Genius, Insight, Diligence
Another month gone. Being busy at work is the default for ordinary people, and I’m one of them — just another person with a job. Time to sit still, think, and write is accidental, almost sudden. It looks like a whim. More often it’s an old habit kicking in on its own.
I only just saw the news: a food-delivery rider won a Lu Xun Literary Prize with a poetry collection called Flying Low. His name is Wang Jibing. A lot of the poems were written on scraps of paper between deliveries. Source: People’s Daily Online
“Who says spreading your wings means you have to fly high
Flying low is still flying
There is wind like birdsong
Wheels like shooting stars
Orders taped on the bags
Black on white, as urgent as a spell”
– Wang Jibing
My title doesn’t seem to have much to do with that. I still think there’s a thread. This story jumped into my head before I even started on the topic.
Everyone means something different by genius, talent, or gift. So do I. To me it’s a way of naming certain strange people, things, or phenomena. Most of that strangeness isn’t manufactured or taught. It arrives from nature, or from nowhere you can point to. I don’t know how the dictionary puts it, and I don’t need to unpack the literal meaning on this blog.
I do know this: geniuses often say their talent comes from diligence.
Lu Xun said he put the time others spent on coffee into work. Gorky and Edison both said genius comes from hard work.
If you trace those famous lines, diligence looks central. The people who said them must have seen geniuses up close.
Diligence — I think Chinese people feel that word in their bones. We were taught it as kids: diligence is a traditional virtue; hard work makes up for a lack of talent; diligence is the premise of success; and so on.
In the life I’ve actually lived, diligence does not turn someone into a genius. Think of all the ride-hailing drivers and delivery riders, out early and back late — would you call them lazy? Geniuses are probably diligent too, because they may, like a rider, do one thing over and over at high frequency for a stretch of time.
What gives me the right to that conclusion? It depends on how I judge genius. Everyone’s bar is different. One shared bar, at least: a genius is someone better than me, and more diligent than me.
I’ve thought about it. People I would call geniuses, or close to it, often share a clear pattern: things most people — including me — find nearly impossible look, in their eyes, like something they can knock off in passing.
I’ve thought about it further. Genius and diligence are not a simple “stack enough hours and you become a genius.” There is something else between them. I think it’s insight. The word is abstract, but at bottom I take insight to be a way of thinking — a way of thinking unlike most people’s. A good way of thinking, plus diligence, can do the work that looks like genius.
Insight has to be trained on purpose. It needs a lot of input, a lot of judgment, and conversation (I’ll get to why another time). Without decent insight, you can’t put out good work or a good product. And geniuses are geniuses in part because they output on purpose. No output, no publicity — you wouldn’t even know who the geniuses are.
Alright, that’s enough for today. I might become a genius myself — a genius in some field, at some thing. Time will tell. And so might you, reading this.