting technique or writing style, for instance, blocks off the associations and disparate pattern combinations that are the neurological hallmark of creativity.
The idea of the lone genius can also distort the truth behind a person's success. To illustrate this, look no further than how Apple is typically described. Yes, Steve Jobs did a good deal of work and his detail-oriented nature no doubt shaped the company, but too often the work of co-founders Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne is left out of the narrative. They did not win public acclaim although their indispensable contributions were just as important as the original insight. So too is the role of MacKenzie Scott in the genesis of Amazon: she left her job at a hedge fund in New York, ditching her affluent life on the Upper West Side for a risky start-up in Silicon Valley, where she upkept the nascent company's accounting and negotiated numerous contracts. Yet the media still mostly frames the success of Amazon solely around Bezos, as if he had operated alone, perpetuating the myth of success without social support.
Ascribing credit to an individual is a caricature of reality propagated by a search for a hero.
Einstein — perhaps the prototypical lone genius — made his mathematical breakthroughs only after spending years working in a Swiss patent office where he pored over other people's inventions, ostensibly sparking his own ideas.
Recent studies show that the most creative people are those who are "open to experience," able to bind together disparate ideas into new viable ones. Locking yourself up in a lab alone would be one of the worst ways to have a creative breakthrough — far better to get other perspectives, to be out in the world, to create with others.