I was half-joking, more like fed up with this overused "everyone can do it" mantra (e.g. I saw it several times in Andrew Ng's machine learning course, which turned me off the subject (not that I had been turned on too much in the first place, but I was curious what he was going to say about the subject that could enthrall me (not much, probably just dimensionality reduction))).

Anyway, if you want to work in a genius-level field, you have to be motivated enough to find it on your own.

Some of those areas include fields in maths and physics, eg string theory breakthrough research I would think.

However if your friend didn't study, say, sth like the general theory of relativity then what I wrote might mean not much to him/her