Sparks Of Genius Quotes

Stand aside, and try not to catch fire if I shed sparks of genius.

You’ve the presence of a mouse fart in a high wind. Stand aside, and try not to catch fire if I shed sparks of genius.

The 'genius' of the moment has the perk to spark a deflagration of ecstasy and a gust of inspiration and, in its aftermath, ease the turbulent underswell of conflicting hassles. ("Just for a moment" )

That's the big mistake a lot of people make when they wonder how soldiers can put their lives on the line day after day or how they can fight for something they may not believe in. Not everyone does. I've worked with soldiers on all sides of the political spectrum; I've met some who hated the army and others who wanted to make it a career. I've met geniuses and idiots, but when all is said and done,we do what we do for one another. For friendship. Not for country, not for patriotism, not because we're programmed killing machines, but because of the guy next to you. You fight for your friend, to keep him alive, and he fights for you, and everything about the army is built on this simple premise.

A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark.

Genius is fine for the ignition spark, but to get there someone has to see that the radiator doesn't leak and no tire is flat.

The genius inside a person wants activity. It’s connected to the stars; it’s connected to a spark and it wants to burn and it wants to make and it wants to create and it has gifts to give. That is the nature of inner genius.

I do believe God gave me a spark of genius, but he quenched it in misery.

An environment of carping and criticism is dangerous to your mental health, whereas those who support and encourage you bring out your true potential and spark your genius.

curing autism would be the same as “curing” science and art.

Four-year-olds are a cross between Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, and Stephen Hawking: They don’t seem to learn from their mistakes, are highly unpredictable, but show sparks of pure genius.

that everyone has an intrinsic talent, a contribution to make, even if it comes in an unexpected form.

Intelligence is a spark, wisdom is the flame.

A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't "get into" me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman. The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names--Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the storm cloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren't people. They don't love and hate, they aren't for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live.

It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune. This establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which, at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge could not have communicated even with the best intentions.

People ask what the hardest thing is about having an autistic child, and for me the answer is easy. What mom doesn’t want to hear her baby tell her that he loves her or to feel his arms around her?

Georgia O'Keeffe wrote, "I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at ― not copy it." Thus the images of art are no more a direct reflection of the feelings, concepts, and sensations from which they arose than are a scientist's formulas direct expressions of his thoughts. All public languages are forms of translation.

The second adventure involves the divine spark hidden in each soul and the dark times require that the inner light of soul be found again. Perhaps there is no greater time to awaken to the adventure the soul would have us live and become agents of the divine in this world.

one spark of genius,suddenly the entire world is filled with anticipation

The “spark of genius” required by our laws lay in getting a good patent lawyer.

Innovation can be sparked by engineering talent, but it must be combined with business skills to set the world afire.

Where there’s madness, there’s genius. Where there is genius, there’s creativity. We all have it somewhere within us; that hint of madness, spark of genius, untapped creativity.

The more open and unstructured a workplace, he believed, the faster new ideas would be sparked,

biochemist Szent-Györgyi argued, “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

Marshmallow guns (or other similarly useless weapons) are actually fairly common accessories in your typical spark laboratory. No one knows why. They just sort of accumulate.

Igor von Moosenflüfen.

I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary office job was a betrayal of that life, and I had to pursue that life at all costs. Management consulting, law school, med school, those were fine for other people — I didn’t judge! — but I was an artist. I was super special. I was sparkly. I would walk another path. And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: You didn’t need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only.

Why is it that of every hundred gifted young musicians who study at Juilliard or every hundred brilliant young scientists who go to work in major labs under illustrious mentors, only a handful will write memorable musical compositions or make scientific discoveries of major importance? Are the majority, despite their gifts, lacking in some further creative spark? Are they missing characteristics other than creativity that may be essential for creative achievement—such as boldness, confidence, independence of mind? It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all. Creativity involves not only years of conscious preparation and training but unconscious preparation as well. This incubation period is essential to allow the subconscious assimilation and incorporation of one’s influences and sources, to reorganize and synthesize them into something of one’s own. In Wagner’s overture to Rienzi, one can almost trace this emergence. There are echoes, imitations, paraphrases, pastiches of Rossini, Meyerbeer, Schumann, and others—all the musical influences of his apprenticeship. And then, suddenly, astoundingly, one hears Wagner’s own voice: powerful, extraordinary (though, to my mind, horrible), a voice of genius, without precedent or antecedent. The essential element in these realms of retaining and appropriating versus assimilating and incorporating is one of depth, of meaning, of active and personal involvement.

The very first day, I came up with an obstacle course that everyone could do. The kids had to pick their way through five hula hoops lying on the ground; cross a mat by stepping on four giant, brightly colored "feet" that I'd cut out of felt; and then pick up an extra-large beanbag (actually a buckwheat neck and shoulder pillow) and bring it back to the group. I'd bought bags of cheap gold medals at Walmart, the kind you'd put in a little kid's birthday part goody bag. I made sure I had enough for everyone. So even when a child stepped on every single hula hoop and none of the giant feet, he or she got a medal. A few weeks in, I noticed that Adam, a nonverbal thirteen-year-old, was always clutching that medal in whichever hand his mom wasn't holding. The medals weren't very study to begin with, and his was beginning to look a bit worse for wear, so after class I slipped a couple of spares into his mom's purse. Turning to thank me, she had tears in her eyes. "You can't imagine how much it means to him to have a medal," she said. "He sleeps with it.

Second, it follows that we must teach the intuitive and imaginative skills necessary to inventive processes. As we have shown, creative thinking in every field begins in nonlogical, nonverbal forms. To think is to feel and to feel is to think.

We are in need of a service that could track down the fertile zone in which the needs of the world and our aptitudes connect, a service to highlight the spark of genius inside every one of us — so that we might one day contribute to a tool that counts and die without so much regret.

Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain - John J. Ratey, MD, with Eric Hagerman Exercise Every Day: 32 Tactics for Building the Exercise Habit (Even if you hate working out) - S.J. Scott No Gym Needed - Quick & Simple Workouts for Gals on the Go: Get a Toned Body in 30 Minutes or Less - Lise Cartwright Weight Loss Motivation Hacks: 7 Psychological Tricks That Keep You Motivated to Lose Weight - Derek Doepker Books

While the universality of the creative process has been noticed, it has not been noticed universally. Not enough people recognize the preverbal, pre-mathematical elements of the creative process. Not enough recognize the cross-disciplinary nature of intuitive tools for thinking. Such a myopic view of cognition is shared not only by philosophers and psychologists but, in consequence, by educators, too. Just look at how the curriculum, at every educational level from kindergarten to graduate school, is divided into disciplines defined by products rather than processes. From the outset, students are given separate classes in literature, in mathematics, in science, in history, in music, in art, as if each of these disciplines were distinct and exclusive. Despite the current lip service paid to “integrating the curriculum,” truly interdisciplinary courses are rare, and transdisciplinary curricula that span the breadth of human knowledge are almost unknown. Moreover, at the level of creative process, where it really counts, the intuitive tools for thinking that tie one discipline to another are entirely ignored. Mathematicians are supposed to think only “in mathematics,” writers only “in words,” musicians only “in notes,” and so forth. Our schools and universities insist on cooking with only half the necessary ingredients. By half-understanding the nature of thinking, teachers only half-understand how to teach, and students only half-understand how to learn.

The reason these diatribes are heard by more than just the occasional potted plant or captured hero is this: sparks quite frequently find themselves surrounded by people whether they want to be or not. We are not just talking about the stereotypical traveler whose cart breaks down during a storm and thus must seek shelter at the lone castle glimpsed through the trees and so finds himself at a timely ringside seat for the revelation of the latest abomination of science (although there is no denying this happens far more than is statistically probable). No, your seriously steeped-in-madness dabbler in the esoteric sciences usually finds themself taxed with a rag-tag collection of hangers-on, typically consisting of minions, constructs, adventurers, and those unique, unclassifiable, individuals whose raison d’être appears to be to remind us of what a strange world it is. Even more interestingly, it appears that the greater the spark, the more of these individuals they spontaneously accumulate.

Fleming’s lab partner, V. D. Allison, for example, was somewhat shocked when Fleming pulled “my leg about my excessive tidiness. Each evening I put my ‘bench’ in order and threw away anything I had no further use for. Fleming told me I was a great deal too careful. He, for his part, kept his cultures sometimes for two or three weeks and before getting rid of them, looked very carefully to see whether by chance any unexpected or interesting phenomena had appeared. The sequel was to prove how right he was.

Consider for a few moments the enormous aesthetic claim of its chief contemporary rival—what we may loosely call the Scientific Outlook, 1 the picture of Mr. [H. G.] Wells and the rest. Supposing this to be a myth, is it not one of the finest myths which human imagination has yet produced? The play is preceded by the most austere of all preludes: the infinite void, and matter restlessly moving to bring forth it knows not what. Then, by the millionth millionth chance—what tragic irony—the conditions at one point of space and time bubble up into that tiny fermentation which is the beginning of life. Everything seems to be against the infant hero of our drama—just as everything seems against the youngest son or ill-used stepdaughter at the opening of a fairy tale. But life somehow wins through. With infinite suffering, against all but insuperable obstacles, it spreads, it breeds, it complicates itself, from the amoeba up to the plant, up to the reptile, up to the mammal. We glance briefly at the age of monsters. Dragons prowl the earth, devour one another, and die. Then comes the theme of the younger son and the ugly duckling once more. As the weak, tiny spark of life began amidst the huge hostilities of the inanimate, so now again, amidst the beasts that are far larger and stronger than he, there comes forth a little naked, shivering, cowering creature, shuffling, not yet erect, promising nothing, the product of another millionth millionth chance. Yet somehow he thrives. He becomes the Cave Man with his club and his flints, muttering and growling over his enemies’ bones, dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I never could quite make out why), tearing his children to pieces in fierce jealousy till one of them is old enough to tear him, cowering before the horrible gods whom he created in his own image. But these are only growing pains. Wait till the next act. There he is becoming true Man. He learns to master Nature. Science comes and dissipates the superstitions of his infancy. More and more he becomes the controller of his own fate. Passing hastily over the present (for it is a mere nothing by the time scale we are using), you follow him on into the future. See him in the last act, though not the last scene, of this great mystery. A race of demigods now rules the planet—and perhaps more than the planet—for eugenics have made certain that only demigods will be born, and psychoanalysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity, and communism that all which divinity requires shall be ready to their hands. Man has ascended his throne. Henceforward he has nothing to do but to practise virtue, to grow in wisdom, to be happy. And now, mark the final stroke of genius. If the myth stopped at that point, it might be a little bathetic.

