There is no genius

A paradox: when we try to applaud work, we often efface it. Authors are asked where they get their ideas. Athletes are described in terms of raw talent. Film directors are called geniuses and visionaries. This implies that people who rise to the top have won an invisible lottery: they were born or gifted with a difference, a lucky advantage, and if someone else had gotten it, they would be there too. Excellence, in other words, is an object unto itself. It can be born into or stumbled upon. It can even be bought.

This is false.

Advantages do, of course, exist. Literacy is a boon to authors, as is height to basketball players and wealth to practically everyone. There’s no such thing as an even playing field.

But work is unavoidable. Expertise can’t be gained, value can’t be created, talent can’t become dominance without work. This is common sense, yet it flies in the face of certain cultural myths about excellence.

In response to those myths, I offer rebuttals:

1. Everything that looks like genius and talent is actually technique and repetition.
2. Everything that looks like magic is just a full-time job.
3. There’s no such thing as a good idea.
4. Ideas are a product of work, anyway.

I must be careful what I imply. Not everyone who’s “successful,” in the way success is commonly measured, has done their own work—or any work at all. Money, fame, and respect are red herrings. For the purposes of this discussion, success is the creation of meaning and progress. An artist is successful to the extent they create objects of emotional valence; a student is successful insofar as they learn; a scientist is successful insofar as they add to the collective knowledge of humanity. These things are difficult to measure in universal terms, but they all require work.

The siren song of genius

Let’s begin with art.

We often speak of art as though it were fundamentally different from other forms of work. Science is work; art is leisure. Commerce is serious; art is romantic.

This is a misconception.

In reality, art is labor. Artists go to work every day. They follow processes. They use tools. They solve problems and make decisions. They practice. They do the same thing over and over again until it’s automatic. The artist is materially similar to the accountant, the farmer, and the mechanic. Ignoring or romanticizing their labor is a way of devaluing the work they do.

We can see the same logic applied to any professional who stands out in their field. When a person excels, some recognize their work, but others commend their passion, drive, talent, and intelligence, painting their greatness as something they are, not something they do. This is subtle rationalization as much as regard. We turn them unwillingly into artists so we don’t have to acknowledge them as laborers.

When you hear someone described as talented, you should understand it to mean they’re doing a great deal of work that isn’t seen or valued. Aptitude plays a part, and genetics are a powerful force, but neither justifies the dismissal of someone’s work. Nothing of value can be created without work (which isn’t to say that all work creates value). There are no shortcuts.

Still, popular media is obsessed with genius. It’s the most insidious avatar of talent: a trait that supposedly enables someone to manifest objects of value with relatively little time and effort.

When I say there is no genius, I don’t mean smart people don’t exist. They do, though they’re much harder to identify than people think. I also don’t mean everyone is born with the same aptitudes. All minds and bodies are different; that’s what makes humanity great. What I mean is that smartness and aptitude are meaningless without years of development. They must be nurtured in order to be seen.

Talent, as defined, is inert; talent as demonstrated is the fruit of hard work.

Genius, then, is the evil twin of expertise. Experts are people who have worked for years to learn the skills and intuition that set them apart. They are geniuses without the implication of luck. Talent is often a factor, but many people find success with only a base level of talent.

What I’m saying is that you, too, could likely be a passable artist or programmer or swimmer or physicist—whatever job you find most mystifying—if you learned the standard techniques of the field and practiced them daily for a few years. You may or may not reach the top 1% of active practitioners, but you’d almost certainly rank in the top 1% of all people who’ve ever tried it.

The other thing I’m saying is that the mystique of genius around eminent artists, scientists, businesspeople, and other laborers does more harm than good. It separates us into disorganized and ultimately meaningless groups: those who believe they lack the genius to succeed, those who give their genius too much credit for their success, and those who are waiting for their genius to be recognized. We would be better off forgetting genius and recognizing work as the locus of value in society.

The appearance of magic

Another way of saying there is no genius: there is no magic.

A transformation occurs when you learn a skill that looked, from the outside, like magic: it stops looking like magic. Instead it becomes a job: a methodical, repetitive process that follows from one thing to the next. Outsiders only see the end result, so if they assume it happened in one step, of course it looks like magic. The effect would be subdued if they understood all the layers that built up to it.

Stage magicians cultivate this effect intentionally. Many other professionals find it annoying. But the fact remains that for both of them, there’s no magic in sight. No working professional is astounded by their own work. No working professional is sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike, or for talent to possess their faculties. They are working, gradually and systematically, with the understanding that each hour brings them closer to a complete, coherent, high-quality result—one that looks like magic.

That final result obscures as much as it reveals. The decisions and details that go into the design of a bag of chips (for example) would stagger the average snacker. In fact, the final imprint you see in the grocery store aisle isn’t the most important outcome. Every hour spent on the design process builds value by way of brand development, market research, organizational competence, regulatory compliance, and so on. If the chip company could skip the process and obtain the same end result, it would be a net loss, not a gain.

