Craig Wright | The Hidden Habits of Genius

Transcript

Srini: .

Craig, welcome to The Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us

Craig Wright: Delighted to be here.

Srini: . Oh, it is my absolute pleasure to have you here. You have been on my list of people to reach out to for quite some time. You have a book called The Hidden Habits of Genius, and I honestly couldn't even tell you how I found it or found out about it, probably because Amazon looks at all my other reading habits and your book came up.

And I remember reading the intro when I downloaded on Kindle and immediately went and said, all right, send this to me. And I absolutely love that. I thought it was really relevant to not only creatives, but the world that we live in today. But before we get into all of that I, what did your parents do for work and how did that end up shaping the choices that you ended up making with your life and your career?

Craig Wright: Very interesting question. And it's so much a reflection of the age which I grew up, which was after World War ii, and the world was a very different place then. And my mother was a housemaker only after 60 years after the fact that I discovered looking through books and notebooks, but documents regarding our family ancestry that I just discovered that she had a master's degree in business education.

I didn't know that. I know that she had gone to college, but because of that age, she wasn't a really allowed or encouraged, it was not thought proper for a highly educated woman to get out there in the public arena. What a tragedy that is. Yeah. I went to the Eastman School of music to be a, the next great Van Clyber world's concert pianist of the highest order and all working out very well, except when I got there, I discovered I was lacking only one thing and that was musical talent.

But to to stay on point here with your questions, Triva, what did my father do? There I am in music. What did my father do? He was a certified public accountant. He had a cpa. Okay. The farthest thing imaginable from music. I don't think, I never, now that I think of it now that you ask the question, not only could he not sing Atune, as far as I know, no, I'm not sure I ever heard him sing anything.

Yeah. Or express music in any sort of way. The music was on my mother's side of the family. And at what, when the gift was given down as it was to some other relatives in the family, I had a sister with perfect pitch of a granddaughter that was, but the music talent completely skipped me.

But if it's in there, coming down my mother's side rather than sign the family, so master's degree in business administration on my mother's side. So not practicing in any sort of, A PhD in economics, but on my father's side. But he was a practicing, he taught business administration and what was licensed as a certified public accountant.

Okay.

Srini: How in the world does the son of an economist and a woman with an mba end up in music of all places? Because funny enough, ed, I don't necessarily agree that you didn't have any talent at all because, you probably, this, you may not know. I played the tuba for nine years, so I know this trajectory, and I got into the USC School of Music, my dad being the wise person that he was told me that, you shouldn't do this.

And then I imagined the future. I was like I'll be reading obituaries, not job boards, because there's only one tuba in every orchestra, as and you have to wait for somebody to die for a job to open up. And, but the thing is that so my parents discouraged me entirely from that trajectory.

So I wonder what was the narrative about making your way in the world, in your household? Because that just doesn't seem. Like a likely outcome

Craig Wright: as you pointed out. I think in a way it was ignorance. I don't think they understood how hard it is to be a practicing musician. I don't think they'd ever done any.

Cost benefit analysis to say that, hey, if you want to be the next band Clyburn, the chances are that about one and zero, and it's a very long and sometimes expensive road to get to at best, a plateau of perhaps mediocrity and perhaps boredom, where you end up teaching in a secondary school just as a studio teacher, which I would've found not particularly exciting or particularly interesting.

So I don't think that they really knew how difficult to it is to be a practicing professional musician or perhaps a practicing professional artist of any kind. Whether it's a novelist a painter, a particularly a poet, tell your Indian barren, says, wow, he's gonna be a poet, but tuba, that's really nuts.

That's really pushing it. I could see that . Yeah. It's

Srini: not about, at least a piano you can go like play jazz clubs and stuff. Absolutely.

Craig Wright: Two, two. What were you thinking? Triva?

Srini: Yeah. It's funny, I was talking to a guest recently who I was a professional violinist for many years and she quit.

She wrote this book called Declassified about classical music. Oh. And we were talking about this and I said, yeah. I was like, we were talking about divorce Act eight symphony. And I'm like, I told her, I was like, there's a tuba part in divorce Acts eight symphony, and you know what the tuba part is? One whole note.

I was like, did somebody sleep with this guy's wife who played the tuba? So he just put that in there to piss to them. But the thing that I wonder is, Eastman is no joke. I know this cause I, there's no joke to even get, and you had to have had some talent.

Craig Wright: Yeah. Before we get into, that's the question.

Yeah. Yeah. You can get in if you work hard, if you have a modicum of talent. And there we go. I had a huge work ethic. Yeah. I was always in the practice room. I was highly disciplined. And I could make up, I could compensate for lack of talent with hard work. And that's the interesting question here, nature versus nurture, talent versus gift, that sort of thing.

The role of work versus natural endowment. On and on we could go. Yeah.

Srini: So one, where does the work ethic come from and based on your research, this is something I've asked a handful of people who I've talked to on the show who've been professional. Why do you often have this thing that happens where there are these kids who are prodigies as kids when they're, musicians.

But very few young prodigies actually end up becoming professionals. Yeah. Leader in their life, particularly in music. I've seen this pattern when I've talked to probably a half a dozen people on the show here. What is that all about? Why does that happen?

Craig Wright: That happens for one very simple reason.

It seems to me, and I do write about this in my book. I think it's chapter three or something like that. I think it's on the Prodigy trap or something such as that. It's an inter, it's an interesting point because prodigies are essentially mimics. What they are told to do. And you can say, watch these tv.

