Brilliant Dept.

Op-Ed Columnist - Genius - The Modern View - NYTimes.com

I'd long been suspicious myself of the "flash of lightning" / "touched by the hand of God" approach to genius. Frankly, it sounded like creationism: you're a genius because, well, you're a genius. Magic Man diddit, and all that.

I know that on my end, the diligence-and-discipline side of things holds water. I was a terrible writer when I was young, but I kept at it non-stop for decades. What looks like something tossed off is not: it's the product of a lifetime of tossing and testing, of getting back on the playing field over and over again. "My week is your year," as someone else once put it.

This outlook also helps explain a number of other things. I've known plenty of people who had a "gift of gab" — they had a raw degree of creativity with the language — but when it came to actually finishing things or creating something cohesive, they had nothing to show for it. They were more interested in the outcome than the process, which might explain why they were typically very well read. They had the patience and drive to finish reading a book like Foucault's Pendulum, but not to produce anything of even one-tenth the scope. I'm not denigrating such people; I'm just fairly sure that even they didn't know what the deal was.

What comes out of this amounts to a truism, but it has a fair amount of significance: People do what they like to do. Not what they say they're going to do, but what they are drawn to doing. If they weren't writing habitually before and finishing what they wrote, then the odds are they're not going to form the habit spontaneously.