#214 Craig Wright – Episode Transcript

Professor Craig Wright, creator of Yale University’s popular “Genius Course,” explores what we can learn from brilliant minds that have changed the world. Einstein. Beethoven. Picasso. Jobs. The word genius evokes these iconic figures, whose cultural contributions have irreversibly shaped society.Yet Beethoven could not multiply. Picasso couldn’t pass a 4th grade math test. And Jobs left high school with a 2.65 GPA.

What does this say about our metrics for measuring success and achievement today? Professor Wright has devoted more than two decades to exploring these questions and probing the nature of this term, which is deeply embedded in our culture.

In The Hidden Habits of Genius, he reveals what we can learn from the lives of those we have dubbed “geniuses,” past and present and looks at the 14 key traits of genius, from curiosity to creative maladjustment to obsession.

Sean Delaney: Craig, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today? 

Craig Wright: I’m doing fine, thank you very much, Sean for inviting me. It’s gonna be fun. We’re gonna have a good time. 

Sean: Yeah, this is gonna be a lot of fun exploring a lot of things that I’m innately curious about, but before we hit on geniuses and all of your work, I’m really intrigued by, did you know what you wanted to do your entire life, or is this something you discovered later in life?

Craig: Oh wow. Life is wonderful, I started out, You’ll never believe this, Sean, when I was age 18, I could accept one of two scholarships. I could take a golf scholarship to the University of Maryland, or I could take a scholarship, a lesser scholarship to the Eastman School of Music to be a classic, trained to be a classical concert pianist.

I declined the golf scholarship though, I really love to play golf. I declined it because other kids, even at age 18 were beating me and I figured well, if I’m already losing to them, I’m not gonna make much money at this. So off I went to the Eastman School of Music, which is really hard to get into. It’s like truly hard admittance and playing some of the best competition against the best in Washington, DC at that point.

And I went there and I graduated from there, but I learned one thing there that I had very little musical talent. I had a lot of industry. I worked very hard, and was given the finest pianist to practice with the best teachers in Washington, DC, and Rochester, New York, but lo and behold, didn’t have a great musical memory and I didn’t have perfect pitch. I was lacking some of the essential gifts that are needed to make a first grade creative musician. So there was this mantra going around on music conservatories, if you can’t create, you perform. If you can’t perform, you teach. So I said to myself, well, maybe I’ll be a teacher, I’ll be a teacher in colleges, ’cause they seem pretty good places to be. Interesting place to be. So off I went to Harvard to get a PhD in what’s called Musicology, in the sort of history of music, and that was fun, and I became, of all things, a medieval musicologist.

I’m working with medieval music, which required me to go to Europe and live in monasteries for a period of time, and no kidding, I did that. Poverty, chastain, obedience. Well, I wasn’t really… I was having some trouble with some of the … So that wasn’t going to work out so well for me. I didn’t just sign up to be a monk, although they were very gracious, and were always welcome and I would go through the rituals, learn all the services, and study the scripts, etcetera, etcetera. Eventually got a job teaching at Yale, and that was really cool. Because here’s the deal, if you are a college professor and you get tenure, wow, that’s a really great job.

First of all, you have to work very hard as a young person. I’m convinced thinking about things at the most critical decades in your life are the 20s and 30s. 20s may be the most critical in terms of getting out there and getting ahead in your profession. 30s are the most pressure-packed because you’ve got your own profession that you’re responsible for and you’ve got domestic considerations, if you have a partner, if you have offspring that you’re dealing with. That’s really hard to do all of that at once, but once… If you can be in the university situation, get tenure, and then you’re given something of a … All presumably, you’re there to do what you were hired to do. But I got bored with what I was hired to do. I woke up one day and said, what’s new in the Middle Ages?

So I started playing with somebody called Mozart, and he turned out to be very, very fascinating, and then I went on, I said, well, there’s more than music here, why don’t I… This guy is really very interesting and got interested in Leonardo DaVinci.

I’m gonna start a course on genius here. Well, wait a minute, we don’t have any courses on genius in the department of music or the school of  music. You’re gonna have to go somewhere else to do this. So I started doing it in the Humanities program, and I did that for a while, and then as I was doing that and that was fascinating, and I sort of ditched all the courses that I was hired to teach and just did the genius class and one basic music class. Then I got very interested in online education, and I am proud to say that I actually taught Yale’s first online course. This was 10 years ago, and it was a struggle, and they said, well, this guy is interested in this online education. Will make him academic director of online education at Yale.

Well, that sounded very impressive, the only thing was I knew very little about this, but it sounded like a really cool thing to explore. And it was. And we were doing all kinds of weird tests and things. Could we link together? This was amazing, all across the campus, eight people at once on one screen and see each other, and it all seems so primitive now, but that’s what we were doing. And it was a battle because the faculty of course thought, well, online, that’s the kiss of death, that’s gonna kill our entire teaching profession. If we have to bring efficiency to this particular market place, we’ll all be out of business.

So it was a battle. I remember going to faculty meetings and being pillaried by people that thought this was the forecast of doomsday, but lo and behold, over time, things change and you need some… You need innovation from time to time.