So such as Child Genius or Genius Junior. Neither one are running at the moment, but they were very popular a few years ago. And what happens there is that the young person with some great natural endowment is asked to replicate and and perform any particular well established discipline up to a standard that we already know the outcome.

You could be prodigy with regard to chess. Could be a prodigy with regard to music. It could be a mnemonic prodigy, somebody has an extraordinary capacity room to remember things or wind speeds in particular, hurricanes, that sort of thing. All that is well and good. And it's astonishing because they are 20, 30 years ahead of everybody else in their age.

Gradually as they move up 20 or 30 years. That particular level of understanding no longer seems truly exceptionable. And what they have not been encouraged to do is think in any kind of original way. They are extremely gifted in staying with inside the box, but the people that are the true geniuses in this world are the ones that are thinking outside the box.

So prodigies are simply young people with exceptional initial endowment that come up to the standard of the age at a very early age. But as age catches up with them, they're no longer of list of interest because they are not creators.

Srini: We, you alluded to this whole debate of talent versus you skill nature versus nurturing.

This is a question that I've been asking a lot of people. I've had numerous conversations. I talked to Steven Kotler, who's sort. Go to Guy on performance. We had Justine Musk here who is Elon's ex-wife. She wrote this article about the psychology of visionaries. And this is something I wonder particularly for you.

You said, you get to Eastman, you quit cause you realize you didn't have any talent. How much of this is like what role do genetics play in these extraordinary accomplishments? Because I think that we're lying to ourselves if we are saying that they don't play any role at all. And Steven Coer said if you have perfect match quality, meaning that you can align your intrinsic motivators and the things you are good at with, the thing that you're doing, then you can be world class in something.

But yeah, he made a good point. He's I'm 160 pounds and I'm never gonna play in the nfl. Yeah. . And I'm a scrt and I'm never gonna be in the nba. Those are genetic limitations that are very real.

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Craig Wright: It's a very interesting question and it's we would love to quantify the ingredients here. We would say what we need is 80% genetics and maybe a 20% quotient element of hard work here. But I think it depends on the individual.

Luck certainly plays a role as well. I think personally that a lot of it is in fact, as you were suggesting, trini us a genetic, you have to get in the high level of expertise or performance expertise or transforming the world. You have to have certain genetic predispositions.

Mine would not have been in mathematics, for example, but there are people that have this. Gift for a math or quantitative of thinking. Natural nature is important. Your genetic the hand that you're dealt genetically is very important, but at the same time, there's a component of hard work involved.

Now, the, my favorite story with this is, and again, I started to continue referencing my book, it sounds like some used car salesman here, but what interests me is a, and I'm gonna go to a story. The story I am teaching online in the summers cuz I would always do that. I'd love to teach this course and.

Given any opportunity, I would teach it in the summers. I could teach it online and gimme a bit of flexibility to give the students a bit of flexibility too. So there we are. Online, it's zooming in real time three days a week for an hour and 15 minutes. Everybody comes together. It looks like a Hollywood squares set up and there are the faces and we're talking.

But there's this one face, Nathan Chen, who always seemed to be dialing him in a different spot. One day he would be at the airport in Los Angeles. Next day he'd be in Montreal. Next day in Toronto. Next day he'd be in the back of an Uber going somewhere. Eventually I started looking around and trying to find out about this.

It turned out this guy is the world's greatest figure skier. He wasn't exactly at that time. He was the number one ranked American figure skier. But he had not won a gold medal as he went on to do spectacularly well as the Tokyo Olympics. So here I've got in my class, Nathan Chin. This is it.

This is the pinnacle. He is the first to do all of this and that, and things that I don't understand about figures ski. So at the end of the course, after all the grades had been submitted and stuff like that, I thought I was free to just chat, talk with him, person to person. So I said what, Nathan, what do you think about this genetics business and versus hard work?

And he said, as I look at this and I look at the top world rank figure skaters, I think it's 67 maybe even 80% genetics, natural gift. That was his opinion. And then in order to reach the 100%, which you would need to

be Olympic level skater, the rest, you really have to work hard and you really have to push your, push yourself hard.

So he wrote me this in a long email and I've incorporated a bit of it in the book. What I didn't get a chance to put in the book fully, I think is in a footnote somewhere, is that then a couple days later, he sent me back a footnote and say, I talked this over with my mother of Chinese background.

She said no. It's not this at all. It's all hard work. It's you can be, and whatever you want to be in life, it's a result. Not that you're genetic gift, but of hard work. And that's all, that's, that then brings you to the whole issue of culture and perception about accomplishment.

And we can, that's a whole nother, that's a

Srini: fashion. Oh let's go down that rabbit hole

Craig Wright: because Indian, whether it's Chinese or Absolutely. Or whether it's American Farm Boy, which is where I came from.

Srini: So yeah. This is such a really interesting nuance because I, my old roommate, we would talk about grades in high school.

He's did you get straight ass? I was like, man, of course I got straight ass. I'm Indian. I was like, but that doesn't mean I'm smart. It means that I had Indian parents because, we jokingly say it's like they'll disown you if you don't get straight A's. But I think that makes a perfect segue into talking one first talking about how you end up quitting Eastman and end up, what's the trajectory from quitting Eastman to

Craig Wright: teaching at Yale?

I did have, there was one bit of good luck there and I did have the fact that my father p at PhD in economics and CPA did teach at a university. So I saw what was going on in university and I thought, Hey, these are really cool patients. You don't earn a ton of money, but it's a reasonably decent living.

And you can go in there and you can do interesting things. You get to work with young people. You get to communicate, you get to exchange ideas. And if you get this thing called tenure, then you can go out there and as long as we say put butts in seeds, in other words, you cover your enrollment and got kids coming in your classes, you can pretty much teach whatever you want to.

They don't okay. Care. So it's almost a numbers scheme at some point. So that's the other great advantage of that. You, there's a huge amount of creative freedom in a university situation, whether that's still there today, it's certainly there for the faculty members if they wanna if they're courageous and curious enough, take advantage of it.

That, that's what the advantage that I had. I saw what a university was and I knew, okay, so I can't make it as a concert pianist plan a. Has just shut down. Door A has just shut down. What's plan B? Plan B is to be university professional. What could you teach? I could teach music. I could teach music history.

I'd always been interested in history. History is this gigantic story. We all love stories. So I'll go traits around finding stories, initiatives. I started studying weird stuff like Gregorian chant and things like that. But then I found out about Mozart and that sort of changed my life and off I went in pursuit of Mr.

Mozart all around the world because he had a fascinating story to tell. . Yeah.

Srini: Let's talk specifically about education and particularly elite education. At a place like Yale we were talking about culture and I think that culture absolutely plays a role in, in how people end up in these situations.

Cuz I can tell you that the sort of narrative in an Indian household, which I'm sure it probably is very similar in an Asian household, is you go to the best damn university, you can get into Uhhuh. Was there something that William Dershowitz said in his recent book the End of Solitude? It was he wrote an amazing book called Excellent Sheep which was about, the Miseducation of the American Elite.

But these are the two things that struck me from this book the one that he wrote most recently. And he said, the first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates from you. The second disadvantage, implicit in what I've been saying is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.

You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity. Not only your identity, but your value. And as somebody who taught at Yale because I believe William did too, it at some point, what do you make of the center? What do you see as patterns in your students, particularly in the wake of the recent college admissions scandal and the pressure that we're seeing because.

The joke, I think for many of us who went to these schools is that we couldn't even get into our own alma maters anymore.

Craig Wright: Yeah. . So

Srini: as somebody who has been in the system,

Craig Wright: like what is, what's it's right what's going wrong? The problem is when, not with the students, but, or necessarily educational system, but it's with the parents and this false sense of values and this false sense of I want my child to be a world beater, so therefore it's gotta go to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton something, or University of Chicago or something.

Something like that. That's a huge misconception. And to my in my defense, I used to say, because I'd be asked to friends would call up and say, my son, daughter coming to campus, can you give 'em tour around campus? Sure. The back. A story here is probably, could you write a little note to the admissions office?

Help . Yeah. That kind of thing. And I would do that, but then at the end of these tours, I would say to both parent and child that I was acquiring around there, there are 300, at least 300 great universities in the United States. The United States really does have a lot, our primary and secondary schools may be.

I won't say a disaster, but challenged. And we, yesterday on both Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, there were articles, front page articles, I believe, about the decline. Maybe it's the third page in the journal on the first page, the decline of test scores in the United States, the eighth grade reading and fourth grade math, and how bad it was all getting.

But the good news is because, and we could go into why that's the case, but probably because of private endowments and private philanthropies, there are a huge number of really fine educational institutions in the United States. And as I say, there are 300 of these around the country, at least 300 that you could go to and come out almost as well as if you had gone to.

To Harvard, Yale, or Princeton or the elite schools or IV or whatever it would be. That's a profound mis And then I would end by, say, it's not the school, it's what is in you. How much, how curious are you? How much independent thinking are you capable of? Are you risked intolerant or risk tolerant?

Are you self-motivated? This kind of thing. Those are, you have a degree of empathy with other people. Are you willing to take chances, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Those are the things that really matter and matter of more The educational institution, if you put factors on it, that's probably in my book, 80 to 85% of what's gonna generate particular outcome.

And the other five to five, 10, 15% is probably the institution. So we don't wanna overrate these institutions. They're wonderful. They're lovely, they're spectacular, they're good. But you, it's the person rather than the institution. Yeah.

Srini: Speaking of all these things that you mentioned, one of the things that you say in your book is, I, if IQ tests, s a t, tests and grades are unreliable predictors of career success, they're even worse predictors of genius, they generate both false positives.

Those who seem to be headed for greatness aren't in false negatives. Those who be to be going nowhere, but ultimately change the world. And I wrote this essay titled Advice to Freshmen Starting College and , this was based on a conversation I had with one of my cousins. Friends sons who was starting college here at uc, Riverside, and it just went on to be this like 25 word letter to myself to like my younger self.

It's this is the advice I would give you. And the, one of the things I said the very beginning is, you're not special, you're privileged. I'm like, just because you're at Elite University. But the thing is that if these aren't, if these are unreliable predictors of career success and worst predictors of genius, then why is it that they are the way that we continue to measure in this country?

Because like you say, we continue to rely on standardized tests because there's just that standardized, a common set of questions that can be used to evaluate and compare the cognitive development of millions of students and advantage in countries such as the United States with large populations to gain efficiency, we sacrifice breath of understanding.

