GENIUS MYTH: The Dangerous Allure of Rule-Breakers

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Self-improvement, Arts, Books, Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sign up for our Substack! Arthur Schopenhauer said, “Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” Thomas Edison famously claimed, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Helen Lewis has a different take entirely. To her, the term genius licenses noxious eccentricities, exasperating ego trips, and downright bad behavior. Sure, plenty of things qualify as acts of genius — Shakespeare’s sonnets, penicillin — but when we pin the genius badge on a person instead of an achievement, we grant them membership in a supposedly superior class. That, Helen says, is the genius myth. She wants to demolish it and, in its place, tell the real story of how breakthroughs happen and who deserves credit.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before we get started, just a quick reminder that we now have a substack. It's called Book of the Day.
0:06.7	Every weekday, we send you five key insights from a new book that we think will blow your mind.
0:12.7	You can find it at bookof the day. NextBigidea Club.com. Or just Google Book of the Day substack.
0:20.5	All right.
0:20.9	Should we do it?
0:21.7	Let's do it.
0:22.6	I'm Rufus Griscom and I'm Caleb Bissinger.
0:25.1	And this is the next big idea.
0:27.6	Today, the dangerous allure of genius. All right, Caleb, why don't you set up today's show?
0:55.2	Who did you talk to? What's the big idea?
0:58.3	Yeah, so I sat down with Helen Lewis.
1:01.1	She's a staff writer at the Atlantic, and she's just published this new book called The Genius Myth.
1:05.9	And her big idea is that our obsession with genius, which stretches back centuries, that obsession, she says,
1:13.7	is poisonous.
1:15.6	Interesting.
1:16.4	But does she believe it exists?
1:18.3	Does she think it's a real thing?
1:19.7	Yeah.
1:20.1	Yeah.
1:20.3	I mean, she points out that there are many acts that we should celebrate as genius, right?
1:24.6	That theory of relativity, the light bulb, Sergeant Pepper's
1:27.5	the only hearts club band. But she's against this idea of the lone genius. Because to her,
	...

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