So there I was, sitting in a meeting room at the Sheraton for a day of management training. I barely qualified to attend these meetings being a mere supervisor, but I was a confident young man who had been recruited from another company to create the department. However, at this point, my 'honeymoon period' had expired, and I was just another mouth to feed.

We were taking Personalasys tests trying to identify the type of people that we are so we can know how each is motivated and better understand ourselves. It was truly one of the more interesting self-evaluation studies I'd been in on, so I was gleaning information about how my mind and motivations work in comparison with other industry professionals, including the CEO and all the levels of VPs that existed!

We were asked to use one word that describes us. It went around the table. People used words like 'organized' and 'thorough.' I said 'iconoclast.' Even the VP who was an aspiring author, and a man I respect to this day, said 'huh?' If I had known that no one understood the term, I would have said something like 'progressive,' or some other term common people understand, but which doesn't describe me as well as 'iconoclast.'

You see, I hadn't recognized it yet. All I wanted to do was participate fully. Anyway, my negative child is almost square, despite that visible squares are optical illusions.

My father was a major influence in my life. He wasn't a genius, but he was highly creative and had an insatiable drive for learning. He was wise, and he was a conceptual thinker. I don't recall how old I was when I asked him what he knew about Einstein's theory of relativity. You see, I was strong in my math skills, but I couldn't figure out how e=mc² works when we aren't given any numbers to plug into those variables. He didn't really understand it, but had been shown an example once. He gave me verbal illustration of a scenario in which a train crosses a bridge.

He never got it. I understood it, albeit after some thought was applied to the 'train crossing the bridge' example and further independent study. I can even explain it in fairly simple terms, but the knowledge will not do much for a person who does not apply it to deep creative thought.

Kant defined a genius as one who understands what others would need to be taught AND who is able to create. Schopenhauer added another group to Kant's definition: those in whom intellect predominates will, seemingly adding, amongst others, the geniuses that Asperger would identify about a century later.

Whatever.

Here is what I notice is common among geniuses: