Feb 5, 2009
Why it can often be discouraging to hear brilliant people tell you how to succeed.
Ordinary people may have difficulty succeeding based on the advice of geniuses, because geniuses attain success by methods unavailable to ordinary people.
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So true… It’s a shame the geniuses don’t seem to appreciate that!
Hm. I guess that doesn’t effect me, being a genius. I’ll be glad to tell you how to succeed, though. You’re welcome.
A seminary prof told us if we used notes while preaching, we lacked faith and had not studied enough. Is that a brilliant person’s analysis?
That’s why we love it when heroes and geniuses fail. It’s not that we wish them harm, but it makes the success they have seem more reachable to the rest of us.
If they make mistakes, and it doesn’t ruin them, then maybe I have some hope that my mistakes will be redeemed.
It often is discouraging because we lose sight of this salient little fact: Geniuses or not, God chooses to favor those He damn well chooses to favor.
Big people collected more manna in the wilderness than their smaller kinsmen; they were ‘successful’ by means not available to others. But who the heck provided the manna in the first place?
@ Joel (Not B)
I think it matters not weather or not you use notes… in fact, I prefer someone who has notes (at least an outline) and an open Bible… to an Extemperanous Sermon….
@The OP
The Problem really is relational.
To the Genius, the Simplistic Explanation of the solution is not simplistic enough for the masses, yet, they don’t wish to dumb down. The Masses wanting to seem smarter than they are, Desire not to ask for a simpler explanation.
This is a case where reading a book by the Other, Older, Tim Hansel might actually come in handy… “Eating Problems for Breakfast” I found it a fascinating glimpse into the world of Genius problem solving that every day folks overlook… and it makes all the difference in how one approaches a situation….
(and yes, my comment is the length of 4 posts, I do not know a way to make it more concise and cover all the points I wish to…)
[...] and Ordinary Abraham Piper posted this on his 22words blog, me [...]
This is so true, and it doesn’t just apply to brilliant people. Any of us who think that someone else can succeed at something by simply doing what we did to succeed doesn’t realize that not everyone is the same.
I saw this so often when I taught school. Kids would get written off as lazy or incapable when they really needed other strategies for learning.
Geniusly put.
Read “Outliers” by Gladwell. He has a really interesting take on the concept of genius and success. I think it would help us be a little less discouraged because it closes the gap between the highly succesful (or the genius) and the common person.
This applies to more than just genius. We talk about gift projection as well. Spiritually gifted people can sometime project on others their gifts.
So compassionate people can’t understand the lack of compassion they encounter so often.
Evangelists think that it’s easy to lead people into relationship with God.
And so on…
Should success really be a primary goal? What is “success”? I guess it depends on what we are trying to succeed in…
WORD!
Are you truly a real genius if you can’t communicate with someone less intelligent than you are?
I try to sound intelligent to others…but what they hear must sound like Charlie Brown’s mom, ‘Whah whah whah whah whah whah’.
Thinking about what Charolotte said, :Should success really be a primary goal? What is “success”? I guess it depends on what we are trying to succeed in…”
This reminds me of the way people sometimes urge people to be “excellent.” Usually they are urging people to really develop their talents and be meticulously professional in everything they do. If a person is not winning awards, selling lots of books, making lots of money, and otherwise measuring up in ways that people are generally evaluated, then they are not seen as being really blessed by the Lord and they are not seen as living out God’s plan or destiny for greatness.
Yet when I studied the words “excellence”/”excellent” in the Bible, I found that the things the Bible urges us to be excellent in are kindness, love, good works, and so on.
This gets directly to my theory of “people who are good at stuff.” The people who are (for instance) telling you to “read hard books,” are the one’s that can understand hard books, so they assume that, since they can understand them, everyone can. My contention is that this is not true. Some of us are far better off having smart people read hard books and then explain them to us.
I think most geniuses are not very successful, and that mosy successful people succeed by hard work and perseverence.
Nobody likes to work with someone who succeeds by non-replicatable means.
My experience has been that parrotting the techniques successful people, no matter what the endeavor may be, almost always never works. We can glean from things we learn from others; that’s true. However, the personality of the person presenting, and their passion and enthusiasm, their background and experience in countering their critics– all this may have played a role in thier success.
So true. So true. I’m really ordinary even though some think me intelligent. Often, your father’s explanation of things thelogical leave me in this conundrum.
Too true. And often reading leadership books is a poor example for success. Often, the author’s only success is in writing books.
This would be akin to you teaching me how to write a short, pithy saying.
How can I come up with something like that every day?
It would be extremely frustrating (for you and me).
Just finished reading Outliers. And, yes, I couldn’t agree more.
I’ll third the recommendation for Outliers, it’s an amazing book. It really dismantles the myths and preconceptions one has about successful people.