So with that in mind, as somebody who has been in one of these institutions, and this is somebody I ask every educator I talk to, something I ask every educator. If you were tasked with redesigning the entire system from the ground up, what would you change? Which I realize is a big question.

Craig Wright: I start,

yeah. Where to begin . I'm, I'm not, and a lot of contradictory aspect here, and as there's a case about to go to the Supreme Court having to do as affirmative action. We and Asian students. And it's all worth considering. How, whom do we admit? It's absurd what's going on.

In some ways, the people are immediately tossed out of consideration for these let's not just say the elite schools, the top 300 schools, because that there's zip code. If you file an application for a school such as Harvey o Princeton with a zip code thousand 28, you might as well forget it because that's the Upper East side of New York and they know that they're probably lot wealthy people there and so called privilege.

Now those kids may be hugely smart, they may be hugely hardworking. But they've got a lot of strikes against. So ironically, a lot of this is turning around in exactly the opposite direction, where we're getting discrimination perhaps against people that should be there. But this is not my area of specialization.

What I think about more, what I think I know something about, I don't know anything about that. The former the latter however, is this, I think it's the curriculum. In the course of my years at Yale, I started out thinking one way. Watching what my own mentors did and ended up in a radically different sort of a 180 pivot to something completely different that I should have known about.

All, all Along. I always thought that the, what an instructor, a teacher, and of course should be structured around would be communicating information as Virginia Wolf famously said, handing off to another a nugget of wisdom so that, so you would prepare your lecture notes and you would come in with your nuggets of wisdom or written out in words and ideas, and you would communicate those ideas.

You would finish up, slam your lecture notes, shut walk outta the room and file 'em away until next year. Ultimately, in terms of cognitive perception and learning skills and things like that to say nothing of getting good ideas. That's a lot of nonsense. That, and gradually I morphed into a completely different style of teaching.

It was much more so Socratic, obviously I should have known that old timer having been around about 2,500 years ago. It should have been much more a question. Let's get a group of people together. Let's have a topic and let's ask questions about this. Nobody has any particular privilege here.

Nobody has any particular standing or status. We're all in this together. Let's explore this. There are no right or wrong answers. It's all just an exploration. I was once impressed and all. I'll continue along this just for a minute. I heard of though I wasn't part a participant in any sort of way.

Of course, it was taught in the psychology department at Yale, and maybe it was an experiment where the instructor listed a course. As such and such. And he, it was to be the theory of this. And for this first, first six weeks of the course, he expounded that theory. And then in the next six weeks of the course, he expounded told his students everything was absolutely wrong with that.

Why the first six weeks were absolutely incorrect. So where I'm going with this is suggest that it's far more important to develop courses and modes of engagement, that challenge and drive to the forefront. Critical thinking, looking at information, modes of analysis, modes of thinking, not trying to figure out necessarily what is right or wrong.

And finally, I would say I'm a great proponent, as you might suspect, of us, of a broadly based liberal arts education, which is ironic because, or maybe is not ironic cuz I went to the least broadly based education in the world. Eastman School of Music where we did only music, there was one course there and in the sciences just one course, it was called science and I didn't take it.

So I spent the rest of my life trying to compensate for that. Courses in critical thinking, you need far more of those and a broadly based liberal arts education. Even if you're going to go into the tech world, if you wanna work in the company, be a specialist. If you wanna run the company, eventually get a good broadly based liberal arts degree.

Srini: Let's talk about this whole idea of how genius develops and what those habits are. And one of the first ones you talk about is obsession. You say geniuses have a

Craig Wright: habit. Hold on here. SVEs. I meant direct. Oh, I'm sorry. That was interesting. Now I gave this long disposition and then you immediately went on a different topic.

My sensation was when you did. He wasn't satisfied with that or he knew all that, or he, that didn't lead to any interesting follow up things around here in Rie vest. I'm gonna ask you Yeah. And the spirit of good critical Socratic teaching here. What did you think of that? Fair enough?

You

Srini: called me out.

Craig Wright: Where am I? Where was I wrong here?

Srini: Shva. You weren't wrong. Actually. You called me out on me. I'm looking back and forth between my notes at your book and also trying to listen to simultaneously, so you caught me on this cause I always have my notes from the

Craig Wright: book opening.

So did that make any sense to Yes.

Srini: So actually let me actually you address that, right? So I, I think that there is an absolute validity to this because this is something that I have realized and this is something I've mentioned on the show so many times that I don't want belabor at this point.

But at Berkeley, one of the things that I realized was that I would go and I would listen to lectures. And you have a discussion section. But the truth

is, it was that same sort of rote memorization approach that worked in high school, made me a c student at Berkeley. Because what I realized was that there was a big difference between actually understanding something and just hearing about it.

Because often what would happen is you would go through the motions of doing problem sets reading the textbook, highlighting things, reviewing your notes, and then you get to an exam where they present a concept in a context you've never seen before. And I think to your point, that's because of the fact that it wasn't a discussion.

Like you didn't sit in a circle ever and say, okay, how does this relate to the world that we live in? How does this apply? I just didn't have that experience. So to me it was like, here we are at Berkeley, where Laura Tyson Clinton's economic advisor was teaching the introductory economics class, and yet, I didn't feel like I walked away knowing anything about economics until, when I did this show.

I've talked to economists, I read The Wealth of Nations, and I thought to myself, this is such a different way than, do you know what it is? I get to have the discussion when I read a book like yours, I get to talk to somebody like you about the ideas in the book, to your point. Exactly. And so as a result, my learning is a very different style of learning than I ever got as a undergrad.

