It’s an age-old question and I don’t think we’re any closer to a definitive answer. Are geniuses born that way? Malcolm Gladwell says anybody can be genius if they’re ready to devote 10,000 hours to the subject or discipline in which they want to display said genius. Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis, offers a somewhat more nuanced definition:
Geniuses are those who “have the intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance to acquire the needed expertise in a broadly valued domain of achievement” and who then make contributions to that field that are considered by peers to be both “original and highly exemplary.”
I guess it isn’t really a matter of whether genius can be learned so much as acquired. (In my case, it took years of a watching TV plus a steady diet of Little Debbie Nutty Bars.) Whether the techniques that Gladwell suggests or the process that Simonton describes can actually lead to genius, I don’t know. But the Age of Acquirable Genius will arrive one day. That will be the day that we can master a new skill by taking a pill or simply “jacking in” to a learning interface that transfers the skills directly to us.
Of course, some will argue that this isn’t “real” genius, in the same sense — I suppose — that a face corrected by plastic surgery doesn’t reflect “real” beauty. (And, yes, sometimes they are far from it!)
And, relatively speaking, an individual in that age who learns how to compose Mozart-like symphonies in a matter of hours won’t be a genius. Anybody can do that. Maybe the individual who combines that skill with the ability to churn out Shakespeare-like poetry and Christopher-Wren-like architecture who then designs an entire virtual world — an ongoing interactive opera combining the most beautiful music, the most thrilling drama, and the most stunning sets imaginable — maybe that individual begins to approach genius. But then at that point, we might be back to Gladwell and his 10,000 hours.