What is genius?

Extraordinary efforts

“It’s complicated explaining how genius or expertise is created and why it’s so rare,” says Anders Ericsson, the professor of psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee who edited the handbook. “But it isn’t magic, and it isn’t born. It happens because some critical things line up so that a person of good intelligence can put in the sustained, focused effort it takes to achieve extraordinary mastery. These people don’t necessarily have an especially high IQ, but they almost always have very supportive environments, and they almost always have important mentors. And the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort.”