The Genius Theory

By Ranjan Yumnam *

We have always thought that geniuses are born and not made. Look at Einstein, Bill Gates, Beatles, Tiger Woods-they are people we consider as geniuses and we have always believed they possess innate abilities that we ordinary mortals do not even seem to fully comprehend. Their genes are extraordinary and only a very few individuals in the history are gifted with them, or so we thought.

That's rubbish, says Malcolm Gladwell. After the Tipping Point and the Blink, two hugely popular books by Gladwell, he has come out with yet another bestseller-Outliers: the Story of Success, a treatise that debunks the genius-is-born-theory.

The gist of the book is simple. There are no self-made successful people; it's a myth. Successful people are what they are because they have been given opportunities and not because they have worked harder than anyone else or smarter than the rest of the humanity. He cites the example of Bill Gates, a poster boy of the Genius League. What separates Bill Gates from his friends during the IT revolution in the seventies was not his brain or a divine spark but a small fact of chance.

That chance is his early introduction to computer at a time when it was still considered a novelty. While even the great universities and research institutes did not have computers during those times, Gates got the luck to do real programming at grade eighth because he happened to attend a school that had a computer lab, a rarity at the time.

Had he not been in that school, Bill Gates may have turned out to be a frustrated sales manager at a copier company, who knows. The time was just right for him too: computers had just been invented and these crude systems did not have a proper operating system and there were very few people you could count on fingertips who had the expertise to write a software to run it. Only a person like Bill Gates who had unlimited access to computer, which cost a fortune at the time, could have gained insight and mastery over it.

The point is, Gates had a head start all right, but not the supernatural intellect that we always attribute to him. He was just like anyone of us, a bit geeky, but who had the drive and the good fortune to be born at the right time, place and circumstances.

Here's an interesting fact to supplement this premise: Bill Gates was born in October 1955, Paul Allen in Jan 1953, Steve Ballmer in March 1956, Steve Jobs in Feb 1955, Eric Schmidt in April 1955, Bill Joy in Nov 1954. These men are the tycoons and legends of the technology industry and they were extremely lucky to have been born in a particular period of history-on the cusp of IT revolution- that put them at great advantage in seizing the rewards of the information technology.

"We pretend that success is a matter of individual merit. That is not the whole story. These are stories about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up" Gladwell emphasizes in Outliers.

So it's all about chance ?

Thomas Edison's insight that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration also finds a resonance in Gladwell's theory. Gladwell says anyone can become a genius if one is willing to put in enough hard work to become one. The secret formula is 10,000 hours of deliberate practice-systematic, intensive, feedback-rich, and focused application to a specific task. What you need to have is just about above average intelligence or talent and the other ingredients are favourable environment, the opportunities and of course 10,000 hours of practice.

Let's take the example of Tiger Woods. His father taught him to play golf at the age of three! From the age of five, Woods practiced daily for 4-5 hours and hit about 800 balls until he could hit them perfectly. At age 21, he became a genius winning the world championship. Ditto for any other geniuses like Mozart, Beatles, Thomas Edison, etc.-they all had to cut their teeth for 10,000 hours before they became maestros in their own fields.

And as they say, practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good. Effortlessness, a quality associated with the works of geniuses, comes only after 10,000 hours of practice but since we almost never saw the geniuses while they were practicing, we gape at their talent and mistake it for divine trait when they showcase their finished product. It is worth remembering what Thomas Edison, a quintessential genius, said: "I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident. They came by work."

The modern view is that genius is an acquired status, not an inborn caste, a perspective which to me is quite democratic and uplifting.

Democratic and uplifting because you don't even need a very high IQ to be a genius in the calling of your choice. For that matter, there is no guarantee that people born with extremely high IQ will be successful and famous. An example is Chris Langan who is gifted with exceptionally high IQ of 210; and by that yardstick he is supposed to be the smartest man alive in world. But, Langan, the most intelligent guy, ended up being a construction worker, cowboy, forest service firefighter, farmhand, and for over twenty years, a bouncer. The message is clear: to be a genius, you need opportunities and focused preparation more than intelligence.

The closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the SMALLER the role innate talent seems to play and the BIGGER the role preparation seems to play. In other words, a key part of what it means to be talented is being able to practice for hours and hours-to the point where it is really hard to know where "natural ability" stops and the simple willingness to work hard begins, writes Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers.

Which means there is a genius hidden in all of us. And the only thing we need to do is to unlock it by investing 10,000 hours of focused preparation. The time starts now..

Ranjan Yumnam

* Ranjan Yumnam, presently an MCS probationer, is a frequent contributor to e-pao.net. He can be contacted at ranjanyumnam(at)gmail(dot)com. This article was webcasted on August 30, 2009.