The Genius Checklist
Nine Paradoxical Tips on How You Can Become a Creative Genius
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Narrated by:
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Daniel Henning
About this listen
What it takes to be a genius: nine essential and contradictory ingredients.
What does it take to be a genius? A high score on an IQ test? Brilliant physicist Richard Feynman's IQ was too low for membership in Mensa. Suffering from varying degrees of mental illness? Creativity is often considered a marker of mental health. Be a child prodigy like Mozart, or a later bloomer like Beethoven? Die tragically young, like Keats, or live to a ripe old age like Goethe? In The Genius Checklist, Dean Keith Simonton examines the key factors in creative genius and finds that they are more than a little contradictory.
Simonton, who has studied creativity and genius for more than four decades, draws on both scientific research and stories from the lives of famous creative geniuses that range from Isaac Newton to Vincent van Gogh to Virginia Woolf. He explains the origin of IQ tests and the art of estimating the IQ of long-dead historical figures (John Stuart Mill: 200; Charles Darwin: 160). He compares IQ scores with achieved eminence as measures of genius, and he draws a distinction between artistic and scientific genius. He rules out birth order as a determining factor (in the James family alone, three geniuses at three different birth-order positions: William James, first born; Henry James, second born; Alice James, born fifth and last); considers Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule; and describes how the “lone” genius gets enmeshed in social networks.
Genius, Simonton explains, operates in ways so subtle that they seem contradictory. The domain of child prodigies and their elders, genius is born and made. Simonton's checklist gives us a new, integrative way to understand geniuses - and perhaps even to nurture your own genius!
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Story
Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner once wondered about "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in the formulation of the laws of nature. Is God a Mathematician? investigates why mathematics is as powerful as it is. From ancient times to the present, scientists and philosophers have marveled at how such a seemingly abstract discipline could so perfectly explain the natural world. More than that - mathematics has often made predictions, for example, about subatomic particles or cosmic phenomena that were unknown at the time, but later were proven to be true.
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Origins of Mathematics
- By Rick B on 07-08-21
By: Mario Livio
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Ungifted
- Intelligence Redefined
- By: Scott Barry Kaufman
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In Ungifted, cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman - who was relegated to special education as a child - sets out to show that the way we interpret traditional metrics of intelligence is misguided. Kaufman explores the latest research in genetics and neuroscience, as well as evolutionary, developmental, social, positive, and cognitive psychology, to challenge the conventional wisdom about the childhood predictors of adult success. He reveals that there are many paths to greatness, and argues for a more holistic approach to achievement that takes into account each young person’s personal goals, individual psychology, and developmental trajectory.
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Great content for the intellectually curious
- By ZestyFresh on 08-11-17
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The End of Average
- How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness
- By: Todd Rose
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Are you above average? Is your child an A student? Is your employee an introvert or an extrovert? Every day we are measured against the yardstick of averages, judged according to how close we come to it or how far we deviate from it. The assumption that metrics comparing us to an average—like GPAs, personality test results, and performance review ratings—reveal something meaningful about our potential is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don't even question it. That assumption, says Harvard's Todd Rose, is spectacularly—and scientifically—wrong.
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Good intentions, terrible execution
- By Kristofer Jarl on 05-06-19
By: Todd Rose
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The Landscape of History
- How Historians Map the Past
- By: John Lewis Gaddis
- Narrated by: Jack Chekijian
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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What is history, and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book. The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today.
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Excellent Book!
- By Billy on 09-15-18
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A Most Elegant Equation
- Euler’s Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics
- By: David Stipp
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 5 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Bertrand Russell wrote that mathematics can exalt "as surely as poetry". This is especially true of one equation: ei(pi) + 1 = 0, the brainchild of Leonhard Euler, the Mozart of mathematics. More than two centuries after Euler's death, it is still regarded as a conceptual diamond of unsurpassed beauty. Called Euler's identity, or God's equation, it includes just five numbers but represents an astonishing revelation of hidden connections.
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Good treatment of the subject
- By Kindle Customer on 04-09-18
By: David Stipp
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The Upright Thinkers
- The Human Journey From Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos
- By: Leonard Mlodinow
- Narrated by: Leonard Mlodinow
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In this fascinating and illuminating work, Leonard Mlodinow guides us through the critical eras and events in the development of science, all of which, he demonstrates, were propelled forward by humankind's collective struggle to know. From the birth of reasoning and culture to the formation of the studies of physics, chemistry, biology, and modern-day quantum physics, we come to see that much of our progress can be attributed to simple questions - why? how? - bravely asked.
