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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Genius is poorly defined. Take all the different ways someone can qualify and you end up with something far more common than people assume.

EX: Apparently, Einstein was an ok chess player and Oppenheimer sucked. Yet, chess prodigy's are often called geniuses even if that's the only thing there particularity good at.

Businesses, Language, Math, Music, Go, Chess, IQ tests, Poetry, Physics, Early development, and Sculpture don't really have all that much in common. In the end it's much more meaningful to say someone is a _ genius than simply calling them a genius because g is closer to a myth than reality.

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Businesses, Math, Music, Go, Chess, IQ tests, Poetry, Physics, Early development, and sculpture don't really have all that much in common.

... except for the people who excel at them. The author of this article is a mathematics professor and an author. I'm a computer scientist and a violinist. And in my time reviewing entrance scholarship applications for my alma mater, I don't think I've ever seen a student who excels in a single academic field and has no other unusual talents or accomplishments.

It takes more to be outstanding as you get older, so a 10 year old can be outstanding in several of them. And a collage student may keep up with 3 or 4.

However, none of the worlds best people in any of those, as in top 5, is also the worlds best any in any of the others. Not to step on anyone toes here. Michael Jordan was an incredible baseball player as in better than 99.99% of everyone that has ever played the game and by the 1:10,000 concept he may have been a dual genius, but that was not enough to be outstanding at the top level. And that is for two vary closely related sports.

So sure you can be outstanding in 2 or 3 of them but good luck finding people that can play at even just the professional level in Go, Physics, Sculpture, AND Poetry.

PS: My point is that collectively they don't share much in common. The Music / Math link while strong is not the same as the Music / Sculpture link.

I agree with your post, however, there are exceptions. While Jordan didn't have the best baseball career, Bo Jackson did excellent in both football and baseball.

Bo Jackson won't make the Hall of Fame in either of those sports, let alone both.

IMO, making the Hall of Fame is one obvious/indisputable mark of someone who is truly distinguished by excellence in the sport. (He did make the All Star & Pro Bowl, but those are far less distinguished honors, with something like 5-10% of players making those teams each year. So, rather than being a "top 5" type of mark, it's a "top 68" (baseball) and "top 110-ish" (football).)

Don't forget "mile-wide inch-deep" generalist geniuses. They aren't particularly gifted in one area, but are able to achieve simultaneous competency in a very large number of discrete disciplines. We used to call these folks "Renaissance Men", but the recognition of excessive achievement in specialties has virtually eliminated recognition for that kind of intellect.

Those people tend to become business multimillionaires.

Not so. Renaissance people (there are a few, even today) tend to end up underemployed. If you want to be a "business multimillionaire", you go the opposite way. You focus, you narrow yourself, but you have to focus on something that can actually make you money (i.e. not medieval history).

Why are most of the true Renaissance people underemployed, obscure, and financially mediocre? It's because the only thing that can tell a polymath from a dabbler is time.

Success in life is more correlated with ambition than with knowledge: an average educated but very ambitious person have more probabilities of being successful than a super smart individual that is ambitious but about knowledge and ideals, not money.

If you link this lack of focus in taking profit from your actions in life with a master in a struggling field, you are on your way to an underachiever life. That's me.

That probably depends if your definition of "success" is centred around "money" or around "happiness". (Or some other factor that I haven't considered).

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