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If John Carmack or Bill Gates thought of themselves as geniuses, they wouldn't have accomplished a fraction of what they did. Nothing is more destructive to som
by mwfunk 12y ago
If John Carmack or Bill Gates thought of themselves as geniuses, they wouldn't have accomplished a fraction of what they did. Nothing is more destructive to someone's intelligence or creativity than believing the hype that people put on you, and that goes 10x if that hype comes from yourself.
Put another way, I consider both of those guys geniuses, but if either of them made that claim about themselves, I would have to reconsider the position.
Put another another way, no good can possibly ever come from acknowledging your own genius, even if that was something a person was capable of perceiving about themselves, which I don't think it is.
- scobar 12y agoI completely agree with most of your comment. I wonder, though, if some good could come from (erroneously) acknowledging one's own genius privately and temporarily. If that person were above a certain threshold, wouldn't the acknowledgement of one's own genius evoke the conflict that there must be much more left to learn that the person isn't yet aware of? It might just provide enough motivation to search for the reasons why it was so ignorant to have considered oneself a genius.
- sbensu 12y agoVery interesting! I find that what geniuses are secretly proud of is seldom what others perceive as their top achievements, so it would be hard to parallel the external "you are a genius" with the internal "I'm a genius". Or maybe I'm just talking about highly intelligent people != genius.