Mark: A female author sends her manuscript to 50 literary agents. She gets two requests to see more. She then sends the exact same manuscript out under a male name. The result? Seventeen requests. Michelle: Whoa, hold on. Seventeen? That’s more than an eight-fold increase. That can't be real. Mark: It is. And that staggering difference isn't a fluke; it’s a feature of a system we call 'genius.' That incredible experiment comes from our book today, Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Schooling by Craig Wright. Michelle: And Wright is the perfect person to write this. He's not a psychologist or a business guru; he's a celebrated musicologist from Yale. He spent decades studying musical geniuses like Mozart and Beethoven before turning his lens on genius in general. Mark: Exactly. He brings that 'fox' perspective he champions in the book—drawing from different fields to see the bigger picture. His work has been highly rated, though some readers find the 'habits' less hidden and more like common sense on steroids. We'll get into whether that's fair. Michelle: I love that. A music professor decoding Elon Musk. This experiment perfectly sets up what you said is Wright's first major argument: before we can even talk about the habits of genius, we have to admit the game is rigged.

Mark: It's completely rigged. And it starts with how we even define genius. For centuries, we’ve been obsessed with this idea of innate talent, something you’re born with. We try to measure it with things like IQ tests or SAT scores. Michelle: Right, the whole "Are you smart enough?" gatekeeping. Mark: But Wright just dismantles that. He points to overwhelming data showing that SAT scores, for example, correlate more strongly with a student's parental income than with their actual potential. It’s a wealth test as much as an intelligence test. Michelle: That’s infuriating. So if the tests are flawed, what are we left with? How do we spot genius then? Mark: Well, that’s the million-dollar question. Wright uses a fantastic story to illustrate this. He pits two art titans against each other: Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne. Michelle: Okay, a heavyweight fight. I'm in. Mark: In one corner, you have Picasso. He's the ultimate prodigy. His father, an art teacher, supposedly gave up painting after seeing his son's talent at age 13. Picasso was a rockstar from the start, celebrated, famous, prolific. He’s the poster child for innate, explosive talent. Michelle: And in the other corner? Mark: Paul Cézanne. He was the opposite. He was a slow, laborious worker. He was rejected by the official art Salon in Paris year after year. He was considered a misfit, a troublemaker. He didn't find real recognition until late in his life. He represents the hard-work, nurture side of the equation. Michelle: So, the classic nature versus nurture debate. Who wins? Mark: Here's the punchline. In 2011, Cézanne's painting 'The Card Players' sold to the royal family of Qatar for $250 million. A few years later, a Picasso sold for a staggering amount, but still less. The slow, rejected grinder's work became more valuable. Wright calls it a draw, but his point is clear: our obsession with the flashy, early-blooming prodigy, the Picasso model, makes us overlook the Cézannes. Michelle: Okay, but Picasso is still Picasso. We're not saying talent doesn't matter, are we? Mark: Not at all. But Wright argues that our very definition of genius and talent has been shaped by those who had the opportunity to express it. He leans heavily on Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, A Room of One's Own. Woolf argued that for centuries, a woman couldn't be a Shakespeare because she was denied the basic resources: an education, financial independence, and even just a quiet room to think. Michelle: A room of one's own. It’s not about a lack of innate ability, it's about a lack of opportunity. The game is rigged because most people weren't even allowed on the field. Mark: Precisely. And that’s not just historical. Remember that author experiment? Catherine Nichols. The bias is still deeply embedded. So, once you get past those external barriers, Wright argues the internal game of a genius is just as unconventional. It’s not about being the smartest person in the room; it’s about thinking differently.

