Helen Lewis on why genius is a myth | ReThinking with Adam Grant

1. 0:00 – 0:16

   Intro

   1. HLHelen Lewis0:00

      If someone said to you, "Name five people everyone kind of agrees are a genius," I find that a lot of them come from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, and I wonder if it's to do with the fact that those are the first people that we've got photographs of. [upbeat music]

2. 0:16 – 4:12

   Do geniuses exist?

   1. AGAdam Grant0:16

      You titled your book The Genius Myth. Does that mean you think geniuses don't exist?

   2. HLHelen Lewis0:22

      Yeah, I d- I, I laid that trap right out for myself, didn't I? No, I, I do think that extraordinary achievement and talent both exist, and actually those are things that should be celebrated because they make the world a little bit more special and precious. But what I mean by myth is a sense of like these are stories, you know, stories you would probably heard in school. You know, like Isaac Newton and the apple or, you know, these things that are just kind of too perfect, and that's because they're not biography, they're, they're mythology. They're about turning these people into something bigger, something special. You know, making them either secular saints or halfway to gods or celebrities. You know, all of those things you might call them. But I do, you know, just to fess up, I do say in the book that I think it's healthier to talk about acts of genius than people as geniuses because it just, uh ... You know, for a start, I mean, this is related to the work that you've done about giving and taking, right? It, it acknowledges the fact that you don't do all this stuff on your own. No matter how singular a talent you are, there are always people who are vital to everything that you do. And w- you know, we so want stories to have protagonists that the pressure always from, you know, from outsiders should be to kind of try and restore the fullness and context to those stories.

   3. AGAdam Grant1:27

      I think that's fair and actually helpful. At the same time, there's a part of me as a psychologist that wants to say, "But people who repeatedly engage in acts of genius, like shouldn't we describe them then as geniuses?"

   4. HLHelen Lewis1:39

      Okay. I, I ... Okay, let's grant it and say we do that. Why? Why do you want to do that? The question is what does it do? Well, I'll tell you what it certainly does. It helps you to market them as a brand, right? One of the lists I have in the book is all the ways that Einstein is used to sell stuff. You know, like Baby Einstein toys and then he's appearing in like Verizon adverts because this is the smart choice that you would make for y- you know, your communications technology. And so turning people into these symbols undoubtedly helps them make more money, helps them become more famous, helps their children and families c- continue to keep cashing in on their legacy. Whether or not it produces more of the kind of work that you'd like to see in the world, I think is a slightly more open question, right? And that's what I think you and I probably both want to see, right? I want the maximum amount of cool stuff in the world, and actually what stories do you tell to people? How do you treat them in a way that encourages them to fulfill their best potential? Versus what I think sometimes happens, which is people get stuck and calcified into this role in public life that they've been cast in.

   5. AGAdam Grant2:37

      Fascinating. Well, I, I, I guess I'm inclined to come down on your side of this, which is gonna make for a very boring beginning of the conversation.

   6. HLHelen Lewis2:45

      No, don't do it. [laughs]

   7. AGAdam Grant2:46

      I don't want to agree so early, but I, I do think the danger of calling someone a genius, you know, is, is not only that it [laughs] that it creates this image of them that's unrealistic, but also I worry a lot about the self-image effects, that it goes to their head, and pretty soon we start to inflate egos into a trap of narcissism.

   8. HLHelen Lewis3:07

      Right, and I want to ask you something, 'cause I remember, um, reading ... I can't remember who it was, who said after, you know, having their first big success they felt really unhappy, and they felt really worried that like, "Has the biggest success I've ever had in my life happened? Like, and who am I now?"

   9. AGAdam Grant3:21

      I think that that kind of doubt is healthy. It, it keeps us questioning ourselves, it keeps us growing, it keeps us [laughs] not believing the flattery that, that people bestow on us, and I think that's how you maintain humility as, as you gain confidence and skill.

   10. HLHelen Lewis3:36

       Oh, I think you're right. I think there's a way to approach it which is brilliant. Like, people are now gonna be more likely to let me take a risk, right? Because, uh, if they believe in me and that I can deliver something at a high level, maybe I can push it. What you don't wanna go is the bad route where people encourage you to do the same thing you just did again but slightly less good.

   11. AGAdam Grant3:53

       I think the book, you do a wonderful job encouraging us to, to think more systematically and maybe be less distracted by these constructions in the world, um, of people that we see as towering figures. And I think this, this idea of like let's think about acts of genius rather than people who are geniuses, I think

3. 4:12 – 7:24

   Genius throughout history

   1. AGAdam Grant4:12

      that's a great distinction. It made me think about the ways that we've looked at genius throughout history, and I was starting to think about, um, I think a perspective that Liz Gilbert first put on my radar, which is that in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, they didn't say you are a genius, they said you have a genius. Like, it was a, a creative spirit that was visiting you, and you were lucky when it showed up. You didn't know how long it would stay or once it left if it would ever be back or when it would return. And I'm curious about how your view of acts of genius differs from that Ancient Greek or Roman view.

   2. HLHelen Lewis4:46

      [laughs] Well, yeah, I don't, um, necessarily believe in, in the kind of supernatural element to it, but I, I think it is a useful way of thinking about it because it explains what is for lots of people a fundamentally inexplicable process, right? I mean, I'm sure you've had situations where you've tried to sit down to write something, and it just won't. It just will not come out. Like, it's just y- there's like some kind of blockage. Versus the hallowed golden day when you sit down, put your fingers on your keyboard, and it is, it does feel like, like fire is flowing out of your fingers. Like, it's all just happening for you, and there's no real way to distinguish between when that will happen and when that won't. That's why I think the Greeks and Romans did talk about, they kind of talked about furor poeticus and furor divinus, you know, the divine fury that kind of, that went through you. Because it, it is ultimately that act of creativity, it's completely inexplicable. There's a whole bunch of stuff you can do to make it more likely to succeed, but then you have to wait for the lightning strike. So I really do, I do think about that, and I wonder if a lot of the way that we talk about genius now I think is probably down to an increasingly secular society, and we've kind of made ourselves little demi-gods rather than- Having this kind of pre-Enlightenment view that you were just a kind of vessel. I mean, that's when the word genius really begins to turn, is like 1600, 1700, 1800, you know, from having a genius to being a genius.

   3. AGAdam Grant6:01

      In some ways we were shedding aspects of having a genius that were not useful to people, right? The idea that it's completely out of my control, that I just have to wait for the spirit to arrive, that could be extremely demotivating. It could also [laughs] cause me to fail to learn from what are the habits that cause lightning to strike more often versus prevent it from coming. But it sounds like you think in doing that, we also took on some aspects of genius that are not so productive. Why? What happened culturally that led us to say we need to reify people as geniuses?

   4. HLHelen Lewis6:34

      My really deep cut is I wonder if it's about capitalism. Sorry, that makes me [laughs] like maybe everything is capitalism. No, but I do wonder if you get the era of kind of mass technology, mass journalism, mass production from the Industrial Revolution onwards, and then you move from if you're an artist, for example, having to look at kind of patronage, or if you're a scientist you might be the, you know, court physician or whatever it might be, to actually maybe being an independent entity acting in a market. And I think at that point, being able to sell your brand you, your personal brand, I think existed as far back as the 1800s. If someone said to you, "Name five people that everyone kind of agrees are a genius," I find that a lot of them come from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, and I wonder if it's to do with the fact that those are the first people that we've got photographs of. Those are the first people who lived in an age of mass literacy. Like someone