How I got to where I got, I think was initially having doors closed and being forced to go in different directions. Eventually I got to a place by working hard where doors began to open and I could head in a number of directions, and I would head in a particular direction, and then lo and behold, other doors would open. Wow, that’s really interesting over there. What would happen if we did that? And go into that door and it’s still going on. 

I’ve written a book here called The Hidden Habits of Genius, now I’m supposed to be writing books on medieval musicology. So how does this happen? Because I started doing academic books and realized that, hey, a best seller here is a thousand copies. You know that university presses, they’re ecstatic if they sell a thousand copies. Harper Collins is throwing a thousand copies in the gutter every second. So you realize, well, this is just so limited, could there not be more to life than this? So then I started doing text books. Well, that’s good, but you still have to write the textbook definition or that the public doesn’t want that. So what happens if you do a trade book? Well, that has the capacity of reaching hundreds of thousands, that’s very exciting, and then you learn things about that because you learn, hey, you know what, nobody’s gonna talk to you unless you have an agent. Me? Yeah, professional wise. Why would I need an agent in Manhattan?

Well, you’ve gotta have it because they won’t read your manuscript, so on and on it goes. So I’m a professor, everybody will love what I do.

How do you feel after you get about 213 rejection notices from various publishers? Well, that’s a learning experience too, but you learn as you go through all of this. You learn about marketing, publicity, you learn about podcasts, and on it goes. So it’s… For me, once the door opens, it’s just a question of, that’s interesting, let’s go over there and find out what’s over there. That will open up new doors, there’s no wrong here, there’s no decision that you make in a way that you really regret because even the ones that seem unpleasant at the time, you learn a great deal from.

Sean: Yeah, I would love exploring this curiosity, but I’m also really interested about just overall learning and skill development because early on it seems like you were pretty good at golf, pretty good at music, and then you have to have a somewhat innate ability in terms of the classroom because of the schools you were getting into. So what do you think you did early on just to develop your skills?

Craig: I just kept trying and trying different sorts of things.

For example, you said, well, you must be pretty good… Yep, I’m Captain B plus. I’m Captain A minus. Okay.

I was pretty good at golf, but not really great. I mean like the really fine players, and we would go into the technical aspects of that. I was pretty good at music, but not because I really had any gift. I have a sister who has an absolute pitch and an uncle who had an absolute pitch and he was a professional composer in New York at Hunter. So it’s floating around, but that gene passed in my gene pool there, but that gene passed me. I didn’t get any of that. And you need that if you want to… To operate at the highest level in terms of music. As to what I’m good at, I think what I found out over the years is what I am good at is taking complex issues, perhaps because I can’t do it innately or genetically, I have to sit there and analyze what the heck is going on. How can that person do this and I can’t do it? What is that person doing? I am forced because I can’t do it innately or genetically to analyze a situation and then extrapolate what is going on and explain that in simple everyday terms to the average educated reader or listener or student. I think that’s what I’m good at, distilling the essence of complex phenomena down to simple principles. 

Sean: Well, that’s the true spark of genius, isn’t it?

Craig: I think in the sciences, it is, it is. But boy, I’m no genius, no kidding.

I told my kids, I have four kids and now 7 grandchildren. I told my kids, You know, I’m running a book on genius, and each one of them goes, what?

Let’s have a reality check here. You’re a plotter. You’re no genius. And they’re absolutely right. I’m no genius. I’m not representing myself as being a genius, it’s having a… I don’t know, I have a definition of genius, and I’m certainly not a genius. I think a genius is a person who changes the world, who is so innovative that they come up with ideas that other people embrace, and as a result of that engagement with other people, and that change, the world heads in a new direction and much… I’d be delighted to think so, but I’d be delusional to say that I’m in anyway changing the world.

Sean: No, believe me, we’re gonna dive a lot into into genius, but I would love to know about your distillation process, and this could be a bit of a nuance or abstract question, but when you come across a new topic, a new person, and you’re sitting there thinking it through, do you have a specific process for that? Is it a journaling process or are you sitting there with your thoughts?

Craig: That’s… You know, funny, Sean. Nobody’s ever asked me that question. I’m not really, I’ve never really thought about that.

What am I doing here?

Oops, never thought about that.

First of all, the first thing that happens when I get something new, and usually I get something new by… It’s usually through a book, although it could be a video or audio format, as you have here with your podcast. It could be a really good Netflix show or documentary or whatever. It could be… So first thing I do, when I encounter something I think is interesting, I get very excited. It makes me happy. There’s joy here, I’m gonna learn something.

And that’s really exciting, but let’s just say that my normal process is to order a book, as I did this morning, actually, I ordered a book from a gentleman who appeared on your show, Matt Ridley. Is that correct? 

Sean: Yeah, Matt Ridley. He’s the author of quite a few books, The Evolution of Everything, and his recent one is about innovation.

Craig: So I ordered the most recent one, because there seems to be some overlap on what he was doing, and what I was interested in. So I’m waiting to get that and it will arrive tomorrow courtesy of this hugely innovative genius Jeff Bezos. And so that will come and I will start to read it, and I will start to think about… The first thing I will do is when I get the book, the next thing I do is reach for a pencil because I’m, or a pen, because I’m very old school in this way. I will sit with a book and I will underline and I will think about it, and I’m a very slow reader. I’ll think about the sentences, I’ll think about the ideas, and I will write in the margin, I will underline, circle and write in the margin points to be remembered or disagreements with that particular line. So is a dialogue, it’s a conversation with me and an authority figure and that’s one of… In my book there, it didn’t have the genius… One of the things I keep banging on about is be a contrarian. Think backwards, argue, be argumentative, and that in a way, something I’ve learned with my teaching over the years that has evolved enormously from when I started as a montessori librarian and where I continue to teach today. So that’s a work in progress, Sean. I gotta think more carefully about what it is that I’m doing as I’m doing it. I haven’t really thought about that. I’ll try to do better next time.

