yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

What Does 'Genius' Mean? | Genius


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

What does "genius" mean, to me? I think there are many brilliant people in the world, many people who are very, very intelligent. So I think it has to do with a line of dialogue that I think we have in the first episode, which is, "A genius is not just answering questions but asking questions that nobody else thought to ask."

You don't need to raise your hand to speak here, Albert. There's a particular thing that happens to you when you watch people do something that they're really, really good at. It's a sensation. It's like a-- it can be a six-year-old kid drawing something, or it can be a painter, like, applying wall color, but they're just very, very good.

You kind of know whenever you witness somebody being really, really excellent at something. It's a profound experience to be able to be around it, you know? And I think that, to me, really is-- watching somebody doing something special. Unless we can define time-- Most people would agree that, whoever the geniuses are-- and you could say it's the people that can combine ideas that are staring everyone else in the face, but they somehow connect something that no one's even thought about. Like Mozart's metronome.

GEOFFREY RUSH: I found the quote that Schopenhauer made. He has this great quote where he says, "Talent hits a target that no one else can hit. Genius hits a target that no one else can see." Close your eyes.

GEOFFREY RUSH: And then, if you apply that to someone like Einstein, he would engage in what he called "thought experiments." He'd just let his mind wander and drift off and speculate about [inaudible]. He was always obsessed, right from his youth-- what if I could travel as fast as the speed of light? What would light look like, next to me? Now, I'm imagining that the ball is traveling in deep space.

The most elegant answer to the question of "what is a genius" was given to me by Ron Howard. Scientists, they live in the light of knowledge. They're working, and they're refining their knowledge, and they're testing things, all the time. Some scientists operate at the edge of the light, where the dark is, which-- nobody knows what's in the dark.

But a tiny number of scientists jump right into the dark and create their own light, around them. It's a combination of vision and absolute determination that you're right, that you're totally convinced that this leap into the dark that you've made is right. And Einstein definitely qualifies.

And that-- --to the sun! --to me, is genius. I have another question.

More Articles

View All
Relative adverbs | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy
Hey Grians! Today we’re going to talk about three of the relative adverbs in English, which are where, when, and why. And this over here is Peggy the Dragon. We’re going to use the story of Peggy the Dragon in order to figure out how to use these relative…
How To Get Rich According To Bill Gates
There are a million ways to make $1,000,000. And this is how Bill Gates did it. Welcome to ALUX. Now, first of all, you need to focus on the power of feedback loops. In one of his annual letters, Bill Gates said you can achieve amazing progress if you se…
Touring the Vulcan Rocket on the Launch Pad - Smarter Every Day 297
In this video, we’re going to walk right up to a huge rocket on the launch pad. Not only are we going to walk up to it, we’re going to walk right up to the hot, naughty bits. That’s what I call it. We’ve got two liquid engines, two solid engines. They’ve …
Why it's so hard to get anything done
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but it seems like the more things that you have to do, the harder it is to do pretty much anything. Like, you have this long list of tasks and responsibilities that seems to be growing longer and longer and longer…
How to light a match inside a balloon - Smarter Every Day 36 LASER MONTH
So what we’re gonna do for this experiment is we are going to take a balloon, a real big clear balloon, and we’ve got a match, and we roll the string up on the match. We’re gonna start blowing the balloon up just a little bit, and we’re gonna make it wher…
The Jet Business Bloomberg Editorial March 2012
On another aviation market set to pick up pace: private jets. Well, if you’ve never flown in your very own plane and you’re wondering what it’s like, well, there’s now a new shop that recreates the look and feel in its bid to sell to the global elite. Oli…