Genius vs. Expertise

Society is good at training talent but terrible at cultivating genius. Talented people are good at hitting targets others can’t hit, but geniuses find targets others can’t see. They are opposite modes of excellence. Talent is predictable, genius is unpredictable. 

The people we traditionally consider to be smartest are those best at some sort of a general math / reasoning ability.  This is not what genius is.  Genius is being extremely good at a couple of things that really matter.  genius is having a vision

The theory by Erik Hoel states that: We're not maximizing the potential of the world's most gifted individuals because we're not educating them the right way. In the past, geniuses did not go to school; they were tutored — getting most of their education at home, for a single person (or a small group of people).

So what’s the take-home message? Let’s not treat the myth of the long genius like it’s gospel. Sometimes really smart people think long and hard about something and come up with an idea that changes the world. Yes, this happens very rarely and most innovation comes from the “hard slog of large armies of individuals, each making—at best—a tiny step ... See more

Recently I was discussing with a friend the hypothesis that aristocratic tutoring (of the kind we don’t do anymore) is the only known consistent method to at least occasionally produce geniuses, to which he objected “What about Einstein?” A great point. Einstein’s reputation makes him seem one the most democratic of geniuses, a term he’s synonymous... See more

The idea that 'expertise is just pattern-matching is challenging to me because it doesn't seem like it should be so simple. What about creativity? Don't different mechanisms than prototype-based recognition drive creativity? The short answer seems to be 'yes, creativity relies on connecting different ideas, which is independent of expertise. The an... See more