4. 7:24 – 10:04

   Thomas Edison

   1. HLHelen Lewis7:24

      like Thomas Edison, for example

   2. AGAdam Grant7:25

      Mm-hmm

   3. HLHelen Lewis7:25

      ... he is this mega celebrity. Because he's there in Menlo Park in New Jersey, every op-ed writer in Manhattan gets on like a lovely branch line for a, for a nice day out at Menlo Park and writes their piece about this incredible lab. And Thomas Edison usually spins them a whole load of yarn about how some invention that he's cooked up, and they then get to go back to their editor who publishes it, people read it, everyone loves it. Lots of those things turn out to be what we now call kind of vaporware, but it worked for everybody. It worked for Thomas Edison 'cause it made him more famous. It worked for the writer 'cause they had a great sort of scoop. And it worked for the readers who loved to read about it. And I think that's just, that, all of that can't happen 100 years earlier, and to me that's a kind of important part of the story, too.

   4. AGAdam Grant8:09

      Yeah, for me as well, and it raises this question, Edison in particular. So when we wanna think about, you know, a person's career or contribution, we could compare the mean, the sum, and the peak.

   5. HLHelen Lewis8:20

      Yeah. Okay.

   6. AGAdam Grant8:21

      And I think Edison had a very high peak but also not such a great mean because he was all over the place. A lot of his, his patents were total duds, and many of his ideas didn't even get there.

   7. HLHelen Lewis8:33

      The thing I find continually fascinating about Edison is that people associate him with the light bulb, and the light bulb is just not the story that you think it is because everybody has the same idea for the light bulb, the incandescent bulb. What if I lit a filament and I had some kind of vacuum around it and it would burn and that would light stuff up? And people have that idea for 100 years before him. They just can't make the vacuum tight enough and the, and the filament burn long enough. And what the real genius of, of Edison is is not this conceptual genius, which is how we tend to think of, like, geniuses, but manufacturing genius. You know, he gets a new pump that's, that's a much better vacuum and stuff like that. I think his real achievement is like the New York City electricity grid but, you know, no one is ever gonna write an inspirational poem or make a statue of the New York elece- electricity grid. But that was, you know, as a logistical, um, feat, that was incredible. And this is what I mean also. There is something in the genius myth about valuing people for the wrong things, for big leaps forward rather than the boring logistics stuff, and that kind of comes back to, you know, I, I start the book with Elon Musk, and I think his real genius is in manufacturing. You know, the fact that he drove down the cost of space parts-

   8. AGAdam Grant9:38

      Mm-hmm

   9. HLHelen Lewis9:38

      ... to the extent that actually reusable rockets have become a kind of, you know, probable, uh, method of getting to space and back over and over again and just, just changed space travel. That's actually underrated as one of his innovations. Whereas what other things has he actually done that are [laughs] you know, compare that with his reign at Twitter, for example. I would say slightly less successful. But you know what I mean. It just doesn't have the kind of glamour of kind of inventing something or finding something new, the fact that you're really, really good at running a supply chain.

5. 10:04 – 11:58

   Innovation vs. staying in your lane

   1. AGAdam Grant10:04

      There's a little bit of a trade-off here because on the one hand you're saying like when, when you figure out what your expertise is you should try to focus on that. On the other hand, you're also saying don't get typecast. You wanna continue to be in the, in the Galenson sense an experimental innovator where you're tinkering and testing out new, new ideas and stretching beyond your comfort zone. I think this, this poses a dilemma. [laughs] W- how do you know when, when a diversion is useful and when it's actually taking you too far from what you're capable of doing well?

