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- [00:01]
Elise Hu
Hi TED Podcast listeners. It's Elise Hu here from TED Talks Daily. Thanks for making our podcast part of your routine. We really appreciate it and we want to make your favorite TED podcasts even better. We put together a quick survey and we'd love to hear from you. It only takes a few minutes, but it helps us shape our shows and get to know you, our listeners, way better. Head to the episode description to find the link. Thank you again for listening and for taking the time to help our shows.
- [00:33]
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- [01:05]
Adam Grant (Host)
What's up? Adam Grant from Work Life, A TED podcast here and I want to tell you about something exciting. You're watching every dollar and Walmart Business helps you stretch each one from office supplies to snacks and cleaning gear. You'll get everyday low prices plus easy bulk ordering and fast delivery. And with tools like spend tracking and multi user accounts, staying organized is simple. Save time, money and hassle. @business.walmart.com it's free to sign up.
- [01:31]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
This episode is sponsored by IBM.
- [01:34]
Adam Grant (Host)
Is your AI built for everyone or is it built to work with the tools your business relies on? IBM's AI agents are tailored to your business and can easily integrate with the tools you're already using so they can work across your business, not just some parts of it. Get started with AI agents@IBM.com the AI built for business IBM.
- [01:55]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
The way that we talk about exceptional achievement is often not actually grounded in reality. I think it's healthier to talk about acts of genius than people as geniuses.
- [02:08]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant.
- [02:09]
Adam Grant (Host)
Welcome back to Rethinking My Podcast with TED on the Science of what Makes us Tick. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.
- [02:26]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
My guest today is journalist Helen Lewis.
- [02:28]
Adam Grant (Host)
She's a provocative writer whose work makes.
- [02:30]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
Me think even when I disagree with her. With her new book, the Genius Myth.
- [02:34]
Adam Grant (Host)
She challenges our attachment to the idea of genius and warns us about the risks of putting so called geniuses on a pedestal.
- [02:47]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Genius.
- [02:47]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
You titled your book the Genius Myth does that mean you think geniuses don't exist?
- [02:52]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Yeah, I laid that trap right out for myself, didn't I? No, I do think that extraordinary achievement and talent both exist. And actually, those are things that should be celebrated because they make the world a little bit more special and precious. But what I mean by myth is a sense of, like, these are stories, you know, stories you would probably heard in school, you know, like Isaac Newton and the apple, or, you know, these things that are just kind of too perfect. And that's because they're not biography, they're mythology. They're about turning these people into something bigger, something special, you know, making them either secular saints or halfway to gods or celebrities, you know, all of those things you might call them. But I do, you know, just to fess up, I do say in the book that I think it's healthier to talk about acts of genius than people as geniuses, because it just, you know, for a start, I mean, this is related to the work that you've done about giving and taking. Right. It acknowledges the fact that you don't do all this stuff on your own. No matter how singular a talent you are, there are always people who are vital to everything that you do. And, you know, we so want stories to have protagonists, that the pressure always from outsiders should be to kind of try and restore the fullness and context to those stories.
- [03:58]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
I think that's fair and actually helpful at the same time. There's a part of me as a psychologist that wants to say, but people who repeatedly engage in acts of genius, shouldn't we describe them then as geniuses?
- [04:12]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Okay, okay, let's grant it and say we do that. Why? Why do you want to do that? The question is, what does it do? Well, tell you what, it certainly does. It helps you market them as a brand. Right. One of the lists I have in the book is all the ways that Einstein is used to sell stuff, you know, like baby Einstein toys. And then he's appearing in, like, Verizon adverts, because this is the smart choice that you would make for, you know, your communications technology. And so turning people into these symbols undoubtedly helps them make more money, helps them become more famous, helps their children and families continue to keep cashing in on their legacy. Whether or not it produces more of the kind of work that you'd like to see in the world, I think is a slightly more open question. Right. And that's what I think you and I probably both want to see. But I want the maximum amount of cool stuff in the world. And actually, what stories do you tell to people? How do you treat them in a way that encourages them to fulfill their best potential versus what I think sometimes happens, which is people get stuck and calcified into this role in public life that they've been cast in.