This is true of all the “magic” that surrounds us: the homes we live in, the devices and applications we use, the books we read, the music we listen to, the relationships we envy. The end result may be all we see, but the process is what makes it valuable. The entire success of a venture comes from the work invested in it.

Where no work is added, no value is gained.

The million-dollar idea

Nothing that occurs to you in the span of a moment can possibly be valuable. A thought is not a meaningful unit of work; ideas are practically valueless entities. They may feel valuable, and they may come to symbolize value as you strive to realize them, but ideas in and of themselves are worth about as much as spent breaths. Those who overvalue ideas risk underachievement.

Still, we habitually give ideas undeserved credit. We fixate on the moment when Philo Farnsworth, at the age of 15, conceived of the television, or when Albert Einstein discovered special relativity. We’re entranced by “eureka” moments. But in all these cases, even the original “eureka,” what mattered was not the idea itself but everything before and after it. Farnsworth was already a serious student of electronics by the time he proposed the modern television, and he spent six years developing a working model. Einstein spent at least seven years developing his theories of relativity, then decades defending and proving them. Archimedes was already a well-known scientist when he had his storied “eureka,” and he still had to conduct experiments to make something of it. At no point in history has someone improved the world or advanced the state of the art by simply saying, “I have a great idea.” Even if they added, “I bet people would pay a lot of money for this,” the incantation was bound to fail.

When we say things like, “The iPhone was an idea that changed the world,” we’re collapsing decades of scientific progress, the work of legions of experts, and a prolonged iterative process into a single midnight stroke of brilliance. It makes for a good story, but it’s thoroughly fictitious. The most generous interpretation is that “idea” is shorthand. It’s an abstraction. Anything, from Apple Inc. to The Lord of the Rings, can be called an idea. This framing is too broad, though, and we should reject it. It feeds the myth that “thinking different” is enough—that it can set you apart, that it can change the world.

In reality, the ideas that make history are better described as expert questions. When someone understands a topic deeply and is in the habit of challenging that understanding, piece by piece, they’re very likely to find things that could be modified, combined, analogized, extended, or rearranged. That’s what ideation is. Though ideas are valueless, the work of ideation is extraordinarily valuable, and when done well, it reliably produces ideas that can be developed into objects of value.

It’s all too easy to mistake the idea for the object. I won’t digress into semiotics, but the distinction is important. What is the core idea of The Lord of the Rings? Is it a hobbit on a dangerous journey to destroy a magical object? Is it a world where wizards and living trees are brothers in arms? Is it the meaning of friendship and bravery? Armed with any of these summaries, or even a much longer one, could you recreate the book from scratch like Pierre Menard? Of course not. Tolkien’s book isn’t just an idea, or a collection of ideas; it’s the culmination of years of work. If you knew what Apple’s next 10 product releases would be, could you invent them yourself and steal their market share? Not likely.

The idea is not the result. The result is not the idea. The result isn’t even the whole result! When we understand the value of work, we consider the process a result unto itself. Bringing an idea to fruition has side effects: it builds expertise, generates offshoot ideas, continuously refines and elaborates on the original idea, and solidifies a process for doing it all again.

Against overwork

I’ve said so much about work, I’m in danger of being called a Puritan. There is something noble about work, but there’s also harm in treating it as a sacred act. We should reward work for what it accomplishes materially, rather than praising it for its goodness. Its nobility is insufficient compensation.

Work is noble because it can’t be faked; wherever progress and meaning are found, you can be sure someone has done the work to create them.

Work, though, should be made to justify itself. It’s a means to an end (not always the stated end). Imposed, meaningless work is mere punishment. We work to create joy and meaning, to improve our own and each other’s lives, to occupy ourselves, and to gain expertise. And as an essential counterpart, rest is also noble. Work doesn’t become virtuous, nor does rest become shameful, by quantity alone.

This bears repeating: no amount of work is inherently virtuous. Some people, weirdly, point to long working hours and infrequent time off as evidence they’re doing something valuable. How is this any different from saying a recipe must be good because the ingredients are expensive? It’s not that there’s anything wrong with hard work. Just as work is valuable, so is hard work—but the difference is repetition, not exhaustion. Hard work is simply work repeated. If you work on the same thing a hundred times, whether for one hour or ten, you are working hard. Practically everyone you know is working hard. There is no deficit of hard work.

Overwork is different. Hard work is dedication to a goal; overwork is the worship of work itself (or the appearance of work). It’s a voluntary waste of effort.

When work is necessary, it can’t be cheated. When it’s not, one should rest.

Valuing work

My thesis, that we should recognize and understand work to be the source of all meaning and progress, is more radical than it sounds. Much of the global economy is predicated on the idea that work can be traded into higher forms of value by rare, talented individuals—that straw can be spun into gold. If this idea is false, then the world owes a vast debt to its laborers, from the highest-paid NFL athlete all the way down to the humblest migrant worker.

I can’t say who owes what to whom. If a ledger exists, it’s hopelessly convoluted. But in small ways, in the language we use, perhaps you and I can help give work the recognition it deserves.