   2. HLHelen Lewis10:36

      Yeah. I think that is, that is really the key conundrum. But I think there is a happy medium between the two, isn't there, where you have a kind of broadly defined area but you keep pushing yourself within it. I think what I'm really having a go at is the, particularly like the creative model where people go, "We love your dot paintings" and you then spend 10 years, you know, probably with your studio making dot paintings and selling them for a huge amount of money rather than trying to push on to some new format. I'm not sure it's necessarily such a problem for scientists because the, you know, the, by nature what they're doing rewards kind of boring, you know, the slow boring of hard boards a bit, a bit more I guess. But yeah, but these, like these are really interesting questions that almost everybody who is a genius has maybe flukely answered the right way, and I think that's another thing that, you know, I really felt when I came out of the book is the, just the huge amount of luck that is involved in all of these and the fact that we tell the stories of the winners basically. And to go back to Musk, I think he's a good example of somebody, you know, Walter Isaacson says in his biography that what really distinguishes him is his appetite for risk-taking, and we have that biography of the one person whose risk-taking paid off. We don't have the 999 biographies of all the people who took a massive bet and it ended up in bankruptcy and f- going down in flames. So there's a g- there is a kind of s- a bias towards, um, successful people obviously, and therefore we shouldn't overread, you know, reverse engineer from the biographies of successful people to what caused their success.

6. 11:58 – 15:11

   What makes a genius?

   1. AGAdam Grant11:58

      One of the things I was thinking about as I was reading your book was it, it seems like the way we attribute genius is very similar to the way that we attribute charisma. Which is, you know, we walk around thinking that charismatic leadership causes success, but there's a whole literature on the romance of leadership where after an organization becomes successful, people then imbue the leader with a perception of charisma after the fact, and, you know, kind of infer from the fact that they've achieved great things that, that that must be a contributing factor or, you know, a major active ingredient in, in the success of the group or of the company. And it made me wonder how often are we attributing the qualities of genius to success as opposed to [laughs] saying, "Hey, these are attributes that could produce genius" before we've seen the result?

   2. HLHelen Lewis12:46

      Yeah, I think it's really interesting. If you go back and read the, the 20th century literature on genius, you know, Hans Eysenck, who was o- o- one of the most cited psychologists of the 20th century, unfortunately now revealed as a research fraud, at least in his papers on smoking. I think that then throws a lot of his other work into question. But he has this book called Genius in which he talks about all the things that you should have, and he says, "You know, it should be like you should be born in February" and [laughs] and you're like, "What?" And, and a time of high solar activity. And it's like you've just found a bunch of things that happen, like you would do in any statistical noise, that just happen to be correlated with the sample that you've got. And then he has this amazing one, which is you should also have gout. Like not a, a subject that gets discussed very much, but a big deal in, in the 1800s. You know, this, it's build of uric acid in your joints, and you get that from eating too much rich food and being a slightly portly middle-aged man. And guess what? That does correlate with high success in life because you have earned enough money [laughs] by middle-age to be able to eat oysters and huge tubs of lard or whatever.

   3. AGAdam Grant13:42

      [laughs]

   4. HLHelen Lewis13:42

      And I just thought that was a kind of completely great example of somebody doing exactly what you're talking about, which is find the genius and then reverse engineer back what you think is, what, what made them so.

   5. AGAdam Grant13:54

      You wrote about this in the book. You said, "Genius becomes a licensing scheme for their eccentricities. Genius transmutes odd into special." I worry a lot about this licensing scheme. When I was writing about Elon recently, I was thinking a lot about the, the classic Hollander work on idiosyncrasy credit, the idea that when, when you accomplish something meaningful, people start to give you more of a, they give you more latitude to deviate from social norms. You start to accumulate this idea of, of credit, which is like, [laughs] hey, you know, th- this person is, you know, is such a rock star, um, that we'll tolerate some of their faults, or, um, we'll, you know, we'll look the other way at some of their vices. And I think that, that [laughs] that, that leads a lot of people to, to make this basic mistake of saying, "Well, um, you have to show these eccentricities in order to be successful," as opposed to saying, "No, the fact that they achieved success has allowed them now to get away with these eccentricities," which by the way, they were working harder to manage or hide or overcome when they didn't have as much freedom to get away with it.