- [05:13]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
Fascinating. Well, I guess I'm inclined to come down on your side of this, which is gonna make for a very boring beginning of the conversation.
- [05:20]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
No, don't do it. Yeah.
- [05:22]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
I don't want to agree so early, but I do think the danger of calling someone a genius is not only that it creates this image of them that's unrealistic, but also I worry a lot about the self image effects, that it goes to their head. And pretty soon we start to inflate egos into a trap of narcissism.
- [05:41]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Right. And I want to ask you something, because I remember reading, I can't remember who it was who said after, you know, having their first big success, they felt really unhappy and they felt really worried that, like, has the biggest success I've ever had in my life happened, like, and who am I now?
- [05:55]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
I think that that kind of doubt is healthy. It keeps us questioning ourselves. It keeps us growing. It keeps us not believing the flattery that people bestow on us. And I think, I think that's how you maintain humility as you gain confidence and skill.
- [06:11]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Oh, I think you're right. I think there's a way to approach it which is brilliant. Like, people are now going to be more likely to let me take a risk. Right. Because if they believe in me and that I can deliver something at a high level, maybe I can push it. What you don't want to go is the bad route where people encourage you to do the same thing you just did again, but slightly less good.
- [06:29]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
Well, I think in the book you do a wonderful job encouraging us to think more systematically and maybe be less distracted by these constructions in the world of people that we see as towering figures. And I think this, this idea of let's think about acts of genius rather than people who are geniuses, I think that's a great distinction. It made me think about the ways that we've looked at genius throughout history. And I was starting to think about a perspective that Liz Gilbert first put on my radar, which is that in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, they didn't say, you are a genius, they said, you have a genius. Like, it was a creative spirit that was visiting you and you were lucky when it showed up. You didn't know how long it would stay or once it left if it would ever be back or when it would return. And I'm curious about how your view of acts of genius differs from that ancient Greek or Roman view.
- [07:25]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Well, yeah, I don't necessarily believe in the kind of supernatural element to it, but I think it is a useful way of thinking about it because it explains what is for lots of people, a fundamentally inexplicable process. Right. I mean, I'm sure you've had situations where you've tried to sit down to write something and it just will. It just will not come out. Like, it's just. There's like some kind of blockage versus the hallowed golden day when you sit down, put your fingers on your keyboard and it is, it does feel like. Like fire is flowing out of your fingers, like it's all just happening for you. And there's no real way to distinguish between when that will happen and when that won't. That's why I think the Greeks and Romans did talk about foror poeticus and foror divinus, you know, the divine fury that kind of went through you because is ultimately that act of creativity. It's completely inexplicable. There's a whole bunch of stuff you can do to make it more likely to succeed, but then you have to wait for the lightning strike. So I really do, I do think about that. And I wonder if a lot of the way that we talk about genius now, I think is probably down to an increasingly secular society and we've kind of made ourselves little demigods rather than having this kind of pre enlightenment view that you were just a kind of vessel. I mean, that's when the word genius really begins to turn, is like 16, 17, 1800, from having a genius to being ageing genius.
- [08:40]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
I think in some ways we were shedding aspects of having a genius that were not useful to people. Right. The idea that it's completely out of my control, that I just have to wait for the spirit to arrive, that could be extremely demotivating. It could also cause me to fail to learn from what are the habits that caused lightning to strike more often versus prevent it from coming. But it sounds like you think in doing that we also took on some aspects of genius that are not so productive.
- [09:11]
Adam Grant (Host)
Why?
- [09:12]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
What happened culturally that led us to say we need to reify people as geniuses?