Sean: No, I mean that’s a pretty good start when you’re able to argue the opposing side. That really distills down your thinking, clears it up. You mentioned when you first received the book, you take out your pen or pencil, do you do anything else prior before opening page one? Do you write down any thoughts of it or anything like that, or do you just dive right into the book? 

Craig: I hope… I hope it’s not gonna be a disappointment, I hope it’s… So there are a lot of things out there in titles, that’s just, there’s no there there. And to be direct, there’s a lot of How To books, how you can improve your life, buy my book and seven steps that’ll change your life forever. There’s no… Oftentimes there’s very little substance there, and my process, I came at this exact opposite, I was really seriously studying all these smart people. No kidding, I was going to … to look at Mozart autographs in Berlin, to look at Mozarts autographs, I would go to Florence to see what I could see there about Leonardo DaVinci. I’ve been in the Ambrosian [Library] in Milan to look at… They didn’t allow me to touch any originals of Leonardo DaVinci, but I’ve seen them right up close, and the books themselves are right in a case two feet from me. So I’ve really tried to get in there and really get into the essence of the subject matter, and that’s how I was gonna come at this. Just with the people and the materials, and then you try to shop a book along these lines, and every publisher and editor will say, well, we’ve kind of seen this before, what we’re interested in here are a few takeaways. How can this book change your life? Well, I was kind of disappointed in that because I thought that might be a non-sense. The shocking thing is, and it sounds like a bold-faced pitch here, the shocking thing is at the end, end of the process, lo and behold, my life really did change as a result of engaging the lives of these great minds, these great figures over time. I started to think and I continue to think in radically different ways than I did at the outset of this particular project. So if I say, writing this book changed my life, it can change yours too. This is not just the slimey sales pitch. In my case, I think it’s true.

Sean: Like I mentioned, I got to explore the book this weekend, and I read the whole thing and definitely had some fascinating, interesting takeaways. Not only am I a big fan of genius and history, and many of the legendary leaders throughout time, but some of those takeaways have me looking at life in a little bit different matter as well…

Craig: Don’t try to be a genius, it’ll make everybody miserable. Sorry, I interrupted, go ahead.

Sean: No, I even just wanna know a little bit more about where was this fascination for you? You were teaching music, I wanna know what really was it where you said, I’m gonna go down this rabbit hole of understanding geniuses.

Craig: Yeah, well, the thing that’s always interested me is the biographies of people. I’m interested in literature and fiction, yes, but it’s the biographies, the human aspect of this, and I can’t explain… I can’t explain why that this is the case, it may be here, it is nature, it is genetics that is driving me here. It’s the people often times as much as the product or the artifact, or the painting or the scientific theory that excites me.

What’s going on in this person’s mind? How do they do that? It’s the people. 

Sean: The people. I’m deeply interested in the people. Maybe that’s why I was pulled to your work as well. You defined Genius a little while ago, but I’m also interested in just knowing what isn’t a genius. I thought you did a good job pulling that out just to paint a clear picture on who actually isn’t a genius when we think they are.

Craig: Yeah, okay. So I’m not a genius. Grade point average, high IQ,… Well, so and so is, she’s so smart, she’s a genius, she’s got an IQ of 145 and she just pulled two 800s, or maybe the 800s on the SAT test. She’s a genius, and the one thing that I’ve learned over time, I really do think it’s true, and I try to discuss this with my grandchildren, much to the consternation of their parents, my children, is that this idea of a high IQ score and a super high SAT score, and a super high ACT scores, great scores in the GRE, that may not be a reliable monitor or a marker of genius.

There are probably other things that are much more important to changing the world than a high IQ score. So in raw intelligence, smarts, whatever that is, they come in different forms, and only a very small part of that is actually measured on a standardized test. We used them because they’re standardized and they’re very efficient testing a very limited type of thing. So what genius is not is a brainiac, the kind stereotype of the brainiac with a high IQ score.

Sean: In addition to the high IQ, you also say how there’s two different things here in terms of talent and genius, correct?

Craig: Yeah, I think lots of us are talented. I’m sure you are talented at what you do, Sean. I’m talented in some ways, having figured out what I do, but that’s not genius, and as we’ve said before, there are successful people in… There are geniuses in this world, and there are successful people. And we need them both. We need the geniuses to change the world to get us out of dilemmas such as the current pandemic, for example, and we need successful people to execute their ideas, to ratify their ideas, to bring their ideas into a practical form for everyday life.

So a successful person is a person who… But let’s start with the genius. The genius is a person who sort of thinks outside the box, that’s the kind of paradigm there. Thinking outside the box of innovative, somewhat rebellious and so on. A successful person has probably figured out how to make the box better, or staying within the box and making it the very best possible box that it can be, and a successful person might know how to play well within that box and make that box work for them. Maybe they get into an Ivy League school or they do well on the SAT test. They get into an Ivy League school, and then they go on to become an investment banker or something like this, or whatever the paradigm in excellence may happen to be today, but I guess the point is that they are successful people. They learn how to play the game, geniuses are people who change the game, they really are game-changers.