   6. HLHelen Lewis14:55

      Oh, I think that, that, that makes complete intuitive sense to me because also when you've got a lot of m- money or high social status, your opportunities for being weird are kind of greater, right? Like getting obsessed with going to space, right? That's just fundamentally the kind of thing you can only do if you've got a spare billion lying

7. 15:11 – 17:20

   The pitfalls of genius

   1. HLHelen Lewis15:11

      around. But the licensing scheme, I, I think there's, I think there's a bit that happens with the geniuses themselves. I think there's also something that happens with the people around them, which is quite complicated and interesting. If you're all the friends of Picasso and he treats you all abominably while seeming like this kind of great god, there is something that makes your life feel like it's bigger than it is, that you're, you're living this something, e- an extraordinary experience. I think that happens in a lot of those Silicon Valley companies that are run like mini cults, right? Of course they don't let us ever go home because we're doing something incredible and amazing and not everybody could hack this. You know, that kind of telling yourself that you're in the part of this, you know, of course you're having this unpleasant experience because you're doing something extraordinary. I think that definitely happens. Yeah, and then I think there is the kind of the person themselves. When people stop saying no to you, most people do get a bit weirder.

   2. AGAdam Grant15:55

      This also shows up in the, the psychology of ambivalent relationships, where if someone is, is sometimes supportive and other times undermining, it's much harder to avoid them and, and set a clear boundary than if they're just difficult or nasty all the time, um, because you don't know whether, you know, Mr. Hyde or Dr. Jekyll is gonna show up and I, I can think of a lot of leaders who [laughs] have modeled that where, okay, like I will tolerate the abuse from Mr. Hyde because of the greatness of Dr. Jekyll.

   3. HLHelen Lewis16:25

      Yeah, it makes me think of that, the, the pigeons pecking away at the corn, you know, and the, and the release lever and, and the, the times when it's just completely random, they just drive themselves mad 'cause they're like, "Will I get corn? Will there be corn? Is there corn coming this time?" And I think people in those kind of organizations, because the corn is coming very intermittently, just become sort of obsessed with it and don't question themselves and what they're- they're putting up with. You know, I worked in a really tough tabloid newspaper office, and it, when I, when I left, I felt like, oh, I failed, like I couldn't hack it. You know, I didn't wanna be there until 10:00 PM being, being shouted at. And then I kind of had a bit more distance from it and I was like, "What? Why? Why did I do this to myself?" It becomes really, you know, if you just do get sucked into that group think, and, and lots of the people that I talk about in the book, Picasso being a very obvious example, everybody around him is aware that he's kind of a monster, but they also know that everybody is so, would, would die to trade places

8. 17:20 – 22:21

   The wives of male geniuses

   1. HLHelen Lewis17:20

      with him. I think about this a lot with like rock star wives and the way that rock star wives get hated by groupies, 'cause the groupie and the kind of rock fan is like, "Why wouldn't you put up with it? Like, you're so lucky to be his wife. You're so close to greatness." And I think that that, those things are, you know, those dynamics are really interesting. The other one that really got to me in the book is, um, so Sophia Tolstoy, the wife of Leo Tolstoy- She was his copyist, and she copied out like War and Peace I think maybe eight times. And her life sounds pretty miserable. She had, she complained about it a lot, certainly. She expressed her unhappiness in lots of diaries and journals, and she had more than a dozen children with him, so she was constantly pregnant. She was copying out his work for him, and you know, the way that she presented that was kind of misery and repressing her own artistic ambitions. But then in midlife he had this religious conversion, took up with the young, handsome officer who then became his kind of muse and his, his reader, and she felt completely, completely bereft by that. She was torn apart by that. So even though she would have said that her previous life had been making her miserable, something about being so close to the most famous writer in Russia, this guy that everybody thought was a kind of, you know, guru, was obviously incredibly meaningful to her, too. And I think that's, that kind of comes back to your ambivalent relationships, doesn't it, is the fact that you're not enjoying it, but you also feel lucky to have it, and you'd be angry if someone took it away.

   2. AGAdam Grant18:37

      I thought it was so interesting that part of the book focuses on the wives of male geniuses, and I'd love to hear a little bit about why and what you learned from them.

