There’s a clip from Jeff Bezos—famous big yacht owner—that I think about often. Bezos recounts a career defining moment from his Princeton undergrad days:
I've also been taking a bunch of computer science classes and electrical engineering classes which I'm also enjoying and I...I can't solve this partial differential equation. It’s really, really hard and I've been studying with my roommate, Joe, who also was really good at math and…and the two of us worked on this one homework problem for three hours and got nowhere and we finally said…we looked up at each other over the table at the same moment we said, “Yasantha,” because Yasantha was the smartest guy at Princeton, and we went to Yasantha’s room and he was Sri Lankan and in the face book—which was an actual paper book at that time—there were his name was three lines long because I guess in Sri Lanka when you do something good for the King they give you an extra syllable on your name, and so he had a super long last name. The most humble wonderful guy, and we show him this problem and he looks at it…he stares at it for a while and he says “cosine,” and I'm like, “what do you mean?” He's like, “that’s the answer,” and I'm like, “that's the answer?” And he's like, “yeah, let me show you.” So he brings us into his room. He sits us down. He writes out three pages of detailed algebra. Everything crosses out and the answer is cosine, and I said, “listen, Yasantha, did you just do that in your head?” And he said, “no, that would be impossible. Three years ago I solved a very similar problem and I was able to map this problem on to that problem and then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine.” And…that was an important moment for me because that was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist.
I’m not one for gambling, but I’d wager Yasantha is Brilliant (with a capital b). Surely he had a bright future ahead of him. And, oh yes, did he ever. He went on to get a PhD in Applied Physics from Caltech. Today, he’s an AI researcher with 100+ patents to his name.
During my own undergrad days, I was humbled to meet people just like Yasantha; brilliant friends who made me look like a genuine idiot (which I very well could still be). These friends could understand new concepts in a blink. And, if they stumbled into new types of problems, they’d find connections between seemingly unrelated concepts to derive elegant solutions. It was simultaneously awe-inspiring and soul crushing to watch as I struggled along to solve the same questions.
I don’t have a great definition for genius, but in the iconic words of Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, "I know it when I see it.”
The best definition I can muster is that smartness—genius being the top tier of this—is an extraordinary ability to handle new situations and/or create something new.
In my eyes, genius (jeen-yuhs in the Kanye lexicon) has two main components: memory and synthesis.
I’ll start with memory because it’s necessary for genius, but it’s not sufficient, and often gets mistaken for smartness. I’ve never met someone who I would label a genius who did not have excellent memory. My literal genius friends, to this day, can remember obscure definitions and methods for solving complex problems as if they’d just walked out of class two minutes ago. Disclaimer: I don’t use the word genius lightly. These are people who published papers during their undergrad; many of them went on to prestigious institutions to pursue Phds in remarkably difficult fields.
Knowledge translates to smartness for most people. I’m not in that camp. I admire people with great memory. I admire people who are subject matter experts. Both types of people are valuable, but just having good memory doesn’t make you smart.
Let’s look at Jeopardy! winners. They have out-of-this-world recall, but if they’re unable to synthesize new ideas and create something new off-stage, would I say they’re geniuses? No. Smart? No. That’s not a shot at Jeopardy! winners. I’m Team Ken Jennings forever. Ride or die, truly. This also isn’t me thinking I’m better than Jeopardy! contestants. They’d squash me every day of the week.
Say we had a hypothetical Jeopardy! winner named John. After his big win on Jeopardy! he’s driving back home. He’s following his GPS and merges onto the highway. After ten minutes he sees an orange cone up ahead. He keeps driving towards it. He keeps going and going. He doesn’t want to run over it, so he parks in the middle of the highway. He stays parked because his GPS tells him to go straight and says nothing about changing lanes. Is he smart? Suppose every time John gets asked to figure something out at work he can’t; the solution isn’t in his memory bank. Is he smart?
Synthesis, on the other hand, is sufficient for genius. It’s the ability to transform existing knowledge into something new. Yasantha’s story is a great example. He used his knowledge of a math problem he solved 3 years ago to quickly solve a new one. He turned nothing into something. We can look at grander examples too. Einstein’s annus mirabilis papers where he revolutionized our understanding of physics, Alan Turing’s pioneering computer science research, or Marie Curie’s scientific discoveries which won two Nobel Prizes. Yes, two. There are everyday examples too. It’s Drake Stimson’s team at Procter & Gamble reviving the dying Febreeze brand in 1998 by adding an odor to the product so customers smelled it working.1 It’s Ed Baker, former Head of International Growth at Facebook, and his team revitalizing Facebook’s adoption in Japan by changing one word in Facebook’s sign up process.
Genius is finding a magic formula where nobody else could.
I’m writing this with envy because I’m not a genius. I have speedy memory at times, but I don’t have the Curie brain power. I can’t do math like Terence Tao. Maybe I need more of a “growth mindset” to open up the possibility of becoming a savant, but I think the aptitude door is shut on that front.
Recall and synthesis go hand-in-hand, but it’s a one-way relationship. If you’re good at synthesizing you’re likely good at recall, but if you’re good at recall you might not be good with synthesis.
Great memory is fun to see in real time—it’s valuable in certain situations too—but it’s nothing more than a party trick on its own.
In “The Craving Brain” in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
It's an interesting take but I think it overvalues synthesis *and* recall by not modeling them as a dynamic system of dufferential equations with multiple factors involved that all fall away like to "cosine" without the four pages of math.
I happen to have had my own annus mirabilis but only in four months instead. And it's about humanity. Just that simple. We might call it self-conscientiousness, and it's a path to all knowledge intuitively - granted the more knowledge we call recall from our own internalized experiences, the simpler the path of instant synergy and synthesis is. So the math falls away.
The genius intuits the problem itself first by having a mirror into their own soul across which it is reflected. The hard part is explaining it to other people, and first treating yourself as just another person. The productivity of the genius is how easily they can do both parts at once. Otherwise you end up like Tesla, with genius no one could understand.
You also have a social dynamic that gets understated. Because, to surround yourself with more people who are of similar predilections and diverse enough experience to make the connection easier. It's the driving force behind teams of researchers around individual genius, and also consequently, near-genius researchers collaborating too.
So I think we touch on communication as an aspect that we traditionally think of as a "skill", which is not a skill at all but another aspect of neurodiversity interacting with a social network of other sentient beings. It's all just energy - from thought to speech to the mind of another. And what is the conveyor of that energy? It is God, quite simply - quantized Time or the essence of sentience itself if you need a more scientific foothold.
As I said, I've had my annus mirabilis this year. It's been rough. But optimism has helped. A belief that all humanity can accept themselves as geniuses in their own way. No recall needed, only self-organizing synthesis.
Nice article Yeti man (is your profile pic a Yeti?)! I listened to a podcast with Bezos (I think it was with that guy that looks suspiciously like Lex Luther) and Bezos recounted this same story. I too once tried to be a physicist with lackluster results. I do wonder - especially when a guy like Bezos does a podcast - how much they embellish as they are working on building the public persona they want. Great story irregardless