Sean: Yeah, you’ve got one of those quotes I love and I’m gonna butcher whoever said it, and also the quote might’ve been … about… Talent can hit a target that no one else can hit…

Craig: Oh yeah…

Sean: … Genius can hit a target no one else can see.

Craig: Yeah, that was Arthur Schopenhauer, a german philosopher. No, I have trouble with that one too, and I can’t tell you how much time I have spent trying to track back the original to… Because that philosophy is a three… That book is published in three volumes over a 30 year period in various editions and when did he say it? Where did he say it and what addition do I find that original German and what were the German words for? And that’s what a good scholar will do, and that’s what I was trained to do, but that’s where that comes from, a person of talent can hit the target and no one else can hit. A person of genius can hit the target that no one else can see.

In other words, think or see outside the box.

Sean: No, I absolutely love that. One of the things I’m really intrigued by is just the point in time someone’s living, and I’m wondering today with access to technology and how connected we are globally, is this a point in time where there’s a likelihood to have more geniuses throughout the world?

Craig: That’s a very good question from a number of points of view. Is it a point in time where we’re likely to have fewer geniuses than we had before? Now, a couple of points. A couple of thoughts here, one, there’s maybe a difference between genius, exceptional human accomplishment in the arts and in human relations, we’ll call them the political science, politics, whatever you want to call them… There may be a difference between that and in science and technology. To some extent, and again, this was a point that a previous guest Matt Ridley had emphasized was that it had never been easier to get information because of the internet, and if one of the first steps in being a genius is to have the experience and gather a great deal of information, this is a great time to be alive, as he said, because you can so quickly pull together so much information. He’s absolutely right. 20 years ago, we were all going to the library. It’s a big advantage to be a student or a professor at Yale ’cause you had this great library. Now that advantage has been equalized all around the world because everybody has access. Nobody goes into the library to look at a book anymore, they’re going for coffee, they’re going to talk, that’s all great. But I’ll go in and pull out a book off the shelf, look at the stamp, and the last time the book was taken out of there, it was 20 years ago, nobody’s back on the bookcase, it’s all available online.

So more and more information is now available. In theory, there should be more game-changing geniuses out there. The other interesting thing, however, and people ask for some rhetoric, was Albert Einstein, the last scientific genius in other words, solo genius, the single individual. Because as time goes on, and it’s exemplified by what’s happening today with the coronavirus, it’s the genius of the team that is supplanting the individual geniu., It’s the genius of the research lab, think about it. We’re now waiting for a vaccine for COVID, right?

Okay, there’s AstraZeneca out there, there’s a Pfizer. There’s Moderna There may be Merck, Johnson and Johnson. Have we heard, Sean, have you heard on the news about scientists so-and so working at AstraZeneca, genius B, working for Moderna? No, it’s all a group of people, it’s a whole research lab. Maybe hundreds of people doing this. Why? Because maybe so much of the information, the information is so enormous that no one individual can control it all. So we need to have specialists that need to cooperate amongst themselves. So that’s interesting to watch. Maybe in science and technology, it’s the genius of the team that’s coming to the fore in this particular day and age, and that would have been very different, let’s say back in the day of Leonardo DaVinci where he was working entirely about himself.

Sean: You mentioned this amongst the team and then you bring up a specialist, which has me wondering about the whole Fox versus Hedgehog. The fox knows many things. The hedgehog knows one thing specifically.

So how do you view that now, moving forward? Is it still more beneficial to be that Fox to be able to aggregate and pull from all these different domains?

Craig: Well, I have, I have always been a great fan of, a great proponent of the fox. Go fox, go fox, go fox. I don’t go around wearing a hedgehog sweatshirt, and I do not have a hedgehog hat when they go to the Hedgehog Fox contest.

I’m a big believer in the Fox, because even when you look at the people, the transformative people around the world, you look at Mozart, you look at Picasso, you look at Einstein, well Einstein was just a specialist in physics. No, Einstein knew a great deal about other things. He knew a great deal about psychology, particularly about philosophy, he knew a huge amount about music, who is his favorite composer? Mozart. He said, if I were not a physicist, I would be a professional musician, he was a violinist. He wasn’t a great violinist, he was once playing in a string quartet, and they stopped and he said, Albert, you have to learn to count. But he was in there, he knew about it, he knew how it worked, and I think that… And he talks about how when he had a scientific block, kind of writer’s block for scientists, he would put things aside and he would just go play Mozart for a while. It probably relaxed him, it probably took down some barriers that are blocking associative linkage in his brain. Relax, play Mozart, he’s got this perfect patterning up there, you may be able to see patterns in the sciences, and he didn’t see up to that point, and back he would come. And we’re not making this up. His son, Hans Albert, comments on this a couple of times. So it’s that kind of thing. 

All of these A-list people, I think whether it’s Picasso, Mozart, Leonardo, Einstein, they are polymaths, they are auto-didactic, self-teaching, curious, polymaths. They want to know everything that they get they can get their hands on. 