   3. HLHelen Lewis18:46

      It was this, there's lots of literature from the suffragettes about how hard they found it to do political campaigning alongside their domestic responsibilities. There's a quote from Hannah Mitchell, who says, you know, "No political cause was won between," I think she says, "dinner and tea," which is a very British way around of putting it. But you know, but that, that really stuck with me, and then when you look at the lives of some of the, you know, the people that we hail as geniuses, whether they had wives or housekeepers or in Isaac Newton's case, you know, lived in a Cambridge college. In the case of Yayoi Kusama, she checked into a mental institution 50 years ago and has a studio across the street. You know, like, she doesn't have any kind of, um, domestic responsibilities in that sense. It just struck me that this was the, you know, the biggest advantage you could possibly have would be somebody to run all the bits of your life that aren't the great work. I'm also interested to know even now what tends to happen is if you have a, a people in high, very high-flying careers, they both have high-flying careers, right? You still don't see that many cases in which there is a female breadwinner and a, and a stay-at-home husband. That is inevitably going to affect the level of just monomaniacal attention that women can pay to, to, to, to their careers. Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock's the one of the examples I discuss, you know, and it's very famous, to the extent I think it is now a piece of the mythology itself, that he was painting these huge drip paintings in their barn, and she was painting tiny little compact canvases 'cause she didn't have a workspace. And it's only after he died and she took over the barn, she begins producing these giant canvases of the type that look awesome on museum walls in the way that her little, tiny, small ones really don't. And there's just those things of like the material conditions I think are fascinating.

   4. AGAdam Grant20:25

      So interesting. To your point about support and how like a spouse who has both like a, a work collaboration role and a domestic role can, you know, can be more helpful because they care, I also think about they know more about you than probably almost anyone else you collaborate with. They see your foibles most clearly. Um, they're aware of your weaknesses and limitations. They recognize, you know, the ways that you tend to be formulaic. And so they, in some ways they're, they're a better, they're better critics, but because of the care, um, it's like no matter how tough it is, there's always love behind it.

   5. HLHelen Lewis21:00

      You know, the idea of kind of having a muse gets a really bad rap now, and we think of some kind of sleazy 50-something male film director and a kind of, you know, ingenue actress. But actually, that idea of having somebody who has got different qualities to you and that you want to impress, I think is a huge, huge... There's a tweet I think about a lot which says that all creative acts are driven by either horniness or revenge, and you have to decide which one of the two is your muse and act accordingly. But it's, it, but it's not untrue, right? Like, you cannot underrate that as a kind of creative force. And I think that's kind of wonderful to think about. As long as it isn't in that really exploitative way, the idea that the spark between two people is often what causes something, even if it looks like an individual achievement, again goes back to my idea that we, you know, we, we, we want to pull the frame back and see a bit more of the, of the context.

   6. AGAdam Grant21:47

      Yeah, I, I think that's right. I, I also [laughs] just going back to the, the tweet that you, you referenced, it's so narrow to think about the desire to impress people as solely like fueled by romantic passion.

   7. HLHelen Lewis21:59

      Sure. Yeah, yeah.

   8. AGAdam Grant22:01

      I think so much of, of human motivation to create is driven by there's somebody who's a role model for me, and I want to try to live up to their standards, and I don't think we talk about that enough.

   9. HLHelen Lewis22:11

      No, I think you really have to hang on to that. I really love that idea about the idea of, you know, you just recognize that there are places to be that will allow you to be your maximum self.

9. 22:21 – 23:59

   Intelligence vs genius

   1. AGAdam Grant22:21

      When I think about the qualities that we associate with genius, um, I think, you know, intelligence is obviously the one that stands out the most. We think about it as giftedness. I think what we overlook is that at the end of the day, intelligence is just the ability to think and learn, and the capacity to learn varies by domain, and it also doesn't guarantee a capacity to create something new and better than what's existed before. And I wonder if we define that more clearly, if the people who are labeled genius would be a little more cautious in their, in their bets about what they're capable of. Number one, it reminds them that they have to keep learning in order to use their genius. Number two, it also, I think, encourages them to think about in what areas do they excel at learning and where do they struggle at learning most. And then number three, to say, "Look, just because I can accumulate a lot of knowledge about something quickly and understand it, doesn't mean I can improve it."