- [09:17]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
My really deep cut is I wonder if it's about capitalism. Sorry, that makes me like maybe everything is capitalism. No, but I do wonder if you get the era of kind of mass technology, mass journalism, Mass production from the Industrial Revolution onwards. And then you move from, if you're an artist, for example, having to look at kind of patterns, patronage, or if you're a scientist, you might be the, you know, a court physician or whatever it might be, to actually maybe being an independent entity acting in a market. And I think at that point being able to sell your brand, you. Your personal brand, I think existed as far back as the 1800s. If someone said to you name five people everyone kind of agrees are a genius. I find that a lot of them come from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. And I wonder if it's to do with the fact that those are the first people that we've got photographs of. Those are the first people who lived in an age of mass literacy. Like someone like Thomas Edison, for example. He is this mega celebrity because he's there in Menlo park in New Jersey. Every op ed writer in Manhattan gets on like a lovely branch line for a nice day out at Menlo park and writes their piece about this incredible lab. And Thomas Edison usually spins them a whole load of yarn about some invention that he's cooked up. And they then get to go back to their editor who publishes it. People read it, everyone loves it. And lots of those things turn out to be what we now call kind of vaporware. But it worked for everybody. It worked for Thomas Edison cause it made him more famous. It worked for the writer cause they had a great sort of scoop. And it worked for the readers who love to read about it. And I think that's just all of that can't happen 100 years earlier. And to me, that's a kind of important part of the story too.
- [10:56]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
Yeah. For me as well. And it raises this question, Edison in particular. When we want to think about a person's career or contribution, we could compare the mean, the sum, and the peak.
- [11:07]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Yeah, okay.
- [11:08]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
And I think Edison had a very high peak, but also not such a great mean because he was all over the place. A lot of his patents were total duds and many of his ideas didn't even get there. Where would you come down on this?
- [11:23]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
The thing I find continually fascinating about Edison is that people associate him with the light bulb. And the light bulb is just not the story that you think it is. Because everybody has the same idea for the light bulb, the incandescent bulb. What if I lit a filament and I had some kind of vacuum around it and it would burn and that would light stuff up. And people had that idea for 100 years before him. They just can't make the vacuum tight enough and the filament burn long enough. And what the real genius of Edison is is not this conceptual genius, which is how we tend to think of, like geniuses, but manufacturing genius. You know, he gets a new pump that's a much better vacuum and stuff like that. I think his real achievement is, like, the New York City electricity grid. But, you know, no one is ever gonna write an inspirational poem or make a statue of the New York electricity grid. But that was, you know, as a logistical feat. That was incredible. And this is what I mean. Also, there is something in the genius myth about valuing people for the wrong things, for big leaps forward, rather than the boring logistics stuff. And that kind of comes back to, I start the book with Elon Musk, and I think his real genius is in manufacturing. The fact that he drove down the cost of space parts to the extent that actually reusable rockets have become a kind of probable method of getting to space and back over and over again and just change space travel, that's actually underrated as one of his innovatives. Whereas what other things has he actually done that are. Compare that with his reign at Twitter, for example. I would say slightly less successful, but you know what I mean, it just doesn't have the kind of glamour of kind of inventing something or finding something new. The fact that you're really, really good at running a supply chain.
- [12:57]
Adam Grant (Host)
There's a little bit of a trade.
- [12:58]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
Off here, because on the one hand, you're saying when you figure out what your expertise is, you should try to focus on that. On the other hand, you're also saying, don't get typecast. You want to continue to be, in the Galenson sense, an experimental innovator where you're tinkering and testing out new ideas and stretching beyond your comfort zone. I think this poses a dilemma. How do you know when a diversion is useful and when it's actually taking you too far from what you're capable of doing?
