Friday 2 January 2015

Three lessons from the Genius Triad (Questing Creative Intelligence - QCI)

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The Genius Triad is intelligence, creativity and long-term self-motivation - all focused on the same domain.

Psychologically the triad could be termed Questing Creative Intelligence; and QCI will be found with lower strength among non-geniuses (or small-scale geniuses) who nonetheless will tend to make original breakthroughs (whether these breakthroughs are noticed and exploited; or ignored and vilified)

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1. Creative people always have difficult personalities; and conversely nice people with conscientious, obedient reliable personalities are not creative.

This means that employers and patrons must tolerate genius-type people, if they want those things that only geniuses can do.

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2. The highest intelligence is not the same as attendance at the most elite institutions, the best reports and grades at school or top performance in exams - because modern institutions are not evaluating and selecting primarily on the basis of intelligence.

(Indeed modern institutions are not even trying to do select primarily by intelligence - the reality of which they often deny; but instead are implicitly - by the nature of their evaluations - and also by explicitly-stated policies - selecting on other grounds).

The most intelligent people are nowadays dispersed among variously ranked institutions (and no-instituions-at-all); and typically have sub-optimal - sometimes frankly bad - academic and employment records.

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3. The most creatively intelligent people are not to be found in the most prestigious, best-funded, or fashionable subjects (unless they were the original founders of the field) - since a genius is stubbornly self-motivated, and will work only where his destiny leads him (and he may refuse or neglect work that interferes with his destiny).

The fields in which genius is questing are as various as the people with genius; and will often strike other people as futile or absurd; nonetheless, 'eccentricity' is intrinsic to the necessary autonomy of genius.

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