   2. HLHelen Lewis23:11

      Yeah, I think, I think you're right. There's a phrase that I really love, I can't remember where it comes from, about keeping yourself at the green growing edge. You know that phrase?

   3. AGAdam Grant23:19

      No, but I love it.

   4. HLHelen Lewis23:19

      And that's what I always think about in m- my writing. One of the reasons I stopped writing op-ed columns, you know, those kind of thousand-word op-ed columns, was I just thought, "I've got a kind of formula for how I do this now," and they're fine. But, and sometimes they're good because I really care about it and I've got something to say, but like it's, it's like a solved equation to me. It's not intellectually interesting anymore. And I think that's, you know, when you hit a bit further into your career, that's the big challenge, isn't it, is to kind of still make yourself uncomfortable, which is more, you know, when you're young and you don't have a dependence and you know, you are more, you know, you, and, and failure would be less humiliating, that's a lot easier. But it's hard to keep that into middle age, I think. And you

10. 23:59 – 25:35

    When does creativity peak?

    1. HLHelen Lewis23:59

       know, I, I don't, I'd be really interested in your take on this. I spent a while wading through the literature on when peak creativity comes, and I just went, I- I, there's nothing for me here. Like, it just seems to be mathematicians do genuinely peak younger.

    2. AGAdam Grant24:14

       Yeah.

    3. HLHelen Lewis24:14

       But apart from that, it's- it's pretty hard to work out when that, you know, like to come up with any kind of rule about it.

    4. AGAdam Grant24:20

       Yes. I would say in general, the more well-structured a field is, the more it has laws, the younger we tend to see creative peaks. And I think math is the prototypical example of that, but physics would probably be not far behind. Literature is kind of the opposite, right? And we see peaks much later. So I think the, the more codified a domain is, the more it seems to, to depend on you come to it with a fresh perspective. You accumulate an understanding of it quickly, and you are able to juxtapose kind of your novel view with what's already known and, and discover something original and then after that, it's harder and harder to unsee the things that [laughs] that you've started to take for granted, and you run into a cognitive entrenchment problem. I think in, you know, in fields where, um, there isn't sort of a, a set of rules or codified principles, there's just more freedom, right? To keep inventing and reinventing, and I wouldn't wanna put an upper limit on that, would you?

    5. HLHelen Lewis25:16

       And I also like the more recent research that has been about, you know, sampling things and the need to just dabble around a bit before then having a hot streak. And so I'm, yeah, I maintain in myself the conviction that at some point the hot, like the hot streak is coming. You know, it's, it, it is entirely possible to keep writing for much longer than you can do other things.

    6. AGAdam Grant25:33

       I think that's one of the best parts of this career.

11. 25:35 – 27:39

    Lightning round

    1. AGAdam Grant25:35

       All right, let's go to a lightning round. I've got some quick-fire questions for you. First question is, when it comes to acts of genius, who are your dream dinner party guests?

    2. HLHelen Lewis25:46

       Jane Austen, because I don't know whether or not in real life she would've been just incredibly quiet or would she have been the person who sits very quietly in the corner and observes everybody all evening and then can kind of completely rinse them. So I, yeah, I'd ... It might be dangerous to invite her, but I'd invite her. Terry Pratchett, my favorite author since childhood, who I think just had such a funny outlook on life. James Baldwin, I could listen to him talk f- forever. Let me chuck a, like a Leonardo in there. Yeah, I think I was trying to think of all the Renaissance artists, which one of them was the least mad [laughs] . Like you would- like Michelangelo notoriously didn't change his boots for like a year when he was painting the Sistine Chapel, right? It was just they were repulsive by the time he took them off. Caravaggio murdered someone. You know, there's quite a lot of them that you probably wouldn't, uh, you wouldn't want. But yeah, yeah, I'll take a Leonardo. Yeah, he can take, have a bit of, you know, broccoli.