The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.

I arm myself once more with the precepts of my philosophy: The duration of a man’s life is merely a small point in time; the substance of it ever flowing away, the sense obscure; and the whole composition of the body tending to decay. His soul is a restless vortex, good fortune is uncertain and fame is unreliable; in a word, as a rushing stream so are all things belonging to the body; as a dream, or as vapor, are all those that belong to the soul. Life is warfare and a sojourn in a foreign land. Our reputation after life is nothing but oblivion. What is it then that will guide man? One thing alone: philosophy, the love of wisdom. And philosophy consists in this: for a man to preserve that inner genius or divine spark within him from violence and injuries, and above all from harmful pains or pleasures; never to do anything either without purpose, or falsely, or hypocritically, regardless of the actions or inaction of others; to contentedly embrace all things that happen to him, as coming from the same source from whom he came himself, and above all things, with humility and calm cheerfulness, to anticipate death as being nothing else but the dissolution of those elements of which every living being is composed. And if the elements themselves suffer nothing by this, their perpetual conversion of one into another, that dissolution, and alteration, which is so common to them all, why should it be feared by any man? Is this not according to Nature? But nothing that is according to Nature can be evil.

The pacifist-humanitarian idea may indeed become an excellent one when the most superior type of manhood will have succeeded in subjugating the world to such an extent that this type is then sole master of the earth. This idea could have an injurious effect only in the measure in which its application became difficult and finally impossible. So, first of all, the fight, and then pacifism. If it were otherwise, it would mean that mankind has already passed the zenith of its development, and accordingly, the end would not be the supremacy of some moral ideal, but degeneration into barbarism and consequent chaos. People may laugh at this statement, but our planet moved through space for millions of years, uninhabited by men, and at some future date may easily begin to do so again, if men should forget that wherever they have reached a superior level of existence, it was not as a result of following the ideas of crazy visionaries but by acknowledging and rigorously observing the iron laws of Nature. What reduces one race to starvation stimulates another to harder work. All the great civilisations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood. The most profound cause of such a decline is to be found in the fact that the people ignored the principle that all culture depends on men, and not the reverse. In other words, in order to preserve a certain culture, the type of manhood that creates such a culture must be preserved, but such a preservation goes hand in hand with the inexorable law that it is the strongest and the best who must triumph and that they have the right to endure. He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist. Such a saying may sound hard, but, after all, that is how the matter really stands. Yet far harder is the lot of him who believes that he can overcome Nature, and thus in reality insults her. Distress, misery, and disease, are her rejoinders. Whoever ignores or despises the laws of race really deprives himself of the happiness to which he believes he can attain, for he places an obstacle in the victorious path of the superior race and, by so doing, he interferes with a prerequisite condition of, all human progress. Loaded with the burden of human sentiment, he falls back to the level of a helpless animal. It would be futile to attempt to discuss the question as to what race or races were the original champions of human culture and were thereby the real founders of all that we understand by the word ‘humanity.’ It is much simpler to deal with this question in so far as it relates to the present time. Here the answer is simple and clear. Every manifestation of human culture, every product of art, science and technical skill, which we see before our eyes to-day, is almost, exclusively the product of the Aryan creative power. All that we admire in the world to-day, its science and its art, its technical developments and discoveries, are the products of the creative activities of a few peoples, and it may be true that their first beginnings must be attributed to one race. The existence of civilisation is wholly dependent on such peoples. Should they perish, all that makes this earth beautiful will descend with them into the grave. He is the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth, always kindling anew that fire which, in the form of knowledge, illuminated the dark night by drawing aside the veil of mystery and thus showing man how to rise and become master over all the other beings on the earth. Should he be forced to disappear, a profound darkness will descend on the earth; within a few thousand years human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert.

Innovation” may be the most overused buzzword in the world today. As the pace of change continues to accelerate and our challenges grow ever more complex, we know we need to do something different just to keep up, let alone get ahead. Finding better ways to tackle the most pressing problems facing people and the planet is no exception. Over the past few years, the notion of innovation for social good has caught on like wildfire, with the term popping up in mission statements, messaging, job descriptions, and initiatives. This quest for social innovation has led to a proliferation of contests, hackathons, and pilots that may make a big splash, but has yielded limited tangible results. So we should start by asking, What is innovation? One unfortunate consequence of the hype has been that, in common parlance, innovation has often become conflated with invention. While invention is the spark of a new idea, innovation is the process of deploying that initial breakthrough to a constructive use. Thomas Edison’s famous quote, “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration,” puts this in perspective. In other words, innovation is the long, hard slog that is required to take a promising invention (the 1%) and transform it into, in our case, meaningful social impact.

Talent is a spark, genius is the flame.