I felt like it was just information in post torture. And for somebody with ADHD , it's I could not it, I actually don't listen to podcasts because I realize audio is not my form of consumption because I read books. Because books allow me to do what you're talking about in my head, and then I get to come and have the discussion with you about the books.

Whereas I don't enjoy listening to people just lecture at.

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Yeah, and you mentioned the word story or something, and that's so important and I think in teaching, and we don't if we could somehow couch the morals or the takeaway or the facts inside of a narrative story or a life story, would, it would make a good deal more sense. And I tried to do that somewhat Ian in the book and indeed reviewers say that what they liked about the book was not so much the specific information about all the stories, as we were talking here though, let's pursue this.

But see, this is the virtue of pushback. So then, now something popped up in my mind as I listened to you talk. About all the pre canned facts that might come across are the principles of whether macro microeconomics that we're coming across. Is it possible, and I don't know this but let's think about this.

Maybe it all sits there, hermetically sealed for 20 or 30 years. We've got this information in there, and then when the right life story comes along or the right situation comes along, then we release the genie to make sense and allow us to inform our thinking more. Maybe to write books or do podcasts or whatever it might be.

Maybe all that factual information sort of way. There's not necessarily a bad thing because us, at some point it may be a value to us when given the right context or the right story wri. It's funny

Srini: you say that because the reason I read The Wealth of Nations was Naval Rav Khan, a venture capital, that

Craig Wright: pretty thick book folks.

It's not a pleasant yeah, God, don't give me going. The reason I read

Srini: it was Naval Rav Khan, who is the founder of AngelList and a prominent venture capitalist in Silicon Valley was talking about developing expertise and knowledge and he said, if you wanna understand business, he said, reading the Wealth of Nations will teach you more than reading a hundred business books because he said, you want to go and look for the original text in a given field.

. And I thought to myself, okay, that is a pretty valid case and you are right. It's a pain in the ass to read. Yeah. And I'll, the reason I mentioned that is because you brought up the context, and I'll tell you what it was. I started to be able to look at my business through the lens of the things I saw in that book.

And suddenly I was like, oh, this division of labor thing, no wonder this is op, foundational principle of economics. I was like, the only difference now is we're dividing labor not just between people, but between people and technology. . And so I started to literally look at, it was like, okay, let me assume that, all the apps and tools I use are employees in my, in my assembly line of what I'm trying to produce.

Because, I'm really fortunate in the fact that I, divergent thinking is pretty much that the cornerstone of what I get to do all day. . Cause I have such a wide variety of inputs and I so started just combining principles from that book, talking to my friend Cal Newport and oh my God, this book makes so much more sense.

I understand the concept now of this book and I almost wonder there's this, the ego in me is tend to, I wonder if I could go to Berkeley right now, sit down for a final exam without ever having gone to class and actually answer any of the questions on an economics exam.

Craig Wright: Yeah prob maybe not so many.

But then the question is are those questions asked on the economic exam, all that valuable for life's lessons? I'm, I don't know. That'd be the, yeah, that'd be the interesting issue. You were gonna, okay, so that was a good example of how pushback and the kind of dialectic that one wants in a classroom rather than a monologue from the point of view of an instructor, the sage on the stage up there outing off pushback dialogue.

Because I really do think it was a good example of it. We had Yeah. That was a fantastic

Srini: example. It was it was such a good,

Craig Wright: and we exemplified it. What you were gonna ask about what the enablers of, is that where we were going with the yeah. We were,

Srini: yeah. We we get into sort of what you call the hidden habits of geniuses.

. And one of the very first ones is that you talk about his obsession and you say geniuses have a habit of working hard because they're obsessed more over in public proclamations, they tend to value their parental units of heredity gifts far less than their own labors as the following quotes from a few Western geniuses suggest.

If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius. Michael Angelo. I didn't believe in weekends. I didn't believe in vacations. Bill Gates, and this goes on and on. But the thing that I wonder is where the obsession comes from, or more importantly, how do you find the thing that you're willing to be obsessed enough with that it leads to genius.

Craig Wright: Oh, gosh, that's a tough one. And I, I'm not sure that I really broached that, or it's a great question and I'm not sure I really got into that properly in the in the book. I suppose a lot of it would have to do with luck. In other words, if you're born, if you're operating in the late 19th century and you happen to be interested in technology, electricity, and industry, it would be, you would be fortunate to be born in that particular time and maybe in the United States because that's where a lot of this seemed to be coalescing.

So some of it surely is genetic. Some of the interest passed along by, by parents. Some of it would have to be good luck. Some of it might happen to be just being as a capacity to be different. . Let's think about that. Somebody with a D H D there, that might come across as a poor student in some ways.

But on the other hand, that would and be, and parents would probably try to clamp down on it. At least as some kinds of educational methods we try to clamp down. But the other hand, that can be a huge enabler because it can, that's the kind of thing that is a 10 amount to curiosity it seems. . So there are sometimes there things that seem like a disadvantage, maybe an advantage.

So it's a very difficult question, and it's another one of these things. There's no any one particular prescription or recipe for genius or exceptional human accomplishment here. It's a medley, an amalgam of different sorts of things that come, there's come together different sorts of ways and different proportions at different times.

Culture plays a role. Time plays a role. The individual plays a role. Genetics plays a, it's a lot of stuff. Yeah.