- [13:29]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Well, yeah, I think that is really the key conundrum. But I think there is a happy medium between the two, isn't there, where you have a kind of broadly defined area, but you keep pushing yourself within it. I think what I'm really having a go at is the particularly, like, the creative model where people go, we love your dot paintings, and you then spend 10 years, you know, probably with your studio making dot paintings and selling them for a huge amount of money, rather than trying to push onto some new Format. I'm not sure it's necessarily such a problem for scientists because, you know, by nature what they're doing rewards kind of the slow boring of hard boards a bit more, I guess. But. Yeah, but these, like, these are really interesting questions that almost everybody who is a genius has maybe Flukely answered the right way. And I think that's another thing that I really felt when I came out of the book is that just the huge amount of luck that is involved in all of these and the fact that we tell the stories of the winners, basically. And to go back to Musk, I think he's a good example of somebody. Walter Isaacson says in his biography that what really distinguishes him is his appetite for risk taking. And we have that biography of the one person whose risk taking paid off. We don't have the 999 biographies of all the people who took a massive bet and it ended up in bankruptcy and going down in flames. So there's a kind of. Yeah, a bias towards successful people, obviously, and therefore we shouldn't overread. Reverse Engineer from the biographies of successful people to what caused their success.
- [14:53]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
To that point, one of the things I was thinking about as I was reading your book was it seems like the way we attribute genius is very similar to the way that we attribute charisma, which is we walk around thinking that charismatic leadership causes success. But there's a whole literature on the romance of leadership where after an organization becomes successful, people then imbue the leader with a perception of charisma after the fact and kind of infer from the fact that they've achieved great things that the leader must be charismatic and that that must be a contributing factor or a major active ingredient in the success of the group or of the company. And it made me wonder how often are we attributing the qualities of genius to success as opposed to saying, hey, these are attributes that could produce genius before we've seen the result?
- [15:48]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Yeah, I think it's really interesting if you go back and read the 20th century literature on genius, you know, Hans Ising, who is one of the most cited psychologists of the 20th century, unfortunately now revealed as a research fraud, at least in his papers on smoking. I think that then throws a lot of his other work into question. But he has this book called Genius, in which he talks about all the things that you should have. And he says, you know, it should be like, you should be born in February. And you're like, what? At a time of high solar activity? And it's like, you've just found a bunch of things that happen like you would do in any statistical noise that just happened to be correlated with the sample that you've got. And then he has this amazing one, which is you should also have gout. Like not a subject that gets discussed very much, but a big deal in the 1800s. You know, it's build up of uric acid in your joints. And you get that from eating too much rich food and being a slightly portly middle aged man. And guess what? That does correlate with high success in life because you have earned enough money by middle age to be able to eat oysters and huge tubs of lard and whatever. And I just thought that was a kind of completely great example of somebody doing exactly what you're talking about, which is find the genius and then reverse engineer back what made them.
- [16:56]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
So you wrote about this in the book. You said genius becomes a licensing scheme for their eccentricities. Genius transmutes odd into special. I worry a lot about this licensing scheme. When I was writing about Elon recently, I was thinking a lot about the classic Hollander work on idiosyncrasy credit. The idea that when you accomplish something meaningful, people start to give you more of. They give you more latitude to deviate from social norms. You start to accumulate this idea of credit which is, hey, you know, this person is, you know, is such a rock star that we'll tolerate some of their faults or we'll look the other way at some of their vices. And I think that leads a lot of people to make this basic mistake of saying, well, you have to show these eccentricities in order to be successful, as opposed to saying no.
- [17:47]
Adam Grant (Host)
The fact that they achieved success has.
- [17:50]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
Allowed them now to get away with these eccentricities, which, by the way, they were working harder to manage or hide when they didn't have as much freedom to get away with it.
- [17:58]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Oh, I think that that makes a complete intuitive sense to me because also when you've got a lot of money or high social status, your opportunities for being weird are kind of greater. Right? Like getting obsessed with going to space, right? That's just fundamentally the kind of thing you can only do if you've got a spare billion lying around. But the licensing scheme, I think there's a bit that happens with the geniuses themselves. I think there's also something that happens with the people around them which is quite complicated and interesting. Like if you're all the friends of Picasso and he treats you all abominably while seeming like this kind of great God. There is something that makes your life feel like it's bigger than it is, that you're living this something, an extraordinary experience. I think that happens in a lot of those Silicon Valley companies that are run like mini cults. Right. You know, of course they don't let us ever go home because we're doing something incredible and amazing. And not everybody could hack this. You know, that kind of telling yourself that you're in the part of this, you know, of course you're having this unpleasant experience because you're doing something extraordinary. I think that definitely happens. Yeah. And then I think there is the kind of the person themselves when people stop saying no to you. Most people do get a bit weirder. Really?