A few years ago, we engaged a team of experts to determine the “secret sauce” that propelled those rare leaders, organizations, and movements to success. They discovered five principles that are consistently present when transformational breakthroughs take place. To spark this sort of change, you must: 1. Make a Big Bet. So many people and organizations are naturally cautious. They look at what seemed to work in the past and try to do more of it, leading to only incremental advances. Every truly history-making transformation has occurred when people have decided to go for revolutionary change. 2. Be bold, take risks. Have the guts to try new, unproven things and the rigor to continue experimenting. Risk taking is not a blind leap off a cliff but a lengthy process of trial and error. And it doesn’t end with the launch of a product or the start of a movement. You need to be willing to risk the next big idea, even if it means upsetting your own status quo. 3. Make failure matter. Great achievers view failure as a necessary part of advancing toward success. No one seeks it out, but if you’re trying new things, the outcome is by definition uncertain. When failure happens, great innovators make the setback matter, applying the lessons learned and sharing them with others. 4. Reach beyond your bubble. Our society is in thrall to the myth of the lone genius. But innovation happens at intersections. Often the most original solutions come from engaging with people with diverse experiences to forge new and unexpected partnerships. 5. Let urgency conquer fear. Don’t overthink and overanalyze. It’s natural to want to study a problem from all angles, but getting caught up in questions like “What if we’re wrong?” and “What if there is a better way?” can leave you paralyzed with fear. Allow the compelling need to act to outweigh all doubts and setbacks. These five principles can be summarized in two words: Be Fearless.

I truly believe that if they turned all the pianos in the world to firewood, he would throw himself on top of the bonfire. We have laughed together about how I am famous, not him. But we both know that I look much prettier in a dress than he does, that I play much more photogenically.... I am a "girl," and therefore more marketable. But I know that he is the genius, that he can take the Chopin Etudes and add a touch of magic, a spark, that makes them definitively his own. I also knew that one day the world will recognize this. And I will be happy to take second place. I'm sure my playing has gone from strength to strength because of him. And I adore him. He is my piano. He is my bonfire. And if he were no longer there, I would throw myself on top of that fire willingly.

If you have a spark of genius, kindle it until it becomes a flame.

Each child has a spark of genius waiting to be discovered, ignited, and fed. And the goal of schools shouldn’t be to manufacture “productive citizens” to fill some corporate cubicle; it should be to inspire each child to find a “calling” that will change the world. The jobs for the future are no longer Manager, Director, or Analyst, but Entrepreneur, Creator, and even Revolutionary.

Computer genius Dennis; exquisite Nobody who saved all our lives; brilliant Erik, with his humor and intelligence and courage; gallant, artistic Javier; beautiful, burning Jada; sunny, steady Kurt - they're just 'Class As' to him. As interchangeable and replaceable as gears in a machine. He'd use and discard them without a second thought, drown all their bright gifts in blood. Because he doesn't see any of the good in us. We're just monsters to him. And if we aren't monsters yet, by the time we get back we will be.

Immanuel Kant wrote in his Critique of Pure Reason, “The intellect can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.

What applies to art and medicine applies to all people working in every area, argued biologist, philosopher, artist, and art historian C. H. Waddington. In 1972 he wrote in his far-sighted book Biology and the History of the Future, “The acute problems of the world can be solved only by whole men [and women], not by people who refuse to be, publicly, anything more than a technologist, or a pure scientist, or an artist. In the world of today, you have got to be everything or you are going to be nothing.” Buckminster Fuller concurred. In his essay “Emergent Humanity,” he warned that in evolution “overspecialization leads to extinction. We need the philosopher-scientist-artist—the comprehensivist, not merely more deluxe quality technician-mechanics.

Sixth, we must use the experiences of people who have successfully bridged disciplines as exemplars of creative activity within our curricula.

The arts are not merely for self-expression or entertainment. They are, as we have shown, disciplines as rigorous as medicine or mathematics, with their own bodies of knowledge, techniques, tools, skills, and philosophies. Moreover, because the imaginative tools used in the arts are critical to the humanities and the sciences, they deserve support not just for their own sake but for the sake of education as a whole. Math, science, and technology have flourished in the past only when and where all the arts have flourished. They will flourish or fail together in the future.

Finally, we must forge a pioneering education, whose purpose is to produce the imaginative generalists who can take us into the uncharted future. Every novel idea takes us into new territory, and creative people are, by necessity, pioneers. The tools and skills that pioneers take to the frontiers are not specialized or narrow. They are basic, general-purpose tools that can be adapted to the need at hand. Pioneers of the creative imagination must have adaptable minds, too, and all-purpose toolboxes of inventive skills that enable them to make new knowledge.

The word polymath, derived from the Greek words meaning “to know much” or “very knowing,” has come to mean in common parlance a person of encyclopedic learning. Polymaths are not to be confused with dilettantes, who take up new subjects for amusement or pleasure. Polymaths master their activities to a significant degree and perceive the fundamental connections between them. The greatest polymaths of all, like the “Renaissance men” Leonardo da Vinci, Vesalius, and Michelangelo, seem capable of encompassing all that is known. Of course, no one has ever had truly encyclopedic knowledge, and that is not what we are calling for here. But it has long been observed by psychologists that people who are innovative tend to participate in a wider range of activities and develop a higher degree of skill in those activities than other people. Certainly that has been the case for virtually every artist, scientist, inventor, and humanist discussed in these pages, nearly all of whom can be called polymaths.