Srini: Let's talk about curiosity specifically, because I think that the. The thing that to me is so fascinating about the way that we're both socialized and educated is that curiosity is drilled out of us as we get older and older.

And I, I don't know if you went through this, I feel like this is one of the phases that, all young boys go through, when they follow their curiosity. The thing I was most curious about when I was in seventh grade was fire and obsessively to the point where I was banned from coming over to any of my friends' houses for sleepovers.

Cause I just kept burning stuff when I'd go to their houses, . But the thing that you say is, although invisible and immeasurable curiosity is an essential part of each person's personality, and it is inextricably linked, inextricably intertwined with other personal traits, particularly with passion for genius, is more than the rest of us.

The desire to understand is t to an itch. The thing that I think when I wrote that piece about the advice I would give to freshmen, I said, follow your curiosity regardless of where it leads you

Craig Wright: or where is it, the grades you get. Yeah. Because the

Srini: thing that I realized and Tina Sig from Stanford told me this.

In fact let me pull up this clip from her, which I thought really sums us up beautifully. Take a listen. There are

Craig Wright: those students who come in and have their life planned some next 50 years. , I can absolutely point to specific students who come to my office with a roadmap, and you look at them and you say, where's the room in this for serendipity?

Here is the room in here for the possibility of stumbling upon something that's really exciting to you, that's not on this path. And that's really shakes them because their life so far has been such that they really want a roadmap. . So that's one extreme. The other extreme is those people who are just.

They're afraid that they don't have anything they're passionate about and they're searching deep inside of themselves for their passions, and they don't realize that their passions actually follow their engagement, not the other way around. And this is super inform your experiences lead to your passions, not that your passion bleed to your experiences.

Yeah. All very good.

Srini: Yeah. And I think that honestly is, that's just not part of the narrative of how we make choices in an educational system. You're handed a course catalog, nobody says anything about following your curiosities. Here are the options in front of you. These are the career paths they lead to. Are you

Craig Wright: thing I, and I think I say this book, I've never run across at any institution of higher learning or any kind of learning that had a course on curiosity, which is mind boggling. Yeah. It's the most basic thing that we should be developing. There's no course there's nothing.

And now maybe it's implicit in some of these let's develop independent studies is your senior project or some, something like that. Okay. That's heading in the right direction. So it's a very interest. Interesting thing, and with four children and now with seven grandchildren, they kinda watch this and there's a huge diverge diversions, I think, in terms of innate curiosity, which leads me to think that it may well be genetic.

A lot of it is genetic, I think, and we could all tell stories. You're the pyro maniac. I was the guys that would run around town and once was run over by a car in Iowa City because I was going around town two and a half at age two and a half open and trying to open car doors and , I got how I got outta the kitchen.

My mother let me escape. She's probably in there cooking cuz that's what women were supposed to do. Forget the Master Business Administration. Curious people manifest curiosity at early age. And you're absolutely right. When I give a lecture on this kind of thing, taught by curiosity, I have a PowerPoint slide up there and we have, we've got boxes, and when you're a child, everything is open to you.

And I watched this with grandchild, the other, it was fascinating. There we are, table and there there's an i'll just long two, actually, two, two long objects out there. They're long and narrow. And one is a pencil and the other is a knife. So how does a child know which is dangerous and which is perhaps create they don't really know.

And it's start to be the job of the parents to say, to draw these constrictive, aggressively constrictive boxes that limit an individual's curiosity as time goes on. And we have to fight a fight against that. And I think there are some ways that one, one can do that kind of thing, but it's going too deeply into the witch to weeds to get there.

Yeah. That particular moment. So it is genetic. It comes in an early age. The job of a good parent would seem to be, not to stamp it out, but to encourage it. God, same thing for the university.

Srini: Speaking of curiosity, there's something that you said that caught my attention in the book.

You said, with modern technology at hand, the opportunity to self-educate anywhere at any time is more robust and more diverse than ever compared to the genius of your We have it easy. And I remember even Robert Green had talked about his book Master with Me. He said, if these guys had the internet, the people who had become masters, like people like Michael Fairday, they would've had a field day.

Yeah. But on the flip side of that I just finished reading this book called The Death of Expertise by a guy named Tom Nichols. And one of the things he talks about is that the internet, while simultaneously being a repository for knowledge, is also a breeding ground for misinformation. So I wonder, you mentioned kids, grandkids so I've assumed you've had probably a couple generations of students too.

You're seeing in the way

your students have changed particularly in terms of curiosity as a result of

Craig Wright: technology? Gosh, that's, I wish I could give you a good answer to this bus, but I'm not that, I don't see, I'm not, and I'm now retired, so I'm getting farther and farther away from, I don't have my finger on the pulse of how young people really engage technology.

And we all know the jokes about old people with technology, , any four year old can work my iPhone better than I can, and it's really true. So I'm not, I wish I could, I wish I could say that I see this intersection of a strong course change based on the outcome of students and their intersection with TE technology.

I'm just not a, an expert there. So I don't know. But generally speaking, I think it, it does, it one could po that it has a deleterious effect in from the point of view that there's too much time inside looking and engaging in kind of frontal lobe thinking, problem solving, gathering information, and not enough time on getting outdoors, getting more green screen than as then.