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10/10 Got What I Wanted.
- By Austin on 09-22-15
By: Leonard Mlodinow
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The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn't Always the Smart One
- By: Satoshi Kanazawa
- Narrated by: Paul Neal Rohrer
- Length: 5 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Satoshi Kanazawa's Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (written with Alan S. Miller) was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "a rollicking bit of pop Science & Technology that turns the lens of evolutionary psychology on issues of the day." That book answered such burning questions as why women tend to lust after males who already have mates and why newborns look more like Dad than Mom. Now Kanazawa tackles the nature of intelligence: what it is, what it does, what it is good for.
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Very entertaining
- By Liz W. on 03-01-20
By: Satoshi Kanazawa
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Evolution
- The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory
- By: Edward J. Larson
- Narrated by: John McDonough
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Edward J. Larson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and eminent science historian. This marvelously readable, yet sumptuously erudite work traces the development of the scientific theory of evolution. From Darwin's essential trip to the Galápagos, to the most contemporary studies in sociobiology, this work takes listeners both into the field and laboratories of the world's greatest evolutionary scientists, and shows how the theory of evolution has itself evolved.
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An Excellent History!
- By Bradly D. Elder on 08-13-07
By: Edward J. Larson
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The Scientific Revolution: A Captivating Guide to the Emergence of Modern Science During the Early Modern Period, Including Stories of Thinkers Such as Isaac Newton and René Descartes
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Kevin Hung-Liang
- Length: 3 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Ancient cultures have been looking up at the stars for thousands of years, wondering about their place in the universe. What were those glowing spots in the black cover of night? Just how far away was the moon? These and other questions hounded humanity through the millennia until, finally, relative economic stability allowed for a number of people to examine their world more closely. Slowly, knowledge and understanding accumulated generation by generation until the conditions were ideal enough for a revolution to occur in thinking, experimentation, worldview, and natural philosophy.
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Dull and superficial
- By Leonardo Fagundes Fernandino on 12-05-19
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Mindware
- Tools for Smart Thinking
- By: Richard E. Nisbett
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Many scientific and philosophical ideas are so powerful that they can be applied to our lives at home, work, and school to help us think smarter and more effectively about our behavior and the world around us. Surprisingly, many of these ideas remain unknown to most of us. In Mindware, the world-renowned psychologist Richard Nisbett presents these ideas in clear and accessible detail, offering a tool kit for better thinking and wiser decisions.
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Sound scientific advice on how to live your life
- By Neuron on 08-26-15
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Scientific Revolution
- A Captivating Guide to the Emergence of Modern Science During the Early Modern Period and the Life of Galileo Galilei
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Kevin Hung-Liang
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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If you want to discover the captivating history of the Scientific Revolution, then pay attention...Two captivating manuscripts in one audiobook: The Scientific Revolution: A Captivating Guide to the Emergence of Modern Science During the Early Modern Period, Including Stories of Thinkers Such as Isaac Newton and René Descartes and Galileo Galilei: A Captivating Guide to an Italian Astronomer, Physicist, and Engineer and His Impact on the History of Science. So if you want to learn more about the Scientific Revolution and Galileo Galilei listen to this audiobook now!
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great info, worst narratorever.
- By Pat Newell on 08-10-21
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The Immortal Game
- A History of Chess
- By: David Shenk
- Narrated by: John H. Mayer
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Why has one game, alone among the thousands of games invented and played throughout human history, not only survived but thrived within every culture it has touched? What is it about its 32 figurative pieces, moving about its 64 black and white squares according to very simple rules, that has captivated people for nearly 1,500 years? Why has it driven some of its greatest players into paranoia and madness, and yet is hailed as a remarkably powerful intellectual tool?
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Buy in print
- By Ivy Reisner on 08-30-11
By: David Shenk
What listeners say about The Genius Checklist
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- nightowl
- 07-05-19
Good but at times directing.
It may unavoidable but given the topic humorous. At times I thought being read by Sheldon Cooper at times the on Big Bang Theory. Both tone and pacing.
About halfway through the contradictory items on the checklist had me thinking the intent was humor.
It is more about the multiple types of genius and work involved. There is no one checklist.
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