Chorus, you call yourself,” he said. “You’ve the presence of a mouse fart in a high wind. Stand aside, and try not to catch fire if I shed sparks of genius.

First, practice play can exercise and develop any thinking tool by enhancing skill through practice. The teenage Richard Feynman play-practiced the visualization of four-dimensional figures simply for the fun of mastering such problems. Fleming enhanced his technical skill and knowledge through his bacterial paintings. M. C. Escher mastered his pattern recognition and pattern forming skills by finding images in wallpaper.

Third, game playing teaches the making of rules within externally bounded situations that define how we may behave or think, as well as the breaking of those rules. H. G. Wells played games when he modeled wars in miniature. So did Fleming, discovering and inventing new rules for the “game” of bacteriology.

Third, we must implement a multidisciplinary education that places the arts on an equal footing with the sciences. Arts and sciences constantly interact in very fruitful ways that are often overlooked.

Seventh, to reach the widest range of minds, ideas in every discipline should be presented in many forms. There is no one single imaginative skill or creative technique that is adequate for all thinking needs. The intuitive approach is as valuable as the logical one; the analytical, algebraic mind is no better than the geometric, visual mind or the kinesthetic, empathic one. Every idea can and should be transformed into several equivalent forms, each of which has a different formal expression and emphasizes a different set of thinking tools. The more ways students can imagine an idea, the better their chances of insight. The more ways they can express that insight, the better their chances that others will understand and appreciate it.

Music was simply a way to teach them how to understand how to learn, and the key was kan, a difficult-to-translate Japanese term meaning something akin to a combination of empathizing and kinesthetic thinking—becoming one with the music and the instrument producing it. A well-known westernized and modernized version of this philosophy can be found in Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a guide to understanding not just people but things through an empathic approach.

We must resist the pedagogical tracking of different kinds of learners. We must reverse the trend toward early and narrow specialization of student interest and activity. For when we look closely at the formative years of productive artists, scientists, and inventors we find that although the strong enthusiasms of youth shaped their future contributions, they did not lead to them in any direct, disciplinary fashion.

Develop spatial skills by modeling your school, house, or neighborhood. Learn engineering and design skills by making structural models of Buckminster Fuller’s tetrahedron-based geodesic domes, Snelson’s tensegrity sculptures, and other architectural forms. Teacher Brenda Jackson particularly recommends the modeling of bridges for its multidisciplinary aspects: “In [a] bridge design project,” she says, “a variety of disciplines is involved. Drawing the proposed design, coping with the practical problem of tension, and using calculations and manual skill in making the model, are all parts of the problem. Testing the bridge to destruction, although somewhat noisy, involves learning in a practical way, and the results are often so spectacular that they are unlikely to be quickly forgotten.

First Encounters with Joy At some point around this time, Lewis’s already rich imaginative life took a new turn. Lewis later recalled three early experiences which he regarded as shaping one of his life’s chief concerns. The first of these took place when the fragrance of a “flowering currant bush” in the garden at Little Lea triggered a memory of his time in the “Old House”—Dundela Villas, which Albert Lewis had then rented from a relative.[29] Lewis speaks of experiencing a transitory, delectable sense of desire, which overwhelmed him. Before he had worked out what was happening, the experience had passed, leaving him “longing for the longing that had just ceased.” It seemed to Lewis to be of enormous importance. “Everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.” But what did it mean? The second experience came when reading Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin (1903). Though Lewis admired Potter’s books in general at this time, something about this work sparked an intense longing for something he clearly struggled to describe—“the Idea of Autumn.”[30] Once more, Lewis experienced the same intoxicating sense of “intense desire.” The third came when he read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of a few lines from the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846):[31] I heard a voice that cried, Balder the beautiful Is dead, is dead— Lewis found the impact of these words devastating. It was as if they opened a door that he did not know existed, allowing him to see a new realm beyond his own experience, which he longed to enter and possess. For a moment, nothing else seemed to matter. “I knew nothing of Balder,” he recalled, “but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, [and] I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote).”[32] Yet even before Lewis had realised what was happening to him, the experience passed, and left him longing to be able to reenter it.

The only difficulty with playing—and it’s a big one—is being able to remain enough of a child to do it. What charms us about a Fleming or a Feynman or a Calder or a Mozart is the fact that, in some way, they never grew up. They continued to “face nature like a child,” to use T. H. Huxley’s phrase. Everyday things remained as exciting and fresh to these men as if they had just seen them for the first time. Conventions of behavior, thought, and action were not taken too seriously. Each man cultivated, in Feynman’s term, a sort of “creative irresponsibility.” We can learn from that.

Fifth, we must emphasize the transdisciplinary lessons of disciplinary learning.

The object is to help everyone think simultaneously as artist and scientist, musician and mathematician, dancer and engineer. An education that trains the mind to imagine creatively in one field prepares the mind for creative application in any other, for thinking tools as well as flexible knowledge are transferable.

Associational synesthesia occurs in about half of all young children and from 5 to 15 percent of the adult population. The huge difference between the number of synesthetic children and adults clearly suggests that the typical educational focus on unisensory experiences and expression stifles an early and natural association of perceptions. “Synesthetic perception is the rule,” the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty has written, ruing the fact that “we unlearn how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel.” Psychologist Lawrence Marks and his colleagues are more positive, suggesting that because so many children have synesthetic experiences, “the potential to experience synesthetically may lie latent within everyone.

