What Genius Actually Is (And Why We Forgot)

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

– A quote commonly misattributed to Albert Einstein

We live in the age of big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. The advancement we're witnessing is unprecedented. We can quantify nearly everything, collect data on almost anything, and with AI, process it all at speeds that once seemed impossible. Then we can analyze, synthesize, and even automate actions based on the intel we gather.

So you'd forgive us for thinking that we've got it all figured out.

But for all our power to record, forecast, and control, an emptiness persists that all our progress seems incapable of filling.

We've built a world of material abundance, yet true wealth feels more distant than ever.

We see it in the crises that plague our culture: conformity over courage, imitation over inspiration.

We feel it in our own lives too as a persistent sense that we are helpless cogs in a machine, driven by metrics, but starved of meaning.

And the more we advance, the more something fundamental seems lost.

This is especially true when it comes to one of the most powerful forces in the human experience: Genius.

Today’s dictionaries define genius as a person possessing both an extraordinarily high intellect and the original creative power to produce groundbreaking work or pioneer new fields.

To identify it, we use IQ tests to measure exceptional intelligence and track child prodigies with remarkable early abilities.

This linear, analytical approach to the world has done us wonders, but one of its most well-documented failures was an experiment conducted in the 1920s by a Stanford psychologist called Lewis Terman.

He thought he’d cracked the code when he set out to find and track the world’s future geniuses. Terman gathered over a thousand children with “genius-level” IQs – he called them his Termites – and watched them for decades, convinced they’d become the next Einsteins and Mozarts. 

But he was wrong.

Though the Termites became successful doctors, lawyers, and professors, though they led comfortable lives and built respectable careers; not one of them became the world-changing genius that Terman and his linear approach predicted.

The irony of the whole experiment manifested in two children Terman had rejected for having IQs that weren't high enough. Those children grew up to win Nobel Prizes in Physics.

This isn't just a problem from the past as we still have no idea what makes a genius a genius.

The word seems like a static label we attach to people who’ve made world-changing contributions but only in hindsight. It's like a medal awarded after the race is won.

To most of us, the whole concept feels like a biological lottery where you either have it or you don't.

So this modern definition leaves us with a dead-end, yes or no question: "Am I a genius or not?"

And we wait for the world to answer.

This gives us a destination without a map as somewhere in the history of the word, that map was lost. And it is this map to genius that we will try to unearth in this post by studying the etymology of the word, as words are not static. They are shaped by the mouths that speak them, by the cultures they inhabit, and by how we perceive them.

So we will travel back to Ancient Rome, back to where the word originated to understand how it was initially defined.

In Ancient Rome, genius wasn't about exceptional intelligence. It was a core concept in Roman religion. Every person was thought to have their own genius. It was a personal tutelary deity or guardian spirit. (For men, it was called Genius, while for women, it was called Juno, but the concept was the same.)

This spirit was believed to be "born with" every child, guiding their destiny and representing their fortunes, essential character, and innate nature. It was the begetter or originator of an individual's life.

And though it sounds abstract, a person's genius in Ancient Rome had practical effects on everyday life. Your genius was your divine double, your life-force, and your personal guardian all in one. Birthdays weren't about celebrating yourself but about honoring the spirit that guided you.

Genius provided a framework for understanding personal spiritual wealth and fostering creativity. The person was the vessel. The genius was the source. And worldly success originated from that dynamic. At the end of one's life, the genius (or Juno) was believed to conduct the person out of the world.

The next stage in the evolution of genius we'll be looking at is in the Renaissance – the period between the 14th and 17th centuries. Renaissance is French for "rebirth," and this era was a transformative period in European history that marked the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era. It's famous for being a golden age in art, and it was a time when advancements in science laid the groundwork for the scientific revolution that followed in the centuries after. The printing press was invented. Exploration and discovery flourished. Literature and philosophy thrived.

