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
Functions with same limit at infinity | Limits and continuity | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
The goal of this video is to get an appreciation that you could have many, in fact, you could have an infinite number of functions that have the same limit as X approaches infinity. So, if we were to make the general statement that the limit of some funct…
This is Wakaliwood | Explorer
[music playing] BILLIE MINTZ: I came here to meet an extraordinary man whose vision stretches far beyond himself. This is Isaac Nabawana. OK. Action. Action. Action. BILLIE MINTZ: He’s committed to changing the country’s image by making incredibly viole…
How to break social media addiction and actually start living
When you’re on the bus, waiting at the queue, or simply walking down the street, do you often find yourself taking up your phone? Constantly looking at your phone will prevent you from being aware of what’s happening around you, and this is not only physi…
How the way you watch movies affects your life
So this may sound weird, but I promise it’ll start to make sense eventually. I sort of observed the other day that there are two different ways that people watch movies. The first group of people, they get home from work, they’re pretty tired, so they sit…
Organization of multicellular organisms | High school biology | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to take a journey in life and we’re going to start with the smallest scale of life that is indisputably life, and that is the cell. Now, the reason why I qualified that a little bit is some people debate whether viruses are livi…
From Doomer To Bloomer | My Story
How can we turn from tumors into bloomers? As a 30-something year old guy who has had his fair share of doomer phases in life, I would like to tell you how I discovered the causes of these dark periods within myself and changed for the better. [Music] F…