Or, screen time in, inside, getting outside, getting natured because getting a sense of relaxation engaging with a different sort of world because that will relax you and that will open all sorts of other modes of creativity that you may not have been aware of. So may is it possible? I don't know that creativity suffers because of an over zealous internet or an oversupply of a particular type of information constantly coming at US 24 7 and indeed almost an addiction to this kind of information.

I don't know. It may be backing off, relaxing, getting outdoors, exercising, swimming, listening to particular kinds of music walking through a garden. Maybe these things, they might seem like a waste of time, but they may make us a lot more creative.

Srini: One other thing that you say that really struck me, and this had a lot to do, I think with mindset is you say that geniuses cannot accept the world as described to them.

Each sees the world asunder and cannot rest until things are put right. Thus ask yourself, do you see something to wish the rest of the world is obvious? Does this blind spot annoy you? Do you believe that you're the only person on the planet who could possibly fix the problem? And do you feel that you could not possibly rest until you do?

So I think on some level, everybody has a bit of that inside of them, but I feel like it's much more pronounced in some people, probably the people that you call, geniuses and others. Because I remember when I asked Justine about Elon, and this is the phrase that always stayed with me so much that I thought, yeah, that's brilliant.

She said he has a way of taking the world that's in his head and imposing it on the world around him until it looks like the one that's in his head. .

Craig Wright: But I think that we also.

Srini: Face tremendous sort of social pressures. Because of the fact that we're all part of a tribe. I think there's this evolutionary need for us to not basically be, thrown out of the tribe.

So even if we do see the world differently, we're often afraid to express it. Or, we do it in, we play much smaller than we should, I guess is one way to think about it. So how do you get to the point where you overcome that fear? Because I'll tell you, I, when I started my surveyed, my audience when I asked them like, what is your biggest fear about building something creative?

Almost all of them. There's so many people who are cited fear of public opinion as one of the biggest obstacles that was in their way.

Craig Wright: Yeah. I guess here are a couple of thoughts there. Passion could probably override. If you're really passionate about, so if you're really convinced and maybe that's the case with people like jobs and people like Elon Musk.

Passion is important. And maybe they, maybe people probably have different degrees, but maybe they're genetic dispositions for greater tolerance for some people are just not afraid to take risk and don't care what other people think. Let's go back to those with maybe particular mental persuasions.

We won't call them disabilities. We call, won't call them disorders at all, but maybe Asperger's and autism as so many of those people have, and I think even Elon Musk who came on Saturday night lied at one point and was talking about, he acknowledged there that he had to a degree aspirated, orinn.

And so many of those people, Seem to be on the cusp of that. So that's a particular, maybe it's a particular mental persuasion that they have that allows them, again, ironically taking this central disability and turning it into an ability and enabler. Maybe it's that kind of thing that allows them to rise above public opinion to rise and overcome this fear of what their peers think.

Yeah. Do you think that's

Srini: something that can be learned?

Craig Wright: Not that, yeah. You can do things with curiosity. You can do things with educational systems. Mental persuasions, again, I'm out of my depth here. I have to be a psychiatrist. No kidding. Be a practicing psychiatrist to be able to, and have had some experience to watch, to see if you could change mindsets in particular kind of way.

And then as, actually I say this in the book gigs, I get into this with people like Beethoven and then go, do we really want to change this? Yeah. Do do we really wanna give up Tri US' adhd? Maybe that's the kind of thing that makes him.

Srini: Oh, there's no qu It's funny you say that cuz I was having a conversation with one of my readers and he had been diagnosed with ADHD later in his life, like after 50.

And we were both joking about the fact that you, it's like, can you imagine if somebody had figured this out sooner? What we might have accomplished? Because it's honestly it is a blessing in one context and a curse in others. I, it, the very thing that got me fired from every single job I ever had was also what led to the kinda obsession and ability to focus that, let me finish a manuscript, a 45,000 word manuscript in six months, yeah. And I was like, okay, this isn't a lack of motivation. It was basically just a poor fit in terms of the jobs that I

Craig Wright: was in. Yeah. Because those people that are ADHD when they la my experience is when they latch onto something, when they finally find it. Attention deficit. No. It's the opposite of pension fixation at that point.

. Obsession isn't obsession. Yeah. Okay. Obsession. There. There they go. So they're bouncing around until they hit something that matches, that morphs exactly on with their particular obsession. ,

Srini: let's talk about this idea of rejection. Cause you say, if you're a creative type or an entrepreneur bent on change, develop a thick skin, understand that rejection is part of the process and be prepared to be misunderstood for a long time.

. And I think it's that last part of the willingness to be misunderstood, that people struggle with for so long. I remember very distinctly, one of my cousins told another cousin at a wedding that we were at, that whatever I was doing was a complete waste of my education. And then I remember the day that I jokingly always tell my mom, I was like, yeah.

I was like, yeah, this person is officially off the guest list for the wedding that we haven't planned yet. Or, I was like, I'm putting the cart before the horse since I need to find somebody to marry. But. And my mom was like, who is this person that you are so like, pissed off at that you're uninviting to a wedding?

I was like, you don't need to know. And the funny thing is that same person commented on my, on Facebook the day that I got my book deal and my first book came out there's a picture of it and she congratulated me. I'm thinking to myself, you're the one who said that I was wasting my education.

Craig Wright: There's a, it has a whole business about acceptance, and who's going to, and your capacity to withstand criticism for long period of time. I could, I won't, you can answer this question or not, but how many with your two books that you've published are leaders with Penguin?