And this massive rebirth led to a powerful new intellectual movement called Humanism, which celebrated human potential, achievement, and a person's ability to shape their own destiny. Leonardo da Vinci exemplified that era as he wasn't just a master painter, but also a scientist, inventor, anatomist, and engineer. Contributions like his ensured that the definition of genius evolved to be seen as a limitless human capacity for understanding and creation.

So with the Renaissance, genius shifted from describing the spirit one connected to to the talent or inspiration that brought about incredible art and advancement. It was still seen as the result kind of divine inspiration, though, like an external force flowing through a person.

Then came the Enlightenment during the 18th century and it was often called the "Age of Reason." This period was a powerful intellectual and cultural revolution that championed reason, science, and individualism over blind faith and tradition. It was an age of scientific classification where thinkers like Carl Linnaeus worked on categorizing the natural world with modern systems of naming organisms (or binomial nomenclature). Consequently, the human mind was approached with the same scientific method. Immanuel Kant crystallized this shift, defining genius as an innate mental talent and a the ability to create new rules and produce original works that others could follow. Thinkers at the time were trying to understand the mechanics of greatness, and the conclusion was this: true genius doesn't just win the game it plays but invents an entirely new one.

For example, a skilled musician can play a Mozart symphony by following the rules written on the page. That is skill. It can be learned. But the genius is Mozart, who created the symphony from nothing and established the rules for others to follow.

The most crucial consequence of the Enlightenment era was this: genius started to become the biological lottery we know today instead of a birthright that could be attained by anyone. And if genius is an innate trait, the next logical question would be: "How do we identify it? And how do we measure it?"

So as we can see, the enlightenment set the stage perfectly for our modern obsession with IQ tests and the quantification of the human mind. And that's where the map was lost. Genius started as a spirit. Then shifted to the talent. Now, genius began describing the person.

Back when genius was a spirit, the question was clear: "How do I align with it? How do I honor it? How do I let it guide me?" Those were questions you could act on as you could cultivate your relationship with your genius through ritual, attention, listening, awareness, and mindfulness. But when genius became an innate trait of the biologically gifted, the question shifted and became impossible to answer: "How do I become what I either am or am not?"

This is why I say we kept the destination, but lost the map. And we've been stuck asking the wrong questions ever since: "Do I have it? Can I measure it? Am I 'gifted' enough?" As if genius were a test you pass, or some exclusive club you're born into, or a label someone else assigns. But what if the Ancient Romans weren't primitive in their thinking? What if they understood something we've forgotten in our rush to quantify and categorize everything?

What if genius isn't something you have or lack, but something you remember to align with?

To answer that, let's look at what actually happens when someone we call a genius creates. Let's look at Albert Einstein, who once said:

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

On his process, he stated:

I never came upon any of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking.

These quotes dismantle the modern idea of genius as pure intellectual horsepower and reveal the journey of a man that began not with formal scientific inquiry, but with a simple and imaginative question from a sixteen-year-old boy: "If I were to ride a beam of light, what would I see?" Common sense and the physics of his time suggested a clear answer: just as you can catch up to a car and see it become stationary when you match its speed, you should be able to catch a beam of light and see it frozen in space beside you. This created a paradox as common sense conflicted with the fundamental laws of nature which stated that a "frozen" light wave was impossible. Einstein's genius wasn't in solving the puzzle with the existing rules, but in his courage to question the rules themselves. He questioned the centuries-old assumption that space and time were absolute, resulting in the revolution we now call relativity.

We then look at Steve Jobs who was a man notoriously driven by intuition at a time when market research was the driver for many others. On a calligraphy class he audited at the college he'd dropped out of, he later said:

It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me... You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

What we can conclude from these two cases and infinite others is that none of these "geniuses" sat down and decided to revolutionize their fields. They didn't manufacture their originality or force their breakthroughs. What they did is much simpler and infinitely harder:

They followed what pulled them even when it made no sense to anyone else. They aligned with their genius, and ultimately became the genius that wanted to emerge through them all along.