- [19:01]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
Yeah. This also shows up in the psychology of ambivalent relationships, where if someone is sometimes supportive and other times undermining, it's much harder to avoid them and set a clear boundary than if they're just difficult or nasty all the time. Because you don't know whether Mr. Hyde or Dr. Jekyll is going to show up. And I can think of a lot of leaders who have modeled that where like, okay, I will tolerate the abuse from Mr. Hyde because of the greatness of Dr. Jekyll.
- [19:33]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Yeah. It makes me think of the pigeons pecking away at the corn, you know, and the release lever. And then the times when it's just completely random, they just drive themselves mad. Cause they're like, will I get corn? Will there be corn? Is there corn coming this time? And I think people in those kind of organizations, because the corn is coming very intermittently, just become sort of obsessed with it and don't question themselves and what they're putting up with. You know, I worked in a really tough tabloid newspaper office. When I left, I felt like, oh, I failed. Like I couldn't hack it. You know, I didn't want to be there until 10pm being shouted at. And then I kind of had a bit more distance from it. And I was like, why? Why did I do this to myself? I was producing a newspaper, you know, and what I've been doing, I remember quite towards the end I was doing a double page spread and it was pictures of dogs dressed in Harry Potter scarves. Sorry, my highbrow pass. But like, why are we all getting there stressed out, like we're curing cancer and I'm tolerating somebody being really rude to me. And the end product will be like a 5% better picture of a dog wearing a scarf in the Hufflepuff colors. But it Becomes really, if you just do get sucked into that group, think and. And lots of the people that I talk about in the book, Picasso being a very obvious example. Everybody around him is aware that he's kind of a monster, but they also know that everybody would die to trade places with them. I think about this a lot with, like, rock star wives and the way that rock star wives get hated by groupies, because the groupie and the kind of rock fan is like, why wouldn't you put up with it? Like, you're so lucky to be his wife, you know, so what if he cheats on you? You know, you should put up with it. Hey, like, you're just a mere woman. You're so close to greatness. And I think that those things are, you know, those dynamics are really interesting. The other one that really got to me in the book is Sophia Tolstoya, the wife of Leo Tolstoy. She was his copyist. And she copied out, like, War and Peace, I think, maybe eight times. And her life sounds pretty miserable. She complained about it a lot, certainly. She expressed her unhappiness in lots of diaries and journals. And she had more than a dozen children with him, so she was constantly pregnant. She was copying out his work for him. And the way that she presented that was kind of misery and repressing her own artistic ambitions. But then in midlife, he had this religious conversion, took up with the young, handsome officer who then became his kind of muse and his. His reader. And she felt completely, completely bereft by that. She was torn apart by that. So even though she would have said that her previous life had been making her miserable, something about being so close to the most famous writer in Russia, this guy that everybody thought was a kind of, you know, guru, was obviously incredibly meaningful to her, too. And I think that's. That kind of comes back to your ambivalent relationships, doesn't it? It's the fact that you're not enjoying it, but you also feel lucky to have it. And you'd be angry if someone took it away.
- [22:21]
Adam Grant (Host)
This episode is sponsored by udemy. If you've ever felt like the pace of change at work is outpacing your skills, you're not alone. In today's world, capabilities matter more than credentials, and staying competitive means constantly evolving.