First, we must emphasize the teaching of universal processes of invention in addition to the acquisition of disciplinary products of knowledge. The purpose of education should be understanding rather than simply knowing; its focus should be the active process of learning and creating rather than the passive acquisition of facts.

Fourth, we must integrate the curriculum by using a common descriptive language for innovation. There is no point in teaching a liberal arts and sciences curriculum that continues to fragment knowledge and creates specialists who cannot communicate across disciplinary lines. Education must focus on the trunk of the tree of knowledge, revealing the ways in which the branches, twigs, and leaves all emerge from a common core. Tools for thinking stem from this core, providing a common language with which practitioners in different fields may share their experience of the process of innovation and discover links between their creative activities. When the same terms are employed across the curriculum, students begin to link different subjects and classes.

Recent studies have found that the best predictor of career success in any field is not IQ, grades, or standardized test scores but participation in one or more mentally intensive leisuretime activities or hobbies—anything from painting, composing music, or writing poetry to programming computers, creating videos, or playing around with scientific ideas or mathematics. This is true for professionals of all kinds; it is true for business entrepreneurs and CEOs; it is true for artists, academics, and entertainers.

think the easiest way to understand the difference is to point out that in Roman pagan thinking all things had their own ‘geni’ and every person possessed their ‘genius.’ To some extent this same thinking can be found among the Greeks in relation to the daimon. The sages understood every person to possess both an eidolon and a daimonic self. For the uninitiated the ‘eidolon’ (much like what is today called an ego) is all they know and the daimon appears as an external agency. But the goal of initiation is to unite daimon and eidolon into a ‘whole self.’ In the language of this book so far we could equate the eidolon with what we have been calling ‘the Shadow’ – this is the normal everyday consciousness of the person. The ‘Skins’ are other forms that may be animated by the Shadow, but the daimonic aspect of consciousness is the most mysterious of all, subtly working through the Shadow at all times, a direct spark of divine fire, the ‘godhead’ dimension of the self that few ever become aware of.

What If is like opening Pandora's box, but instead of unleashing chaos, it unleashes your inner genius. It’s the spark that ignites your creativity, the fuel that powers your innovation, and the key that unlocks the door to your endless possibilities. So, the next time you find yourself pondering “what if,” don’t hold back. Let your imagination run wild, embrace the unknown, and dare to dream big. After all, the greatest stories begin with those two simple words: “What if…

We all have sparks of genius in us, which come alive once in a while on the winding lanes of life, surrounded constantly by the beauty of nature, that accompanies us, through our ever-changing journey of life, do not look to be perfect, you will never achieve it, you will never be rich enough to buy or have everything in the world, and you will never be poor enough where you will be without virtue, Excellence generosity, goodness, kindness and love, it is called balancing of the books, and the law laid down for this balance is nature and life,

This was a family that consumed attractive, talented people. Its aim was to preserve beauty and genius through the centuries. For all eternity. To bottle the spark of magic that flares up in the soul of an artist, to preserve in wax the pain that is born in the heart of an actor, to dry and store the subtle, shifting images that hover above the head of a writer. Madness. They didn't realize it was impossible. As the years pass by, feelings and emotions are blunted. And thousands of years of life kill all feelings. The soul becomes cold. It can't burn anymore. The farys took away from humans the one thing that I sought and valued in them most of all—their bright, vital feelings.

and crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples. The Negro thus educated is a hopeless liability of the race.

The businessman wants to create something for everyone, which leads to products that are middle of the road,” said Brunner. “It becomes about consensus, and that’s why you rarely see the spark of genius.”37 Even if a great idea came along, it was impossible to get anything done. Norman described just such an occasion.

Every great idea has a spark of inspiration. Divine…if the shoe fits. Every great spark of inspiration comes from a remarkably intense passion, love, or desire. It can be out of love for God, a family member, a lover, child, friend, or just out of a desire to be compassionate and help others. It can be an intense passion for music, art, physical comforts, or beauty. It can be from the desire to prove those who hurt, wrong, or doubt them wrong because they themselves are not yet capable of asking questions and chasing dreams which seem so far away. The paradox of any genius or creative virtuoso is that they see one plus one does not equal two and they do not consult the mathematicians to hear what they have to say about this. When the idea or project they desire to create is fueled from a combination of these previously mentioned factors and then ignited by a pure intention of their heart and soul it is more than the sum of its’ parts. It is no longer a song composed of a melody and words or a picture brushed with paint upon an easel. It is a masterpiece with an explanation which can only be hinted or pointed at. Just like the moon can only reflect the light passed on to it by the sun. Personally, a master watch maker is a person I look up to. They lovingly and thoughtfully put immense energy and concentration on putting seemingly small pieces into place that once put into place learn to work on their own in perfect synchronization and harmony. However, this working together of gears and pieces does not happen by itself; It happens because the master had a vision of what he wanted and put in the time, energy, love, and effort to make it happen. The designer didn’t have it materialize right in front of their face instantly. Rather, they had faith it would come together a piece at a time. It’s my mission to find as many of these Masters who don’t run away from their ability to love, be loved, and create. The more we present beauty to those around us, the quicker others will find light within themselves. The more assistance we give to those we know struggling with poverty both inside and externally, the quicker we change this world into what it’s meant to be.

