The Genius Is Just the One Who Can't Be Kept Away
Genius is not a gift you were born with or denied. Elsie Lincoln Benedict strips the mystique off it completely in How to Get Anything You Want, and what is left is almost too simple to argue with. The genius, she says, is the one who cannot be kept away from the work. Not the most talented. Not the most credentialed. The one who forgets to eat, who treats the toil as play, who you would have to physically drag from the thing. The difference between the genius and the failure, she writes, is less in their abilities than in their attitude toward those abilities — the genius encourages the want, the failure inhibits it. ...