- [22:34]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
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- [22:36]
Adam Grant (Host)
Udemy is an AI powered reskilling platform designed for the modern workforce. Whether you're trying to level up in your current role or lead a team that's adapting to change, udemy helps you build real world skills that make a difference from AI and data science to communication and leadership. One of the themes we revisit on this show is how people thrive at work. Insight isn't enough, you need tools to act on it, and Udemy can help you gain the skills you need to turn your ideas into action. It's practical, it's flexible, and it's built around your goals. Visit udemy.com that's U-E-M-Y.com to explore plans for people and businesses and subscribe free for 7 days. This episode is sponsored by IBM. Is your AI built for everyone or is it built to work with your business's data? IBM helps you integrate and govern unstructured data wherever it lives so your business can have more accurate AI instead of just more of it. Get your Data Ready for AI@IBM.com the AI Built for Business IBM this episode is brought to you by Upwork. Scaling a business means solving for today and preparing for what's next. And to do that, well, you need the right talent at the right moment. That's where upwork comes in. Whether you're looking for support in design, development, marketing or AI, upwork connects you with highly skilled freelancers who are ready.
- [23:59]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
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Adam Grant (Host)
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Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
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Adam Grant (Host)
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- [24:39]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
I thought it was so interesting that part of the book focuses on the wives of male geniuses, and I'd love to hear a little bit about why and what you learned from them.
- [24:49]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Well, there's lots of literature from the suffragettes about how hard they found it to do political campaigning alongside their domestic responsibilities. There's a quote from Hannah Mitchell who says, you know, no political cause was one between, I think she says dinner and tea, which is a very British round of putting it. But that really stuck with me. And then when you look at the lives of some of the people that we hail as geniuses, whether they had wives or housekeepers or in Isaac Newton's case, you know lived in a Cambridge college. In the case of Yayoi Kusama, she checked into a mental institution 50 years ago and has a studio across the street. She doesn't have any kind of domestic responsibilities in that sense. It just struck me that this was the biggest advantage you could possibly have would be somebody to run all the bits of your life that aren't the great work. I'm also interested to know even now what tends to happen is if you have people in very high flying careers, they both have high flying careers. Right. You still don't see that many cases in which there is a female breadwinner and a stay at home husband. That is inevitably going to affect the level of just monomaniacal attention that women can pay to their careers. Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, one of the examples that I discuss, and it's very famous to the extent I think it is now a piece of the mythology itself that he was painting these huge drip paintings in their barn and she was painting tiny little compact canvases because she didn't have a workspace. And it's only after he died and she took over the barn, she begins producing these giant canvases of the type that look awesome on museum walls in the way that her little tiny small ones really don't. And there's just those things like the material conditions I think are fascinating.
- [26:27]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
So interesting on a couple levels. One is to your point about support and how a spouse who has both a work collaboration role and a domestic role can be more helpful because they care. I also think about they know more about you than probably almost anyone else you collaborate with. They see your foibles most clearly. They're aware of your weaknesses and limitations. They recognize the ways that you tend to be formulaic. And so in some ways they're better critics. But because of the care, it's like no matter how tough it is, there's always love behind it.
- [27:04]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
You know, the idea of kind of having a muse gets a really bad rap now. We think of some kind of sleazy 50 something male film director and a kind of, you know, ingenue actress. But actually that idea of having somebody who has got different qualities to you and that you want to impress I think is a huge, huge. There's a tweet I think about a lot which says that all creative acts are driven by either horniness or revenge. And you have to decide which one of the two is your muse and act accordingly. But it's not untrue, right? Like, we cannot underrate that as a Kind of creative force. And I think that's kind of wonderful to think about, as long as it isn't in that really exploitative way. The idea that the spark between two people is often what causes something, even if it looks like an individual achievement. Again, goes back to my idea that we want to pull the frame back and see a bit more of the context.
- [27:50]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
Yeah, I think that's right. I also just going back to the tweet that you referenced, it's so narrow to think about the desire to impress people as solely fueled by romantic passion.
- [28:03]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Sure, yeah. Yeah.
- [28:04]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
I think so much of human motivation to create is driven by. There's somebody who's a role model for me and I want to try to live up to their standards. And I don't think we talk about that enough.