Purpose of our journey is to discover the self and to leave the persona behind. The most revered lives are those that can touch and change other lives. Every human has that spark of genius in them and it is only when when you see that in yourself that you will see the genius in others.

The Visionary DNA Common Roles Common Traits Common Challenges • Entrepreneurial “spark plug” • Are the founding entrepreneur • Inconsistency • Inspirer • Have lots of ideas/idea creation/idea growth • Organizational “whiplash,” the head turn • Passion provider • Are strategic thinkers • Dysfunctional team, a lack of openness and honesty • Developer of new/big ideas/breakthroughs • Always see the big picture • Lack of clear direction/undercommunication • Big problem solver • Have a pulse on the industry and target market • Reluctance to let go • Engager and maintainer of big external relationships • Research and develop new products and services • Underdeveloped leaders and managers • Closer of big deals • Manage big external relationships (e.g., customer, vendor, industry) • “Genius with a thousand helpers” • Learner, researcher, and discoverer • Get involved with customers and employees when Visionary is needed • Ego and feelings of value dependent on being needed by others • Company vision creator and champion • Inspire people • Eyes (appetite) bigger than stomach; 100 pounds in a 50-pound bag • Are creative problem solvers (big problems) • Resistance to following standardized processes • Create the company vision and protect it • Quickly and easily bored • Sell and close big deals • No patience for the details • Connect the dots • Amplification of complexity and chaos • On occasion do the work, provide the service, make the product • ADD (typical; not always) • All foot on gas pedal—with no brake • Drive is too hard for most people

Do dreads and dreams, hopes and griefs, ideas and beliefs, interests and doubts, infatuations and envies, memories and ambitions, bouts of nostalgia and floods of empathy, flashes of guilt and sparks of genius, play any role in the world of physical objects? Do such pure abstractions have causal powers? Can they shove massive things around, or are they just impotent fictions? Can a blurry, intangible “I” dictate to concrete physical objects such as electrons or muscles (or for that matter, books) what to do?

I am disposed to believe,” he concluded, “that under this mass of abortions and rubbish there lie hidden some sparks of a diviner fire, which the genius of my countrymen may gather and nurse into a flame.

We are walking along the path on the way to the golf course. The clubhouse is behind us, and out in front of you, the whole of your golfing experience lies ahead, waiting to be discovered and all rather exciting. Along the path you see a fork ahead, a large sign catches your eye that says, “Accept your good shots, but after every bad shot, stop, analyse what you did wrong, correct it, and move on.” ……Seemingly logical advice, and one would imagine you need to find out what you are doing wrong and correct it to progress. This all sounds fine. However, as you look down the path along the other side of the fork, a little in the distance and slightly more obscure—is a smaller sign—a sign that has a different message. It says, “Accept your bad shots, but after every good shot, stop, replay it through your mind, imagine what it felt like, remember it, and move on.

Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman, who also saw and felt things intuitively, noted, “In certain problems that I have done, it was necessary to continue the development of the picture as the method, before the mathematics could really be done.” So much for the myth that scientists think more logically than others. To think creatively is first to feel. The desire to understand must be whipped together with sensual and emotional feelings and blended with intellect to yield imaginative insight.

The poet e. e. cummings, for one, challenged the assumption that poets are essentially wordsmiths manipulating the rules of grammar, syntax, and semantics. “The artist,” he wrote, “is not a man who describes but a man who FEELS.” Gary Snyder, also a poet, has expanded on that theme, saying that to write he must “revisualize it all. . . . I’ll replay the whole experience again in my mind. I’ll forget all about what’s on the page and get in contact with the preverbal level behind it, and then by an effort of reexperiencing, recall, visualization, revisualization, I’ll live through the whole thing again and try to see it more clearly.

The crafting of imaginary worlds, in both cummings’s and Spender’s cases, took more than a mastery of language; it took an ability to relive sense impressions almost at will. Other writers have said much the same. Robert Frost called his poetry a process of “carrying out some intention more felt than thought. . . . I’ve often been quoted: ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise for the reader.

Stephen Spender defines the “terrifying challenge of poetry” as the attempt to express in words that which may not be verbally expressed but may be verbally suggested: “Can I think out the logic of images? How easy it is to explain here the poem that I would have liked to write! How difficult it would be to write it. For writing it would imply living my way through the imaged experience of all those ideas, which here are mere abstractions, and such an effort of imaginative experience requires a lifetime of patience and watching.

professors at MIT and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as well as research directors at major engineering firms have long realized that what eventually separates successful scientists and engineers from the rest of the students in their classes is the ability to feel or see what the equations mean.

Karl von Frisch, who decoded the dance language of bees, wrote that his ability to observe came from simply lying “for hours between the cliffs, motionless, watching living things I could see on and between the slimy green stones just below the surface of the water. I discovered that miraculous worlds may reveal themselves to a patient observer where the casual passer-by sees nothing at all.

