Real Genius is Play
New Humble Mind podcast with Alexander Beiner & what 3 unusual geniuses teach us about massive talent
Hey there
The all-new Humble Mind podcast with Alexander Beiner is out. I genuinely think it’s one of the best conversations we’ve had on the pod.
Alexander Beiner spent years trying to understand why the world feels increasingly unreal: why trust has collapsed, why ideas seem to live in the ether rather than in the lives of actual people.
His answer, explored in his documentary Leviathan, centres on something deceptively simple: we've started treating the abstract as more real than the embodied. Algorithms more real than bodies. Financial instruments more real than communities.
This conversation is about what that costs us and what it might take to reverse it.
What we’ve missed about genius
I’m fascinated with the idea of genius, as most of us are.
It’s an attractive category: what we consider to be genius says as much about how we choose the criteria as it does about the actual individuals wielding their peculiar talent.
Who’s best and who’s last? Which is fastest and most expensive? Who’s the richest scumbag of them all? These are the questions at which the human conversation collects, because modern culture succeeds so well in grabbing and securing our attention at the extremes.
I was recently invited at my son’s school in Costa Rica to speak to the upper years’ students on this topic. As soon as I sat down to think about what I was going to say, images of Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs flashed across my mind like a police raid.
Thinking up anything interesting to say about these run-of-the-mill geniuses bored me before I even began. These dead old white guys had had so much limelight thrown their way over the years anyway, so surely there would be room for more unusual names on the list.
That’s when I began to seriously think about the concept of a genius, and how caveman-like our definitions of prodigious talent and brilliance really are. We miss the point because we’re obsessed with the esteemed status of what we imagine being a marvelous mind must be like in hyperbolic terms, and less about the actual nature or degree of that talent.
To mere mortal non-geniuses, a genius is a winner, even a strongman (or woman, but often, unfortunately, way less so). A genius is supposed to be the apex predator because we over-index predatory extremes everywhere else in our lives.
But for a true genius, the experience of their own brilliance is not about hard-earned achievement or best of categories. After removing my own blinkers of what a genius should comprise, I studied the most subtle, unusual and unexpected practitioners of genius I could find. What I found was the genius was not about intelligence or perfection. It was not about personality or charisma.
It was something far simpler and more profound that I found across all three I examined: all geniuses play.
When everyone else is playing football, he’s doing ballet
When I was growing up, I followed Real Madrid’s Galácticos era. In the early 2000s, massive superstars like Ronaldo (the original, better one), Luis Figo and David Beckham were joining the richest club in football. These were all fantastically talented players with their own entourage of endorsements and private jets. When they stepped onto the pitch, goals would be scored with certainty.
However, there was another player who seemed to tower above the rest. He was not only tall, but possessed a kind of willowy grace none of the others had. His passes were not merely accurate but suddenly could create space where none existed before. His touch on the ball was unmistakable, somewhere between an acrobat and a million-dollar jewel thief; once it was his, there was no getting it back.
This was the slinky Frenchman Zinedine Zidane.
He scored goals, yes, won the World Cup and many other trophies and awards. But his greatness was that which simply oozed off him, without effort or forethought. While others played football, he seemed to be engaged in a different activity altogether. He would be dancing with the ball.
Even many years later, I will often catch myself watching greatest hits videos of his impossible skills and elegant dribbling on YouTube. Like millions of his fans around the world, it’s not his goals I’m drawn to, but the way he communicates with his feet is entirely different to the other twenty-one men on the pitch. Football is a game with rules, demarcated by lines and boxes and corner flags. There are things you can do on the pitch, and things you cannot do. A genius like Zidane makes new things happen while not breaking the laws of the game. Zidane’s genius was to excel but not playing the game as it is, but by insisting that a different game could be played altogether, while still recognising it as football.
What good is a fast car, flash house or a gold plated dunny to me?
Some geniuses are born with irreplaceable skills. Others are born with the kind of star-bright understanding of their true position in the universe that it’s impossible to be infected by their shining sense of purpose.
It’s hard to count how many other wildlife conservationists I would add to my genius list, but Steve Irwin makes the cut. Strangely, he is unlike anyone else but yet also totally archetypal in his unfailingly honest and infectious character as an Aussie outdoorsman, saving the planet from misplaced crocodiles and silly humans. It was a TV-personality match made perfectly: if you ever spent more than a few minutes on the National Geographic or Discovery channel, you would have caught this wide-eyed, khaki-bearing swashbuckler holding the snapping jaws of a reptile double his size on more than one occasion.
Steve Irwin had an impressive career on TV whose passion and dedication contributed to a substantial wildlife protection movement in Australia. But genius?
I think yes, and it’s not down to his credentials or billowing blonde hair. When we release the idea of genius being about cognitive or artistic achievement, someone like Irwin becomes undeniable. His capacity for raw but lucid authenticity was what inspired so many people to watch his show, even if they didn’t give a toss about the wild. We watched his antics not just because they were borderline insane (which they absolutely were) but because his principled obsessiveness showed his audiences that big dreams were possible, and that communicating one’s own contagious excitement is essential to unleashing them.
It’s the kind of inspiration that sparks the desire to have a greater stake in our own lives. Geniuses can have the greatest gifts, but if they can’t find a way to communicate it with the world, it lays waste.
The unmistakable face of the artist no one knows
My final genius nomination arrives not just because the products of his talent are sensational, arresting pieces of art in their own right, but because he/it/they has built a cult of zero personality in just the same puzzlingly brilliant way.
Known in the UK as a legend for more than twenty years, the artist known as Banksy has harassed walls, monuments, galleries and millionaires like no other.
In my view, Banksy’s true genius is not only in the biting inventiveness of his spectacle. It’s in the unyielding commitment to never reveal (or even hint) at his true identity. In this way, the artist maintains total blissful freedom in anonymity, perhaps even notoriety, which is even better.
In staying clear of any kind of identity or celebrity tied to a specific person, Banksy’s art has a kind of elevated mystique. It works the same way Apple’s marketing is built into the laptop or iPhone you buy. But Banksy’s branding is cleverer and more covert - in creating a seemingly formless personality through only his visible art, he has cultivated for himself a strong affection in the public eye as though he were a recognisable celebrity anyway, and that’s genius.
Genius is not what most of us think.
It’s not reserved only for shaggy, sweater-wearing mathematicians wiping their brow over equations or miracle cures. In fact, geniuses are everywhere, doing what we do, but only better. We just don’t know it because it’s not immediately clear what game they’re playing, as it often isn’t the same one we are hopeless at.
And that’s part of the genius foundation, using new combinations, sometimes generative, other times reductive, to arrive at a wholly new set of results. That’s what they’re doing when most of us are hurrying around stapled to our earpods, preoccupied with top 10 rich lists and scrambling to pay rent.
While we’re doing that, geniuses are quietly reinventing how the world thinks, breathes and lives. The best part is that most of the time, they weren’t really trying to do that at all.
They were just playing.
I hope you enjoyed reading.
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All the best until the next one,
Alex