The 6 personalities of geniuses

Have you ever wondered what are the characteristics of the mind of a genius?

The great personalities who stand out for their creative potential and the impressiveness of their works are not only capable of making unique contributions to society, but also they themselves also show a series of characteristics that make them unrepeatable in their discipline.

The personality that distinguishes geniuses

Below you can see the main personality traits that make geniuses geniuses. Some of them may cause admiration, but not all of their facets are advantageous.

1. They are very perfectionists

According to the psychologist howard gardner, geniuses spend a lot of time and effort to perfect what they put all their passion into. They are not limited to materialize what they have created in their mind, but they look for possible failures, they invent solutions, they apply them to their creation and check if the situation has been resolved.

This has to do with self-discipline and self-criticism, of course, but it is not a level of demand imposed from outside, rather it is born from a desire to improve that springs from oneself and that is very advantageous. After all, no one knows a work and its possible imperfections better than the person who created it.

2. They show an insatiable curiosity

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyione of the great referents of Positive Psychology, something that distinguishes geniuses from other people is your extreme curiosity to develop original or attractive ideas. That means that they are not content with simply imagining what it would be like to paint a certain picture, create a certain machine, or write a certain novel, but are driven toward the actual creation of those works. They connect their fantasies with reality because they are so fascinated by what they imagine that they want to feel what it would be like to put them into practice.

This is good and bad at the same time, because it supposes moments of deep frustration when problems appear in the practical application of the idea, while the rest of the people feel satisfied from the security that fantasizes about things that will not happen.

3. They are guided by intrinsic motivation

This feature is derived from the previous two. When it is said that a genius lives for his passion, that does not mean that he invests a lot of time and effort in his work to obtain benefits at the end of the creation process.

As explained Dan Pink In his book The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, geniuses embrace the idea that they are the first to be interested in making their works perfect, but they do not do it for social recognition or financial rewards, but because they enjoy the path that leads them to the goal. That is, its motivation is intrinsic, and not extrinsic, because it cannot be separated from the creation process and it does not arise from a reward that is not organically integrated into it. The work that characterizes a genius is not a tool, but the goal itself.

4. His life is his work

As the curiosity and passion that leads them to strive in their work comes from the depths of their being, geniuses are not used to establishing a border between their personal life and work. This is good in a way, because it means that by spending a lot of time thinking about their creative work (even in the most bizarre situations), they are better able to make ingenious relationships between ideas that no one has ever thought to compare before. In other words, geniuses benefit from many more sources of inspiration.

However, this can be bad for your social life, as friendships and relationships sometimes take a backseat when a groundbreaking idea comes along that requires interrupting a conversation to scribble on a pad or rushing back to the workplace.

5. They are self-taught

When it comes to developing exceptional abilities and unique creative potential, the amount of formal education received in high schools or universities does not correspond to the potential that is reached. The investigator Dean Simonton he studied a series of 350 geniuses such as Beethoven or Galileo Galilei and discovered that the vast majority of them had an average educational level.

Both people with a very complete and specialized level of training and those who had hardly been educated in schools were less likely to be among this group of historical figures who have made important contributions to humanity. That means a good part of the ingredients that serve to create geniuses come through self-taught education outside the classroom.

6. They are lonely

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi points out that, beyond the exceptional cases of geniuses being born into well-situated and related families, most of these people tend to be loners and experience problems when establishing stable relationships. His work is usually so intense and demanding that his affective life suffers a certain wear and tear, especially during his youth.

While the vast majority of people do not care to hone their skills or become highly specialized in a field of science or art, geniuses are not only willing to make this sacrifice but feel the need to make it. That is why a gap is opened between them and the rest of society, which on many occasions looks at them strangely and only pays attention to the final results of their work.

In conclusion…

George de Savile He said centuries ago that a man who is a master of patience is a master of everything else, and this is especially true when we stop to think about the characteristics of geniuses.

All the personal traits of geniuses that we have seen share something in common: they are born from the need to experiment with techniques and ideas, a desire that displaces almost all other.

This fact in itself allows them to spend a lot of time and effort honing their skills, and from that engine of personal development all these characteristics that make geniuses admired are born. It is not so much the talent as the time and the enthusiasm dedicated to improving oneself that is decisive when it comes to offering something unique and almost perfect.