Sean: You mentioned when he’s having one of those scientific mental blocks, he’ll play the violin. What do you do when you’re having one of those blocks and you’re trying to open up the mind?

Craig: Well, I have a theory about this, and it’s once again, it’s kind of… This is such a vernacular BS. There are things that you can do. Here’s what I’ve learned to do. No kidding, it’s true.

Relaxation. Well, you wanna be a genius, gotta get out there and concentrate. Relaxation is hugely important for coming up with new ideas.

When do I get my best ideas? There are two streams here, one is the unconscious and psychologists, neuroscientists have worked through this, and I’m simply repeating in general terms what they come up with, but the brain continues to operate and is thinking about things sort of subliminally multitasking underneath that, and sometimes when we sleep it is continuing to work, and sometimes when we wake up immediately after a deep sleep, the brain is continuing to work. And again, neuroscientists, they know all about these neurotransmitters, and how it’s in the bloodstream in particular times and allow you to be more creative. If you capture those moments when you’re accessing your subconscious and your barriers to creativity are all taken down and you can link ideas that hither to four had not been linked. When you do that, particularly early in the morning, either by capturing a dream or just sitting thinking about things in your mind. I could run through a list of a dozen major scientific breakthroughs and artistic breakthroughs by major figures that Beethoven, Strovinsky, the very discovery … etcetera, etcetera. The periodic table were done as a result of work accomplished during dreams. Paul McCartney, Yesterday, the song came to him in a dream, he said.

So the first thing you’re going to do, get a pen and paper and put it right next to your bed. The shower, same thing, because you get in their first thing in the morning, it’s probably 70% of the great ideas we had according to one survey come out of the office, but in the shower in the morning, keep pen and paper right next to the shower as well, because you can forget this things when you get your ideas.

What else do I do? I try to relax by going for a walk. You can do the same thing on a treadmill. That’s fine. The only thing is you can’t take your exercise very seriously. If you say, okay, don’t look at my watch say, okay, I’ve got to get to one mile, I gotta get there by seven minutes… You see how old I am? That’d be a good day. Nine minutes in. Nine minutes, I gotta get to the end of that mile by nine minutes. Let’s get going. Legs gotta push, push, push. Now, that’s a total waste of time if you wanna be creative. You’ve got to just get in the flow, get into a nice pattern of movement and relax and just disassociate. And curiously, the same thing happens when listening to music, you don’t want to listen to the lyrics, you just want to listen to the rhythm and go with the flow. The same thing happens if you go to a beach, you can sit there and just look at the waves, because it’s this regular relaxing patterns or the number here people that have been in a rocking conveyance, whether it’s Beethoven, whether it’s J.K. Rowling, whether it’s Walt Disney, who in some kind of a conveyance coach or train had a major insight because of the rocking, presumably because the relaxing quality of the repetitive rocking motion of that vehicle has allowed them to have insights that they didn’t realize were in there.

Sean: Yeah, I love hearing about these. I try to tap into many of those, and it’s funny prior to knowing the benefits of the subconscious mind working at times, you can’t take advantage of these, but then once I had discovered these, even if I’d wake up in the middle of the night, I’d almost sit there and just continue to think because of the interesting creative thoughts I could come up with, and similar during times of exercise. There’s times I’m not trying to peak my heart rate because I’m trying to get in that slow steady state zone where my mind can drift off.

Craig: Yeah, and it’s interesting, you probably get these things, the newspapers do word scrambles where they give you six letters and you can’t figure it out. I don’t play with this very much, my wife does and she’ll look at this in the morning, she’ll be… And then she’ll go off an exercise and she’ll come back and, oh yeah, there it is, there it is, there it is. It’s just that you’re not focusing, you’re relaxing, and we can just kind of have it all come into place at that particular time?

Sean: Yeah, so talking about de-focusing. One of the things that was brought up in the book, and any really successful person I’ve been around, I’ve noticed there’s time so that when they need to focus, they can block out every extra thing and they can just get down and focus. What did you discover about this within the geniuses you’ve studied?

Craig: I think that’s absolutely true. So that’s the flip side of this. And in my book, I save those two chapters for the end, the penultimate one is called basically “Relax,” and the last ones called “Now It’s Time to Concentrate,” ’cause you gotta get the work product out the door. Okay, so you gotta take those notes that you took early in the morning when you’re relaxing and take them into your study. The one thing that I found studying the lives of all of these geniuses is this, A) There’s no such thing as a lazy genius. They all are extremely hard working. Do they think this as work? No, it is their passion, it’s what they want to do. They may be running over people all around them, just treating them like road kill in their personal lives, but nonetheless they do this because they’re obsessive, but what they all have, what they all have in common is a habit for work. So that’s another hidden habit here. Get a habit for work. Now, the habits are all very different for the most part with each individual. They call them different things, they call, I gotta get in my flow today, I gotta get it in my ritual, it could be an actual habit. Gotta get in a pattern, whatever term you wanna use, but they get into a daily routine that is always the same.