It could be. Is that right, penguin? Yes. Okay. Two books you published with Penguin are the first one. Once you get one in, then you have your chances are better. How many rejection letters did you get before they, before somebody accepted it?

Srini: So this is not a good example. I'm like, I have the Cinderella.

So I have the Cinderella story of an editor, ed Penguin reaching out to me. But that being said I wrote three self-published books and something like 1500 articles before I got the editor. And I did have a very smart woman named Betsy Rapaport tell me when I first called her that I wasn't ready.

And that was a gift that I only recognized in retrospect because that was two years before I got the book deal. And those two years basically gave me the time to develop the habits and the discipline that I needed to be able to write a book and also basically refine my thinking, my voice and my message to get to the point where I had something interesting enough to say that it was worthy of an actual publisher giving me a book deal.

So I didn't get the rejection letters, but trust me, I, I lingered in obscurity for a very long time, which is equally, which is a form of rejection. In

Craig Wright: its own way, we can all go through a famous story. Stephen King. Rejected. JK Rowling submits the Harry Potter thing to 15 different publishers.

Rejected. That's a, that's about the norm. Ideas by Tesla, by Beethoven, by Van Gogh. Sold one painting, and that was to a relative. Their meri had to wait 150 years before anybody started even rounding up or paying any attention to 'em. See, some people they have to wait a long time before they are recognized, and some people are never even recognized in their own lifetime.

A very one question. One thing I wanna go back to I'm thinking in my head and we haven't really talked about, it's an interesting question though. We've framed this entire discussion, and maybe we'll stop with this, but we'll frame this entire discussion about the meaning of life. What does it mean to be what are we talking about?

We seem to be holding up the standard, the highest standard of genius. Somebody that changes the world. What the heck? What about the people that don't change the world but are just hugely successful? And that's what all of our parents seem to want the offspring to bring. They don't want them to change the world.

They don't want to go through the them to go through the rejections. They want them to be financially successful. So there is genius, there is success. What about leading the life in which every day you just went around doing a single act of kindness for anonymous people, nobody would ever notice you, but maybe that's a wildly successful life.

. So that's another way of looking another prism through which to look at all of this or another way to, to frame all of the issues. And it just, once again, and maybe that's, and maybe this has been, I hope it's been a good discussion and maybe it's a course you don't wanna come out oh, now I found it.

I understand. No, that's not the way it happens. You leave oftentimes with as many questions as you arrive. I

Srini: wanna finish with one final thing that you mentioned in the book. And I, this is I wish people would really embrace this. You say that every human needs an activity with a saluatory forward trajectory.

Even if what you're creating is insignificant to others, thinking that is important can be a life save. I wish that you had written this book prior to my writing audience of one, because I would've literally put that quote in the inscription

Craig Wright: at the very beginning. I'm such a believer in that. That's the only thing.

Having agency in this world is the only thing that will allow for the leading of a happy life. You have to believe that you have a attached a mission that you are doing. And and then eventually you work and you're happy doing that, and you finish that task, but then you're, the first, next thing you gotta do is find another task that you can do.

And that's what the, whether it's Musk or ju, another thing to invent or another. Plan it to survey or whatever it might happen to be having, believing that you have agency that you have the capacity to shape something during the time that you are on or turns out, I think to be hugely important, maybe one of the most important of all things.

Srini: I think that makes a beautiful way to wrap up our conversation. I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews with the un unmistakable creative. What do you think its, that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Craig Wright: Based on our discussion say it again. Bus. I wanna make sure that I understand it.

Srini: Yeah, absolutely. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something

Craig Wright: unmistakable?

Creativity. They are different. They've created something that is different and that, because I haven't seen that before, because I wanna be curious, I wanna find out how that happens. So something that expresses creativity. Yeah. Amazing.

Srini: I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your insights, your wisdom, and your stories.

This has been such a fascinating discussion. Where can people find out more

Craig Wright: about you? The Go ahead. Yeah. Hey, listen, which reminds me, obviously we got this book called The Hidden Habits of Genius Fish Around. You can find out about Amazon or any one of these other books, but I have finished up something else that you might be interested in, and it's a promo.

I don't make any money out of it, but yeah, say corer course. You've probably heard of Corer. They have 3000 basically free courses out there, 24 7 corer. If these, if this topic interests you, all you have to do is Google. They just came out a couple of weeks ago, available a couple of weeks ago. Corer Nature, a genius.

And you get about 14 hours of free me talking with lots of slides and lots of animations and stuff and questions and engagement. So again, cor era, nature a genius.

Srini: Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that

Craig Wright: shop Amazon for last minute gifts. Great deals for everyone on your list. Gifts for mom, gifts for dad, even for your sister and your brother Chad. Ah, shoot. We didn't realize we were supposed to get the gift for our dog walker guy. We almost forgot about it. Then just talk to Kurt. We didn't expect to get a gift from her or our cousin.

I forget it. His named beyond something nice. Better reciprocate for the last minute deals I give some people you forgot. Can't pass the free shipping at Amazon.

Srini: .

Craig, welcome to The Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join

Craig Wright: us Trini Vest. Delighted to be

Srini: here. Oh, it is my absolute pleasure to have you here. You have been on my list of people to reach out to for quite some time. You have a book called The Hidden Habits of Genius, and I honestly couldn't even tell you how I found it or found out about it, probably because Amazon looks at all my other reading habits and your book came up.