- [28:17]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
No, I think you really have to hang on to that. I really love that idea. You know, you just recognize that there are places to be that will allow you to be your maximum self.
- [28:26]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
When I think about the qualities that we associate with genius, I think intelligence is obviously the one that stands out the most. We think about it as giftedness, but I think what we overlook is that at the end of the day, intelligence is just the ability to think and learn. And the capacity to learn varies by domain. And it also doesn't guarantee a capacity to create something new and better than what's existed before. And I wonder if we define that more clearly, if the people who are labeled genius would be a little more cautious in their bets about what they're capable of. Number one, it reminds them they have to keep learning in order to use their genius. Number two, it also, I think, encourages them to think about in what areas do they excel at learning and where do they struggle at learning most. And then number three, to say, look, just because I can accumulate a lot of knowledge about something quickly and understand it, doesn't mean I can improve it.
- [29:19]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Yeah, I think you're right. There's a phrase that I really love, I can't remember where it comes from, about keeping yourself at the green growing edge. You know that phrase, which I think is about.
- [29:28]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
No, but I love it.
- [29:28]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
But like, that's the idea and that's what I always think about in my writing. One of the reasons I stopped writing op ed columns, you know, those kind of thousand word op ed columns was I just thought, I've got a kind of formula for how I do this now, and they're fine, you know, and sometimes they're good because I really care about it. I've got Something to say, but, like, it's. It's like a solved equation to me. It's not intellectually interesting anymore. And I think that's, you know, when you hit a bit further into your career, that's the big challenge, isn't it? Is to kind of still make yourself uncomfortable, which is more, you know, when you're young and you don't have a dependence and failure would be less humiliating, that's a lot easier. But it's hard to keep that into middle age, I think. And, you know, I don't know I'd be really interested in your take on this. I spent a while wading through the literature on when peak creativity comes, and I just went, nothing for me here. It just seems to be mathematicians do genuinely peak younger, but apart from that, it's pretty hard to work out when that. To come up with any kind of rule about it.
- [30:29]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
Yes. I would say in general, the more well structured a field is, the more it has laws, the younger we tend to see creative peaks. And I think math is the prototypical example of that. But physics would probably be not far behind. Literature is kind of the opposite. Right. And we see peaks much later. So I think the more codified a domain is, the more it seems to depend on. You come to it with a fresh perspective, you accumulate an understanding of it quickly, and you are able to juxtapose kind of your novel view with what's already known and discover something original. And then after that, it's harder and harder to unsee the things that. That you've started to take for granted, and you run into a cognitive entrenchment problem. I think in fields where there isn't sort of a set of rules or codified principles, there's just more freedom, right, to keep inventing and reinventing. And I wouldn't want to put an upper limit on that, would you?
- [31:27]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
No. And I also like the more recent research that has been about, you know, sampling things and the need to just dabble around a bit before then having a hot streak. And so I maintain in myself the conviction that at some point the hot streak is coming. It is entirely possible to keep writing for much longer than you can do other things.
- [31:44]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
I think that's one of the best parts of this career.
- [31:49]
Adam Grant (Host)
This episode is sponsored by NPR's Life Kit podcast. Life doesn't come with a manual, and every day we're making choices, big and small, that shape who we are and where we're headed. That's why there's Life Kit from npr. It's a podcast designed to help you move through life with intention and confidence.
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Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
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Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
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Adam Grant (Host)
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Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
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Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
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Adam Grant (Host)
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Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
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Adam Grant (Host)
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- [34:48]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
All right, let's go to a lightning round. I've got some quick fire questions for you. Okay, first question is, when it comes to acts of genius, who are your dream dinner party guests?