Why do they do that? They do that because it saves time, it saves psychic energy. There are no extraneous things that you have to deal with. When you get to your work zone, then it’s interesting what they have in that work. So another thing that saves time is not to be distracted. Some people disengage from all technical things such as email or internet connectivity, and they’ll just sit in there and write on a computer. So that’s another thing one can take that to various degrees of extreme, most of us, of course, we need the internet to get information from so we have to say stay going back and forth. Another thing I like to do, and I think others do as well, is put pictures of photos of the people we love around us, I don’t know why that is useful. I find it comforting. I then put some pictures I have in my office study here, I could show you and reach from here, I’ll reach for that. Alright, I can just see it anyway. I’ll reach for one in which I think was leading the Yale Commencement. They were kind enough when I retired to let me be the grand marshal of the Yale Commencement. There I am leading the Yale Commencement, and I have a picture of that. And I thought that was pretty cool. 

Well, I must not be a complete failure here, each of us were trying to be creative, we’re trying to do our own thing, but God every morning you wake up and say, this is… You write a paragraph, you come back the next day. What could I have been thinking? This is terrible, this is nonsense, you’re worthless, this is a total waste of time. So you need these markers in your life to say, no, you’re not a complete failure because look, you did that, maybe you can do this again, and ultimately also we need in our lives, inspiration, and I think we in our habit of work, it helps to have in the office people we admire. I’m reminded and sometimes you can see pictures, engravings of great people’s offices. 

There is one, for example, from Johannes Brahms, and he has in his office standing over his piano, a huge engraving of Beethoven, sort of Beethoven looking over his shoulder. With Einstein, he had three seminal… He had portraits, pictures of three seminal figures in his life, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and don’t ask me to third, because I can’t remember who… 

Sean: Two out of three is good enough anyway.

Craig: It might have been Max Plunk. I don’t really remember, but in any event, get tangible images of people you admire. I’m reaching over now just for fun and picking up the kind of little statue here of Nikola Tesla, which I have right right over there, and you can attest, ’cause you’re seeing it. You can attest to the fact that it’s really, really there. So get support around you, get love around you and get inspiration around you.

Sean: I would love learning about your teaching process and all the years, the courses you’ve taught. I know you’ve taught even specifically on genius. What have you learned about uncovering these geniuses that just helped you in your teaching process?

Craig: That’s a good, good question. Great question, because my approach to teaching has turned 180 degrees since I started out.

I started out by thinking that the model… I think I was watching other people and you always tend to imitate what your superiors do. So I was starting out with a model of the so-called sage on the stage. Remember what that is? You go into the classroom, the kids come in and some inevitably antiquarian white male ascends the stage, holding a yellow legal pad and begins to read notes, academic scripture off of the book of wisdom here.

Meanwhile, the kids are falling asleep and modern times you’d be looking for shoes on their computer on the Internet. Totally done that.

And I think the seminal moment for me came when I was reading of all things a passage of Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, which is a superb piece of writing in a very superb piece of fiction, and I have my kids in the genius class read that every day, and it’s… It’s really a series of public lectures that she came to and she begins to somebody saying, ladies and gentlemen, “I come to you tonight not to hand you a nugget of wisdom, which you can wrap up in your notebook and take home with you.” And boy, that really stuck in my mind, that’s not what teaching is about. There are no such things as giving people a nugget of wisdom, so as time went on, I began to see that, strangely enough, that the old Socratic method was far much more valuable that you would throw out questions and you would have people… You would have a goal that maybe there is something that we could say approximates truth. You have a goal and you would try to get people to that goal through a series of questions. As time went on, I began to refine that a bit. Yes, we need information, and there’s a new book out by a gentleman named Hersch that was reviewed recently in the Wall Street Journal, doesn’t really matter. I think that’s his name, about education, and it says how we are messing up education because we’re not teaching people enough facts. I would push back about that. I would say it’s very important to gather facts, all of these geniuses gather facts and they bring them in. You’ve got to know stuff, that’s the first part of the creative process. You’ve got to have stuff in your head, and then you gotta re-combine it in new and exciting, innovative ways.

So yes, we need when teaching to get information out there. So as time went on, what I would do would be to develop a two-fold approach. One, we will get the information out there with an assigned reading and almost pure as it seems, then they would come into class, and we would have a quiz first thing every morning in the genius class, first eight minutes, we would have a quiz on that reading of the previous night. Okay, that means the facts are in there. Okay. We’ve got the facts. Now, let’s have a go at it. 

Are the facts correct? Can you think of alternative solutions to those facts? How could those facts be combined in innovative, new ways? How could someone who happened to be reared on a Navajo Indian reservation have a completely different interpretation of these facts? How can someone from Brooklyn have a completely different view of all of this? What is truth? And it would be an argumentation and this… I was able to do this a couple of times, and as time went on, people took interest in this, and I would have to cap the class at about 100 because there was no more room in the room in which I was teaching, which I like for that.

So these arguments would break out and the arguments would become a very animated and once it happened that I would ask, this argument was going. I was able to just sneak out of the classroom in the side door, and I don’t think they noticed. And that was the best class I ever taught.

Sean: It’s remarkable, it’s almost like your current day you’re reading process where you’re almost having these arguments against yourself, so you’re seeing both sides. Is that somewhat on track there?

Craig:  I guess so. You know again, Sean, that’s something that I ever thought of. Maybe you have… It’s like me dealing with genius, you don’t know what you’re doing. It takes an outsider to examine you and to see what you’re doing maybe. Do I have to pay you for this day? Am I going to get a bill for my psychiatrist, Sean Delaney, at the end of this session? I hope not. You may be entitled to send me one, but… I wasn’t expecting it.