Other scientists, such as geologist Nathaniel Shaler, at Harvard, were given exercises, much as Picasso was, that forced them to look at a specimen over and over until inobvious facts, for example, that in some fish the scale pattern differs on the two sides, became obvious.

Numerous scientists have also advocated art as a way to train observation, reiterating the theme that “that which has not been drawn has not been seen.” As Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the great turn-of-the-century neuroanatomist, explained, “If our study is concerned with an object related to natural history, etc., observation will be accompanied by sketching; for aside from other advantages, the act of depicting something disciplines and strengthens attention, obliging us to cover the whole of the phenomenon. . . . It is not without reason [therefore] that all great observers are skillful in sketching.

Writing and reading literature can be valuable for those who deal with people, whether in the social, legal, or medical professions.

Physicians and writers,” Stone argues, “draw on the same source: the human encounter, people and their indelible stories. And the works of both depend on skillful use of the senses. As with [Sherlock] Holmes, success rests with the powers of observation. . . . Literature, indeed, can have a kind of laboratory function. . . . The medical ear must be properly trained to hear stories—a medical history, after all, is a short story.” “I believe that the writing of poems makes me a better medical practitioner,” says physician-poet Jack Coulehan. “Poetry demands a style of seeing and responding that enhances my ability to form therapeutic bonds with patients.

we point out at the start of every science class a very interesting fact: even the simplest textbooks written for secondary-school students are based on the achievements of the greatest names in science, such as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Mendel, Curie, Watson, and Crick. If you think about it for a moment, this is truly surprising. One would expect the most important developments in science to be the most complex, but in fact, they are always the simplest.

Picasso also cautioned other painters, “To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality. . . . You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. There’s no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark. It is what started the artist off, excited his ideas, and stirred his emotions.” True to his word, Picasso began his well-known Bull series with a realistic image of a bull. Then he became interested in the planes defining the bull’s form. But as he experimented with these planes, he realized that what defined them were their edges, which he then reduced to simple outlines. Finally, he eliminated most of these lines, leaving a pure outline that still conveys the essence of “bullness.

We also need practice in noting the sublimity of the mundane. Like an actor studying with Stanislavsky or Boleslavsky, “collect all of your attention.” Select an object, notice its form, its lines, its colors, its sounds, its tactile characteristics, its smell, perhaps even its taste. Then remove the object and recall one by one as many details as possible. Write about what you perceived or draw it. Go back and observe it again.

When Rodin created The Thinker, perhaps one of the best-known public sculptures in the world, he gave physical form to his own proprioceptive imagination. A nude man, whom Rodin meant to represent all poets, all artists, all inventors, sits upon a rock in tense and intense contemplation. “What makes my Thinker think,” Rodin wrote, “is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils, and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes.

When we were in graduate school we heard about another physicist, whose name we’ve unfortunately long forgotten, who was said to have Ulam’s capacity for “feeling” quantum equations with his whole body. During seminars, if a speaker presented equations resulting in atomic interactions that were too loose, the man would slump in his chair. If the equations forced the atoms to pack too tightly, he would scrunch up as if desperately in need of the men’s room. Speakers could “read” his opinion of their work long before he ever opened his mouth to comment.

Mathematician Norbert Wiener employed an even more bizarre set of bodily feelings. After spending months working fruitlessly on a difficult problem that led him into controversy with his Harvard colleagues, Wiener became gravely ill with pneumonia. Throughout the course of the feverish disease his mind conflated bodily discomfort with mental anxiety. “It was impossible for me to distinguish among my pain and difficulty in breathing, the flapping of the window curtain, and certain as yet unresolved parts of the potential problem on which I was working.

As the New Year dawns, let your genius not be just a spark but a relentless flame, igniting paths unseen and potential untapped.

Things happen, he believed, and there’s nothing you can do to keep them from occurring without taking out the magic spark plug, the genius of invention that ignited the adventure in the first place.

Yet without the emergence of superior or differently adapted individuals—beneficial mutations, in other words—the doorways to prolonged survival of the species would, under changing conditions, be closed. Similarly, if society sinks into the absolute rut of custom, if it refuses to accept beneficial mutations in the cultural realm or to tolerate, if not promote, the life of genius, then its unwieldy slumbers may be its last. Worse is the fact that all we know of beauty and the delights of free untrammeled thought may sink to a few concealed sparks glimmering warily behind the foreheads of men no longer in a position to transfer these miraculous mutations to the society which gave them birth.

Indeed, man is incapable of doing any good. Are all unbelievers then wicked and repulsive men? Not at all. In our experience we find that the unbelieving world excels in many things. Precious treasures have come down to us from the old heathen civilization. In Plato you find pages that you devour. Cicero fascinates you and bears you along by his noble tone and stirs in you holy sentiments…It is not exclusively the spark of genius or the splendor of talent, which excites your pleasure in the words and actions of unbelievers, but it is often their beauty of character, their zeal, their devotion, their love, their candor, their faithfulness, and their sense of honesty. Who of us has not been put to the blush by the virtues of the heathen? It is thus a fact, that your dogma of total depravity by sin does not always tally with your experience in life. Well, my friends, by its doctrine of common grace Calvinism can hold on to both what the Bible teaches on human depravity and to what experience teaches about the virtues of the heathen.