What is genius?

3 March 2025 C.E.

Today, we usually use the term “genius” to refer to someone with incredible intelligence, talent, or ability. Albert Einstein was a genius. Nina Simone was a genius. Mohammad Ali was a genius. That friend of ours who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard is a genius. We use “genius” to distinguish truly exceptional humans from the rest of us.

It’s time we let go of this way of thinking.

First, it unnecessarily discourages and diminishes the vast majority of us who aren’t exalted as geniuses. But even worse, it dangerously glorifies and inflates those who we do deem geniuses, offering them an easy way to explain away their blindspots and harmful behaviors.

Fortunately, I believe there’s a much more constructive and life-affirming way to think about genius.

Genius is our guiding spirit and creative power

The word “genius” likely comes from the Latin verbs gignere for “to bring into being” and generare for “to beget or generate.” And “genius” actually had specific meanings for the ancient Romans who spoke that Latin (similar to what the Greeks referred to as the “daemon”).

For the Romans, one’s genius was something like a guiding spirit that watched over them. In this sense, it might be likened to what we call intuition or callings. It is our connection to the divine that offers us support and guidance through our lives.

At the same time, the Romans perhaps also thought of genius as the unique creative power that inspires and enables someone to make art, invent a new technology, or conceive new ideas. In this sense, everyone has their own unique brand of genius, like their own unique DNA or fingerprint, that determines their unique essence as an individual.

In both conceptions, genius is not something a few people are; it is something people have. It is something that everyone has.

This is how I like to think about it: Genius is not what distinguishes a few exceptional people from the rest. It is not rare. It is something that we all have innate access to.

Genius is bringing a desired future into being

In the traditional Western view of education and self-improvement we strive primarily to acquire knowledge. We read books, go to school, and learn new skills to build our internal databases of information about ourselves and the world. We might think of knowledge as how we remember and harness the past.

Many of us also strive to cultivate presence. We practice meditation, yoga, and other mindfulness modalities to gain clarity, focus, and equanimity. Through presence, we attune to our aliveness, break down the internal barriers that limit us, and expand our ability to sense and navigate the world around us. Presence is how we attune to the now.

In contrast, genius is how we bring a desired future into being. It is the innate creative power within us that allows us to dream up a future state that exists only in our imagination and then devise the actions, values, beliefs, and innovations that can bring that future into being. It is how we dream up new possibilities for who we are, where we can go, what we can do, and why we exist.

Genius is what makes us human

In his now-famous 1971 debate with Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky asserts, “A fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation…” This creative spark is not simply some capacity we all happen to have access to. It is a fundamental, essential element of our nature. We all deeply yearn to use and express this genius. We need it to feel truly alive. It is a basic human need.

Our need to create has informed the entire unfolding of human history. We have constantly reinvented ourselves and our societies through new values, beliefs, cultures, institutions, art, music, philosophy, and technologies. Each generation brings new ideas and new ways of being. Humanity itself has demonstrated this creative capacity since the very beginning – from our invention of myth to law, religion, science, and beyond.

It is not only universal to all humans; it seems to be exclusive to us, at least for life on Earth. No other creature we’ve encountered has this same capacity to imagine and will ideal futures into being. No other creature needs creative inquiry and expression. Other creatures are motivated by survival, procreation, and for some, play. But not creativity.

Every form of life is beautiful in its own way. And many creatures display abilities and even wisdom that humans never will. As Eckhart Tolle says in his seminal 1997 book The Power of Now, “I have lived with many Zen masters, all of them cats.”

But cats will never create art. Plants will never create philosophy. Fungi will not dream up new values or belief systems to organize their societies around.

No. This power of creativity and innovation is uniquely human. And it is not reserved for just a special few of us. It is available to each and every one of us, each in our own unique way. You don't have to win a Nobel prize. You don't have to be "Person of the Year." You don't need to be an intellectual, phenom, or even an innovator in the usual sense of the word. There is genius simply in the ideas that only you have ever thought, the feelings only you have felt in that particular way, and all the endless ways you are uniquely you.

We all have genius. It is a fundamental aspect of our humanity. It is what makes us human.