HOW TO BE A GENIUS

The other day, my friend Mike gently told me off for putting myself down when I had (jokingly) said, “I wish I were a super genius.”

Now, I don’t think Mike thinks I’m a super genius; I didn’t say it just so that he would put a brotherly arm around my shoulder and tell me how clever he thought I was. I don’t think Mike would do that anyway, so fishing for compliments would have been a waste of a boat trip, or more accurately, a waste of a coffee in Stockholmhaven.

He actually, looked at me quizzically, let two beats of silence pass, and then said this:

“I heard a story once of a very clever person who kept saying he wasn’t intelligent, when everyone knew he was - and much more so. In the end, he didn’t realise that he was also putting down everyone else in the room by being so self-effacing. If he didn’t believe himself to be smart, it followed that he also thought everyone else was much less intelligent too.”

Ouch. Who’d have thought that being diffident could be so blindly insulting to those around you? It had never occurred to me that being self-deprecating could actually come off as self-centred.

I think Mike knew exactly what he was doing. We went on to talk about dimensions of intelligence, and how it makes no sense at all to compare a brilliant empath with someone who makes fantastic furniture or remembers quiz facts; or to compare an incredible artist with a person who can write backwards, or design helicopters. 

The point is: we are all geniuses. No-one in the world has been, or ever will be, a better you than you, and nobody has the same potential that’s locked inside you. The unique combination of the thousands of ancestors who met, fell in love, and passed on their genetic code that would one day make you you, is an extraordinary singularity of probability. Whether you believe in chance, fate, or intelligent design, you are a work of absolute, world-changing, unrepeatable, one-in-a-quadrillion... genius.

And so am I.

Mike looked at me over a coffee cup while all of that sank in.

If we’re all geniuses, then the cleverest, kindest thing to do is to be ourselves and give each other permission to do the same. We recognise the different dimension that someone else might be working in, but we don’t let it influence our own - what’s more, as Mike had very cleverly pointed out, we don’t compromise our own genius ability, just to make others feel better about theirs. They’re different scales, along different axes. So it’s okay to find your axis and shoot along it. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.