    3. AGAdam Grant26:32

       [laughs] Sounds like a good night. All right. Um, in the realm of talent, what's the worst advice that people get?

    4. HLHelen Lewis26:40

       Hmm. I have a really conflicted attitude to how nice people should be, particularly women should be. There's a really difficult thing, isn't there, but you hear this advice about don't be too nice, and you think, I, are we just telling a lot of people, giving them permission to be assholes? Versus I do think if you are too compliant and too conscientious, people treat you as less brilliant, treat you as less talented, treat you as le- you know, they, we, we just, I think being nice often is morally good, but personally bad. Can I nominate that one? That's my kind of controversial one.

    5. AGAdam Grant27:16

       I don't find it that controversial. I, I think there's such an important distinction between being nice and being helpful.

    6. HLHelen Lewis27:22

       Yes.

    7. AGAdam Grant27:23

       I would like people to try to do what they can to [laughs] to make other people's lives better and support others in achieving their goals, but that doesn't mean you can't say no and you can't set boundaries. Um, and by the way, when you do that, try to do it respectfully. This is not that complicated [laughs] . Okay. What's a question you have for me?

12. 27:39 – 30:06

    Advice for child prodigies

    1. HLHelen Lewis27:39

       Uh, this isn't something I covered in the book. I thought about it. Child prodigies, right? Who, who notoriously have quite troubled later lives 'cause they can never recreate, you know, they're always chasing the high. What's your advice to somebody who is a super bright kid and feels like things have gone wrong for them in adulthood? 'Cause I think that's a quite a common thing that happens, and there's almost no route map for those people out there, and they're almost afraid to ask 'cause it sounds like boasting.

    2. AGAdam Grant28:03

       Yeah. Um, wow. I mean, I'm, I'm thinking about the, the Ellen Winner research showing that child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses, in part because the standards of success change. And instead of being evaluated on whether they can [laughs] you know, play the f- the perfect Mozart sonata at age four, um, or you know, win a, a chess game against a grand master at age seven, now all of a sudden they have to invent their own game or write their own sonata. I guess the advice that I would give to, um, a former prodigy [laughs] or you know, a, a gifted child who's grown into a, an adult who's struggling professionally would be this might be a time to invest in creativity because mastering rote knowledge and skills is not gonna be rewarded as an adult. It's just not. I remember, you know, a- actually, Helen, I'll give you an, an example of this. Once I interviewed, uh, Christopher Nolan, the, the director, I was asking him about how he thought about his, his creative process. And he said, "You know, it's, it's strange because, you know, in school it was all about trying to get an A on a paper. As an adult, you realize no one's even reading your paper. And so you get to decide [laughs] like, what, okay, what, what is the thing that I wanna build?" And I think unfortunately a lot of prodigies don't get the exposure to that kind of opportunity, so that, I guess that would be my advice, is start figuring out who are the people in your orbit who are really great at coming up with new ideas, and go and learn from them and try to soak up some of their habits.

    3. HLHelen Lewis29:33

       I think that's really good advice, and I think probably I would say that the reverse of it applies, too, which is if you're somebody who has had a good deal of success in your career, go and put yourself in environments where nobody knows who you are. And I think it, this comes back to our discussion about becoming a monster in later life if you've had success because people do treat you a certain way. They give you more respect if they, you know, for whatever reason, and trying to take yourself out of environments and remember what it's like for people who don't get that level of respect, I think is really important. So yeah, if, if it's all gone a bit wrong, focus on creativity. If it's all gone right, focus on humility. That's where we can leave it.

13. 30:06 – 30:17

    Credits

    1. HLHelen Lewis30:07

       [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 30:26