The pattern repeats itself across every field in every era. Something within 'a genius' pulls them in a direction – call it intuition, obsession, the genius-spirit – and despite the fear and the lack of understanding from others, they follow it.

Why? Because not following that current becomes more painful than the uncertainty of the path. This is alignment. And from it, everything else emerges.

Now, if we look at the evolution of the word genius across the four eras we explored, we can see that the journey of the word mirrors the journey of the person we label as a genius.

Stage One is Recognition (Ancient Rome – Genius as Spirit)

The question here isn't whether you have the genius-spirit or not, but about the stillness required to notice it. It's about the curiosity to let it pull at you without resisting and the recognition that the pull isn't a problem to solve, but it actually originates from the source you carry within you. The alternative to following that pull is the pain of an unlived life that has chosen you and that you refuse to live. Then you have to deal with the emptiness that stems from denying the unique purpose that you, and only you, can carry out.

The Romans saw it as a presence to be honored. So the first stage is about a confession that you – with your unique combination of parts that make the whole you are – have never happened before and will never happen again. This is a truth that you must live up to. It is the unique purpose only you can fulfill.

So are you brave enough to admit you can feel it pulling?

Stage Two is Alignment (Renaissance – Genius as Channeled Inspiration)

This is where your free will aligns with what's pulling at you and with the unique purpose calling you. You didn't choose your genius-spirit, but you must choose to answer its call. This stage is about a sacred yes to that spirit and it is the hardest stage because alignment is not a one-time decision, but a continuous one where you choose to follow the pull by aligning your free will with what fate has handed you even when it contradicts everything you've built and offers no guarantees. It is about choosing alignment even when you still can't explain it to others.

Just as Steve Jobs said,

you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

That trust is the source of your confidence in your path and your conviction in your choice. This is where the channeling happens and where divine inspiration (or whatever you choose to call it) flows through a willing vessel, setting the ground for the next stage.

Stage Three is Manifestation (Enlightenment – Genius as Original Work)

After countless hours in the uncertain flow of alignment and in the refinement of that flow by absorbing and understanding every resistance you face, something begins to solidify and a pattern emerges. This is what allows the creation of a unique body of work that only you can build. One day you will perish, and this body of work is the only thing that will remain. This is the stage of manifestation and it is when you bring the product of your alignment into the light for all the world to see. The work that comes through is not simply a better version of what already exists, but something inherently and unavoidably different.

At this point, you're not simply playing the game and following its rules, but you're creating a new one just like the Macintosh, the iPhone and the Theory of Relativity. The work itself becomes a new standard and a new way of seeing. The emergence of such work doesn't happen because you forced it, but because you stopped blocking it and allowed it to flow through you. This originality is not an act of ego as you aren't trying to be original, but you simply can't be otherwise.

At this stage, you realize that conviction is not something you build. It is what remains when you've stopped doubting the current. Confidence is not manufactured, but the natural state of someone who's aligned with their genius-spirit and has seen the potential that emerges from that alignment.

Stage Four is Recognition (Contemporary – Genius as Label)

This is the final and least important stage, and it's the only one that happens outside of you. After your work has manifested and changed the rules, the world needs a word to describe the person who channeled it. So, it reaches for the only label it has for something so inexplicably new: Genius.

The journey comes full circle and the label that once seemed like a distant, impossible destination is finally offered to you. But now you see it for what it truly is. It is an echo. It is a label attached to you in hindsight and a medal after you’ve won the race. The world sees you as the destination. But you know the truth.

You are simply the one who finally agreed to take the journey.

Your genius has been waiting.

It's been pulling you, calling you, trying to show you the direction only you can take.

Einstein followed his to relativity. Jobs followed his to the Mac. Mozart followed his to symphonies that still move us centuries later. And it wasn't because they were born special.

They just remembered to listen.

The pull is already there. The path is mapped. It's been there your whole life.

So, will you follow that path to mastering your genius?