Working with "Geniuses"

A lot of people talk carelessly about 'geniuses'.  In a world where stories are passed around quickly and easily, and where anybody can add to the hype about anything, via a blog or a facebook post or what have you, claims of genius status for all sorts of people are common.  Our president, for instance, is a self-proclaimed genius, and there are millions who would support that claim!  I'm not going to deny it; as you will see, I think it is a condition to which we should attach a lot less reverence than we do, but that is not the thrust of this post.

I, like many of us, felt rather a mental klutz, until I hit somewhere around grade 5, I think.  At that point, I began to be a little more confident about how smart, or clever I was, compared to my classmates.  A couple of them were really good at their schoolwork, and I felt naturally frustrated at my inability to beat their scores on tests.  But I was also noticing that they weren't as efficient as I was in certain areas.  But those areas were few, and minor.

The older I got, the more I was certain that intelligence was often specific to particular aspects of life and study.  Some fellows (I attended boy's schools for my entire school career until I went to college) were naturals at extracting information from books, which was a huge advantage.  Others were naturals at understanding the meaning of a question, even if it was phrased differently from how we had usually heard it asked.  Yet others were brilliant at connecting two ideas that we had learned at different times, and putting them together.

I had a few things going for me; for instance, I could remember things.  I also had an honest and kindly face, and many of my classmates and friends---who were not recognized as worthy of cultivation---would be glad to help me understand something, if I happened to be struggling with some assignment.  (Matter of fact, I owe an enormous debt to these sorts of friends throughout my career.)  Often, these guys had latched on to the importance of some principle that the smarter fellows had accepted and moved past, sometimes a principle that ended up being almost the most important one that we were to be taught that marking period, say.

Then I changed schools, because my parents got different jobs in a different area, and this was a sort of magnet school, where they offered huge scholarships to kids who were at the top of their classes in other schools.  I did not quite understand this, so when I went in to class on the first day of the year, I found myself surrounded by quite friendly boys.  But pretty soon over the course of a couple of weeks, I discovered that these fellows were a lot cleverer than I was, knew a lot more, and picked up stuff very fast.  They were also very interested in all the new material, and eager to share their insights with the new boy in class.

It was about this time that I began to realize that, contrary to what I was reading in fiction, geniuses were rarely snooty or standoffish; they were usually eager to share their insights with anyone who was interested.  Interested, that's the secret.  They often had no time for people who wanted to know something for some stupid purpose---such as for an test of exam, for instance---and were frustrated with people who really weren't interested in whatever the topic was.  In contrast, some of these chaps were amazingly patient with even plodders who were trying to understand something, even if their level of interest did not really come up to the high standards that this genius usually expected.

Once I went to college, there was the initial excitement of doing classes with girls!  I was one of the few students who had gone to all-boy's schools all through; and there were a few girls, too, who had gone exclusively to girl's schools.  It didn't take us long to change gears, and buckle down to learning the new material, in the new subjects that college invariably lays in front of freshmen.

Here, people who knew what they were doing were the norm, both among the students and the professors.  There were a few duds, but they had all got into our fairly exclusive college because they were good at something.  Again, there were a few geniuses scattered about, but we learned to get along with them.  Four years later, we were ready to go on to graduate school; some of us, anyway; at lot of the people found jobs, and I never saw them again.

In graduate school, things got more extreme.  I knew a wide variety of people, mostly people who were interested in music.  A lot of these people were unimaginably bright in their various subjects, but most of their energy went into music.  This is an interesting phenomenon: there were brilliant chemists, brilliant language specialists, physicists, mathematicians, etc, but they were at least as interested in music as they were in their specialty.  So geniuses are sort of quirky.  Actually, they are very quirky!

Well, there's not a lot more to be said in that vein.  One of the invaluable things that college did for me, to a different degree than high school, and graduate school, was to make me comfortable in rubbing shoulders with very intelligent people.  In many ways they're very much like anybody else, but you have to be prepared to deal with their frustration at being unable to get the sort of response from you that they think the subject deserves.

Another problem is that they tend to overestimate the abilities of whoever they're dealing with.  Very few of them tended to regard everybody else as an idiot; this was a tendency only among people with a very narrow expertise, especially if they weren't good at communicating.  Some people with a higher than usual ability in some area, who initially have trouble communicating, acquire certain communication crutches, for example constant repetition, or the use of certain basic words to emphasize points.  Unfortunately they go on to overusing these superlatives, and people learn to ignore them, which means that every idea takes a long time to come across, because of the constant interspersion of these superlatives and the repetition.

By the time I got out of graduate school, I knew that, though I was no genius, there were some areas where I was more capable than most other people, but there were no areas where I was more capable than everybody else.   This is quite a humbling situation: to be aware that there were always people smarter than you in every area in which you were at all an expert.  But I could say that I was close to being an expert in a huge number of areas.

To summarize: we often need to work with people who are very good at what they do.  They need to be respected, but most of all, they need to be appreciated.  You can disagree with these people, but you should be able to justify your position; simply insisting upon it will not get you anywhere.

One sort of genius is a synthesist.  They can listen to a number of presentations by several people, and then splice them together to create something new and powerful.  It is highly useful to have people like this around.  They are not only good at synthesis, they are usually really good at understanding what they're being told.  They're highly motivated, and they're very patient, but they have their limits.  When they feel they aren't getting anywhere, they'll just quit.

So remember: geniuses don't really want adoration and worship; they want to be understood and appreciated, and they want an interested---and informed---audience.

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