How to Think Like a Genius 31-Doing
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Rick Rosner)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/02/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s talk about actually getting things done, geniuses can’t just not be geniuses, sit around, and then become geniuses. They must do. They act. There’s different learning styles and talents, and intelligence levels, and persistence and creativity levels, and differences in the number of hours devoted to their pursuits. There’s some geniuses that are simply productive, and we label them after they have made some significant advances. Others can do well on IQ tests. Those scores are representative on the condition that they mainstream professionally administered and supervised tests.
Rick Rosner: I guess the first general principle will be getting a knowledge that lets you move beyond that base, which means that it can have a differing background. Primary example of that is Darwin who went on his five-year journey and just saw everything. To be a genius, it helps to be born earlier in time, especially now with 7.3 billion people. Now, every discipline is crowded with people trying to figure things out, but you can’t do that because you’ll be let down.
If you’re looking to follow your interests into an area that hasn’t been over-colonized or explored, and if you’re super lucky and good enough to even out in a crowded field to find the right areas for new analysis and exploration, for any of this you need to develop expertise, it doesn’t have to be a full set of knowledge of a particular field but just the basics. More than that you need to analyze, break down the subjects, break down things you’re observing into their components.
You need some expertise in your area, and then you need mental flexibility and the ability to break things down into analyzable chunks. Other factors that are helpful are to not die. Some of the — you can probably argue that there’s a statistical correlation between a lifespan and being acknowledged as a genius. If you die too early — there are people who, like Abelard or something, I don’t know, who got assassinated when he was 20, and the night before he was assassinated did great work, but, in general, I think especially in the arts.
It helps to hang around. Picasso lived a long time. These are not great examples. Newton lived a long time, but Picasso and Newton were acknowledged as brilliant when they were young. Yet, I still think you want to expand your legacy and being healthy in general, which is correlated with living longer, which means you’re mentally healthy, which means you can work longer, and having a long working period is probably correlated with genius. So, I take 70 vitamins and supplements a day. I got to the gym a lot. I try to keep my weight down. I work mental challenges, though that’s partly because I’m interested in it rather than an exercise to keep my brain healthy.
Even so, that seems to help, so staying healthy. If you look around in traffic at other drivers, people in the city who — just look around at other people, and people who look like they live terrible lifestyles also look kind of mentally dulled and that’s been backed up by some research with people in PET scan machines and they can see how wrecked their brains are, and they can metabolic syndrome, can not exercise, can have metabolic syndrome, and are overweight. And then you get hem on an exercise machine, drop some weight, take them away from diabetes a bit, and put them back in the PET scan machine, and their brain is more lit up.
Other things correlated with actually accomplishing something is genius is being isolated. Genius is probably overrated. Learning to collaborate is — Erdos was the greatest or among the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century and was known as the nomad of the mathematicians. He would just travel from the homes of mathematicians and stay for a few weeks and while he was there he and the mathematicians of the house he was staying in would do 3 weeks of intense work and advance that mathematicians work, greatly.
He was part of probably thousands of papers. There’s something called the Erdos Number, which is similar to your Kevin Bacon number. It shows how close you are to publishing papers to somebody who has published a paper with Erdos. So if you publish on with him, you’ve got an Erdos Number of 1, which includes hundreds of mathematicians. All of the mathematicians he influenced. All of the easy stuff has been plucked out of math and science over the past centuries and decades, and that only leaves the harder problems, which means you’re going to need to collaborate to take some of these tough problems.
You’re going to need — and I’m really bad at this — advance computer skills if you’re going into advanced mathematics and physics. They have a lot of training in statistics, which is fairly useless in terms of doing modern statistics. I can do mental statistics. I can estimate the standard deviation of something and stuff like that, but in terms of doing the kinds of statistics that people get paid for as actuaries or maybe somebody sets up things. Those people know the hell out of computers because they have a deep knowledge in demand right now.
They know stuff that is not simply crunchable by people. You have to know how to work with the programs. So, you’ve got to be a genius in the sciences. You can do yourself a favor and learn how to code. It’s the various codes are probably as advanced as any spoken or written language right now.
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