Michelle: Thinking differently. That sounds a bit like a platitude, like something you'd see on a motivational poster. What does it actually mean in practice? Mark: Wright has a brilliant analogy for it, borrowed from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. He says there are two types of thinkers: the hedgehog and the fox. Michelle: A hedgehog and a fox? Okay, I'm listening. Mark: The hedgehog knows one big thing. It's a specialist. It sees the world through a single, defining idea. Think of a brilliant economist who applies one theory to everything. They dig one deep, deep well. Michelle: I know that person. It’s my friend who's a tax lawyer, and he somehow relates every global event back to obscure tax codes. He's a total hedgehog. Mark: Exactly. Now, the fox knows many little things. It's a generalist, a dabbler. It roams across different fields, collecting ideas, comfortable with nuance, contradiction, and complexity. Wright argues that true, world-changing geniuses are almost always foxes. Michelle: So it’s breadth over depth? Mark: It's breadth that creates a new kind of depth. He uses Steve Jobs as the prime example. Jobs dropped out of college but famously audited a calligraphy class. It seemed useless. But years later, when designing the first Macintosh, that knowledge of typography became a key differentiator. He connected the art of calligraphy to the science of computing. A hedgehog would never have made that leap. Michelle: That makes so much sense. Creativity is just connecting things, and you can't connect things if you only live in one box. Mark: And this connects to another one of Wright's habits: the need to cultivate a childlike imagination. Picasso famously said, "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." Geniuses, Wright says, actively fight against the adult tendency to put things in rigid categories. They play, they question, they see the world with fresh eyes. Michelle: They stay curious. It’s like they refuse to let the world become boring. But there's another habit you mentioned that feels related: 'Think Opposite.' Isn't that just being difficult for the sake of it? Mark: It can look that way, but it's a strategic tool. Thinking opposite is about challenging the default assumption. Wright gives this amazing business example: Henry Ford and Elon Musk. Ford's genius was making the car affordable for the masses. He started with the cheap Model T and worked his way up. His entire model was: start low, go high. Michelle: The classic mass-market approach. Mark: Elon Musk did the exact opposite. He started with the Tesla Roadster, a $200,000 luxury sports car for the super-rich. Then he introduced the slightly less expensive Model S, and only after establishing Tesla as a premium, aspirational brand did he release the more affordable Model 3. He completely reversed Ford's logic: start high, go low. It was a contrarian move that built a powerful brand halo. Michelle: Wow. That's a perfect example. You see the default path, and you deliberately walk the other way. This all sounds so inspiring—be a fox, be a child, be a contrarian. But the book gets pretty dark, doesn't it? A lot of these 'rebels' and 'misfits' were, frankly, terrible people. How does Wright handle that?

Mark: He confronts it head-on. This is where the book gets really complex and uncomfortable. He has a chapter titled "Move Fast and Break Things," which we associate with Mark Zuckerberg, but Wright applies it much more broadly. He argues that genius is often inherently destructive. Michelle: Destructive how? Like, disrupting industries? Mark: Yes, but also destructive to people, to ethics, to norms. He tells the absolutely shocking story of Thomas Edison's "War of Currents" against Nikola Tesla. Edison championed Direct Current (DC), while Tesla was pioneering Alternating Current (AC). Michelle: The safer, more efficient system that we use today. Mark: Correct. But Edison had invested everything in DC. To discredit AC, he launched a smear campaign to prove how dangerous it was. He paid local boys to bring him stray dogs, which he publicly electrocuted with AC power. It gets worse. He worked with the state of New York to use AC for the first-ever electric chair execution. And the horrifying climax was in 1903, when he arranged the public electrocution of Topsy, a circus elephant, on Coney Island, and had his film crew capture it all. Michelle: That's monstrous. That's beyond 'breaking things.' That's just cruel and sociopathic. How can we celebrate the man who gave us the lightbulb and ignore that? Mark: That is the central, agonizing question. And it doesn't stop with Edison. Wright details Picasso's life, which was a trail of psychological and physical abuse against the women he claimed to love. He had a famous saying: "For me, there are only two kinds of women—goddesses and doormats." His granddaughter said he needed to "drink the blood" of those around him to fuel his art. Two of his partners and one of his grandsons died by suicide. Michelle: So, what's the argument? That you have to be a monster to be a genius? I refuse to believe that. Mark: Wright doesn't argue that you have to be. But he suggests that society often makes a Faustian bargain. We get the masterpieces, the innovations, the world-changing ideas, and in return, we often overlook the personal wreckage. We create a "genius" pass for bad behavior. Michelle: That feels like a dangerous justification. It lets people off the hook. Mark: It is. But Wright balances this by highlighting the other, more constructive habits that are just as crucial. He talks about the importance of relaxation, of allowing the mind to wander. He tells the story of Dmitri Mendeleev, the chemist who was obsessing over how to organize the elements. He worked himself to exhaustion, then fell asleep. In a dream, he saw the entire periodic table, perfectly arranged. He woke up and wrote it down. Michelle: So the breakthrough came from rest, not from aggression. Mark: Exactly. The insight came from letting go. It's the counterbalance to the destructive, obsessive drive. Genius requires both the intense, focused concentration to break a problem and the relaxed, defocused state to see the solution. It’s the ultimate paradox.

Michelle: So, genius isn't this clean, pure thing we imagine. It's not a lightning bolt from the heavens. It's a messy, chaotic, and deeply human combination of breaking external rules, cultivating internal habits, and sometimes, a real dark side. Mark: That's it perfectly. And Wright's ultimate point, I think, is that we can be strategic about this. We can learn the productive habits—the childlike curiosity, the fox-like thinking, the balance of relaxation and intense focus—without adopting the destructive ones. We don't need to be Edison electrocuting elephants to be innovative. Michelle: It’s about separating the habits from the horrors. Mark: Yes. The book opens with a quote from Arthur Schopenhauer that really sticks with me. "A person of talent hits a target that no one else can hit; a person of genius hits a target that no one else can see." And what Wright shows, chapter by chapter, is that seeing that hidden target requires a fundamentally different way of looking at the world. Michelle: That’s a powerful idea. It makes you wonder, which of these habits do you already have? And which one could you start cultivating today? Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.