Sean: Yeah, no, I always love distilling it and pulling out different threads and thoughts. Two more things I would love hitting on in terms of geniuses, and these are things that we’ve somewhat hit on, and I’m just so fascinated, and the first is gonna be just at a rebel mentality. And is that true amongst all the geniuses, they’ve got a little rebellious-ness in them?

Craig: They would have to in a sense. If you’re gonna change the box, you’ve gotta be able to see things outside the box. I think what really happened, you could call them rebels, they’re just annoyed.

They’re annoyed by something that they see and they say, that’s not right, or it could be better than it. Why not do it this way? And whether it’s a painting or a scientific theory. Einstein in effect said the Newton said it very politely and he realized he was borrowing greatly from Newton. But you know what, Newton saying the theory of gravity, it’s just not quite right there. What Picasso started painting with something famous is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which is now the iconic piece in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It would look crazy at the time, but that’s what he thought was really involved in art. That’s what he thought the message of art was. 

So you could call them rebels, you could call them outsiders, they are comfortable with being outsiders. They are comfortable with not being immediately appreciated, because they are so convinced that their vision of the world, what the world might be is correct, that they are willing to persevere in the face of negativity and denial. 

Sean: Is that how the relationship with the risk evolves where they almost don’t view risk the same way because they have such a deep-seated belief?

Craig:  Wow, that’s a very interesting… That’s a very interesting way of looking at it. I haven’t looked at it in that fashion.

Excuse me, Sean, I wanna phone into my edit… Stop the presses. We gotta insert a new thought here. I hadn’t really thought of that, that the correlation between self-confidence and risk, they can’t believe that they’re going to get it wrong. I was looking at it from the point of, well, these are just very courageous people that they realized that there are liabilities out there, dangers out there, but they’re willing to assume this liability or this danger. It may be, as you are suggesting that they don’t see the dangers. They have such enormous self-confidence in their vision, that they are able to pursue that vision, not being aware of the dangers. They couldn’t possibly be wrong, so this must be the right path, there is no risk here. I’m right.

Sean: Yeah, I guess we’ll have to continue to monitor that against some of the current day geniuses and maybe another 100 years not to explore that one a little bit further, but there’s three geniuses… 

Craig: That’s a good point that, I’m sorry to interrupt, that’s a good point, ’cause with all of this, as one of the criteria of my definition of geniuses, duration. This has to last for a period of time, you can’t be an overnight, have five minutes of success and everybody forgets you.

So we’ll have to wait. You’re absolutely right, Sean, we’ll have to wait and come, we’ll re-assemble in 100 years and see how this is turning out.

Sean: No, I’d love to do that.

So there’s three geniuses that I’ve just been fascinated with for a while, and I would love to just here you’re just a short couple sentence paragraph for each one, and the first one being Einstein.

Craig: Interesting figure, a great mind, not necessarily a great human being. Externally, a great human being, concerned about the welfare of all, but internally within his own family, whether it was a daughter, an illegitimate daughter that he sired and simply allowed to be forgotten, or whether it was his second of three children that he had institutionalized in Switzerland and never visited for the last 10 years of his life. What he did with the money that was supposed to go to Mileva Marić, his first wife. It’s not a happy story in that regard, it brings up the issue of sort of public persona of the genius and private reality. So a fascinating person, just the go-to guy for a book on genius, but it points out some of the things about genius.

Sean: What about your music man, Mozart?

Craig: Love him.

If there were one guy you’d want to invite to dinner, it would be Mozart, why? Because A) Contrary to what you might think, he was a polymath. He knew a lot of stuff about a lot of different things, particularly mathematics. He was enormously curious, he was enamored with puzzles and games, he was a prankster, he was hugely funny, just riffing on jokes instantly and plays on words because he could speak five languages fluently. He was a great dancer, he was apparently a great lover. And by the way, did I mention, he happened to be maybe the finest musical composer who ever lived. So I think it’d be Moazart, because if he wasn’t telling a joke, he could hop over right or the piano and entertain you in that fashion and you’d be delighted to sit there for hours.

Sean: Yeah, no, being honest, I haven’t actually even dove into any of Mozart’s biographies or writings about him. I listen to his music quite frequently when I’m trying to read, but…

Craig: Sean, I got a great tip for you. Just go watch the film Amadeus. It’s not absolutely correct about Mozart, but it’s an old film now, it’s now 35 years old, but it did win 12 Academy Awards, which is the highest number I believe ever accumulated by one film. Amadeus about 1985. Go watch that. It’s a quick entry, quick and fun and hugely entertaining entry into Mozart. 

Sean: I’ll definitely have to do that. And then what about Leonardo DaVinci?

Craig: If I were to say who is, it would be a tie, I think between who are the greatest genius in your experience, and I’m dealing here essentially with genius is in the Western History of Western culture. Who are the two greatest geniuses that you ran into in your study? I would say coming in at number in second position would be William Shakespeare, because all of the human mind, all of the human experiences, the loves, the hates, the envy, the failure, the hopes, they’re all in there, and he knew them and he is able to… It is extraordinary. We could almost sign off, quit the rest of our lives and just go read Shakespeare because it would save time, it’s all in there.

And in first place, coming in first place as the world’s all time unbelievable genius, it would have to be Leonardo DaVinci. He had no education, he was an illegitimate child, and he could not be educated in traditional terms. In retrospect, that may have been a huge advantage because he went out there and figured it all out on, all of this stuff himself and he was trying to figure out everything. He’d climb the tops of mountains in the Apennines there. And what would he find? He’d find fossils of fish. Fish? How did fish bones get up here? How old is this Earth?

So he was interested in geology, he’s interested in visual aspects of distance perception. He’s interested in zoology, and that studying animals and figures out lo and behold, that when a dragonfly flies, it’s back two wings are up higher than the front two wings. Who knew that? Who can see that? How do you have this kind of power of observation to know that? And on and on it goes. He took apart things. He took apart machines to figure out how they worked, and in so doing, figured out how new machines worked, and most importantly, he took apart the human body through his dissection and he totally rewrote, although people at the time didn’t know it. He totally rewrote the text book of human anatomy. How the heart works. It actually has four chambers. Not two chambers. He identified arteriosclerosis, for example, he figured out, that we actually see by light coming into our eyes rather than a kind of flashlight effect with light going outside of our eyes. My favorite quote of Leonardo DaVinci, and maybe I should stop with this, is the following: He writes in one of his notebooks, “Read me well, oh reader for you will never see my likes again,” and that sounds like hubris, but in my opinion, he was right.

Sean: Yeah, I’ve had a deep fascination with Leonardo for a long time now, so I love that riff right there. Getting to hear more about him. A couple more questions, I would love knowing though, because in your book, throughout your link to so many different sources and you’re clearly so widely read. Have there been just a couple of books throughout your life that have had tremendous impact for you?

Craig: Books that really… I think two books.

One is, it seems a strange book and nobody ever really reads. It’s called The Measure of Reality by Alfred Crosby. Measure of Reality by Alford Crosby.

Alfred Crosby was a biologist, epidemiologist, who taught at the University of Texas, but he was not a medievalist, and he was not necessarily trained as a mathematician, but he writes all about quantification in the West at the end of the Middle Ages. How the Western world came to see the world differently than the rest of the world at that particular time. Then from the Mid-East or the Far East, that had to do with bringing in a measurement and measurement in terms of distances, measurements in terms of organ pipes and measurement in terms of just calculation so that commerce could develop. So that’s The Measure of Reality by Alfred Crosby, a little known book, but it always had a… It was very impressive in my life.

Another book that impressed me that I think influenced me was strangely enough, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because it sort of gives you a sense of what it would mean. Joyce is clearly a genius. If you could just write A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, you’d have to be a genius because so many people have read it. I’ve read it and influenced my life. It changed my world because it gives you a sense of what an average, in this case, usually above average person goes through in the course of their development experiences and suggests that these are things that happen and these are things that can happen. If they happen to him, it could happen to you. So a spring board in a sense for people launching into life as they begin their life’s journey. So that’s James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Sean: Two books I’ve never read, so I love getting new recommendations. Final one though, if you could only listen to one more piece of music the rest of your life, what would that be?

Craig: That’s a good question.

Coming in once again, number two would be, I love Beethoven, we all think of Beethoven, it’s the 250th anniversary of his birth this year, 2020. We all love Beethoven and I suppose the one piece we all know by Beethhoven is the Ode to Joy of the Ninth Symphony. Okay, so we all know that, but there’s another movement in that symphony, another section of that symphony, it’s very, very beautiful, and I think that it’s slow. It is Majestic. It is thoughtful. It is human. And it is restful.

So in terms of what are you gonna be listening to Craig as you check out of this world, that would be number two. Number one, as when I check out is going to be the … I have now been married for 42 years to my beloved wife, Sharon. There was a piece written by Richard Strauss called Im Abendrot, in the red glow of sunset, and it’s about sunset being used as a metaphor for life and the love between these two individuals, and it was written as a song dedicated to his wife who was then married to for 50 something years, Pauline. And it’s exquisitely beautiful, I would write that down. It’s late flamboyant, romantic style, but it’s both heroic, it’s both soothing, it’s both exhilarating and exquisitely beautiful, and as I say, in life, you cannot really appreciate beauty unless you share it with someone whom you love, and I think that’s true. 

So maybe you have to listen to this with somebody else, or at the very least, you have to listen to this thinking of someone else knowing that that’s someone else, either in your imagination or in reality actually exists.

Sean: I’m not sure there’s a better place to wrap up there.

Craig Wright, the book is The Hidden Habits of Genius: Genius Beyond Talent, IQ and Grit, Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness. This was a book I really did enjoy. Of course, we’re gonna have it linked up in the show notes and provide the listeners every available access to purchase the book. Anything else you want them knowing about the book or yourself.

Craig: No, I feel obliged because it’s a wonderful team working behind me, once again, say if you need it, all you have to do is go to Amazon and punch in the search box there, Craig Wright genius and the book will come up. That’s one thing I’d like to say. The final thing I would like to say is thank you, Sean, very much for inviting me. I had fun, I hope I don’t get arrested, and I hope one day or another, you invite me back again, so thanks to you, Sean. 

Sean: This is a true pleasure. Once again, thanks for joining us on What Got You There.