The "Genius and Misfit Aren't Synonyms, or Are They?" article in NYT includes the following passages: "“All the ideas that mattered to me came from outsiders,” [Steve Wozniak of Apple] recalls" and "When everyone says that something is true, be very skeptical, Mr. Grove [of Intel] advised. Question the obvious."
I've noticed that people will put up with a lot of "bad behavior" from a person if that person is very valuable or knowledgable on a topic. Does that mean the person is both the "trouble maker" AND the "answer person" mentioned by Marc Smith in the Educause podcasts [Part 1] (where the trouble makers are 'poisoning the well' while the answer people are those 2% of people who answer 90% of the community's questions)? Perhaps the average genius (if there is such a thing) is more often the troublemaker than the question-answerer; it does seem that genius comes with a social cost. How does that relate to what I've heard about workplace sociology, that you can get more done and be better respected by being easy to work with than you can by being, say, a perfectionist (which reminds me of the small uproar among some FastTrackers when we were told the motto is "Completion Not Perfection"). I suppose perfectionism is far from genius, and that most workplaces do not tolerate much genius in the workers; I suppose most societies don't tolerate much genius.
What is the balance between having an answer and asking a question? One genius I know in particular seems to keep a constant balance of Knowing and Asking. He knows BECAUSE he has asked and because he was determined to find an answer even when no one could give it to him, or when no one else had even thought to formulate the question...
I've noticed that people will put up with a lot of "bad behavior" from a person if that person is very valuable or knowledgable on a topic. Does that mean the person is both the "trouble maker" AND the "answer person" mentioned by Marc Smith in the Educause podcasts [Part 1] (where the trouble makers are 'poisoning the well' while the answer people are those 2% of people who answer 90% of the community's questions)? Perhaps the average genius (if there is such a thing) is more often the troublemaker than the question-answerer; it does seem that genius comes with a social cost. How does that relate to what I've heard about workplace sociology, that you can get more done and be better respected by being easy to work with than you can by being, say, a perfectionist (which reminds me of the small uproar among some FastTrackers when we were told the motto is "Completion Not Perfection"). I suppose perfectionism is far from genius, and that most workplaces do not tolerate much genius in the workers; I suppose most societies don't tolerate much genius.
What is the balance between having an answer and asking a question? One genius I know in particular seems to keep a constant balance of Knowing and Asking. He knows BECAUSE he has asked and because he was determined to find an answer even when no one could give it to him, or when no one else had even thought to formulate the question...
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