- [35:01]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Jane Austen. Because I don't know whether or not in real life she would have been just incredibly quiet or would she have been the person who sits very quietly in the corner and observes everybody all evening and then can kind of completely. So it might be dangerous to invite her, but I'd invite her. Terry Pratchett, my favourite author since childhood, who I think just had such a funny outlook on life. James Baldwin. I could listen to him talk forever and let me. Yeah, why don't I chuck a. Like a Leonardo in there? Yeah, I think I was trying to think, of all the Renaissance artists, which one of them was the least mad? Like you wouldn't. Michelangelo notoriously didn't change his boots for like a year when he was painting the Sistine Chapel. Right. It was just. They were repulsive by the time he took them off. Caravaggio murdered someone. You know, there's quite a lot of them that you probably wouldn't want. But, yeah, I'll take a Leonardo. Yeah, he can take him. Have a bit of broccoli.
- [35:51]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
Sounds like a good night. All right. In the realm of talent, what's the worst advice that people get?
- [35:59]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
I have a really conflicted attitude to how nice people should be, particularly women. There's a really difficult thing, isn't there? But you hear this advice of don't be too nice, and you think, are we just telling a lot of people, giving them permission to be assholes? Versus I do think if you are too compliant and too conscientious, people treat you as less brilliant, treat you as less talented. I think being nice often is morally good, but personally bad. Can I nominate that one? That's my kind of controversial one.
- [36:31]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
I don't find it that controversial. I think there's such an important distinction between being nice and being helpful. And I would like people to try to do what they can to make other people's lives better and support others in achieving their goals. But that doesn't mean you can't say no and you can't set boundaries. And by the way, when you do.
- [36:50]
Adam Grant (Host)
That, try to do it respectfully.
- [36:51]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
This is not that complicated.
- [36:53]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
Yeah, okay.
- [36:54]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
What's a question you have for me?
- [36:56]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
This isn't something I covered in the book. I thought about it. Child prodigies, right? Who notoriously have quite troubled later lives because they're always chasing the high. What's your advice to somebody who is a super bright kid and feels like things have gone wrong for them in adulthood? Because I think that's quite a common thing that happens. And there's almost no route map for those people out there. And they're almost afraid to ask because it sounds like boasting.
- [37:19]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
Wow. I mean, I'm thinking about the Ellen Winner research showing that child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses, in part because the standards of success change. And instead of being evaluated on whether they can play the perfect Mozart sonata at age 4 or win a chess game against a Grandmaster at age 7, now all of a sudden they have to invent their own game or write their own sonata. And I guess the advice that I would give to a former prodigy or a gifted child who's grown into an adult who's struggling professionally would be, this might be a time to invest in creativity, because mastering rote knowledge and skills is not going to be rewarded as an adult. It's just not. Actually, Helen, I'll give you an example of this. Once I interviewed Christopher Nolan, the director, and I was asking him about how he thought about his creative process, and he said, you know, it's strange because in school it was all about trying to get an A on a paper. And as an adult, you realize no one's even reading your paper. And so you get to decide, like, okay, what is the thing that I want to build? And I think, unfortunately, a lot of prodigies don't get the exposure to that kind of opportunity. So I guess that would be my advice, is start figuring out who are the people in your orbit who are really great at coming up with new ideas and go and learn from them and try to soak up some of their habits.
- [38:56]
Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
I think that's really good advice. And I think probably I would say that the reverse of it applies too, which is, if you're somebody who has had a good deal of success in your career, go and put yourself in environments where nobody knows who you are. And I think this comes back to our discussion about becoming a monster in later life if you've had success because people do treat you a certain way, they give you more respect for whatever reason, and trying to take yourself out of environments and remember what it's like for people who don't get that level of respect I think is really important. So, yeah, if it's all gone a bit wrong, focus on creativity. If it's all gone right, focus on Humility. That's where we can leave it.
- [39:33]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant.
- [39:35]
Adam Grant (Host)
The show is produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glaser. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winick and our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hilasch, Ban Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manibong and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Layton Brown.
- [40:03]
Adam Grant (Host, Interviewer)
Helen, you're describing like oh yeah, you have to go to an environment where people don't know who you are and they don't respect you. And I'm like, I go there every day. It's called the Internet.
- [40:17]
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Helen Lewis (Guest, Author)
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Adam Grant (Host)
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