So You Want to be a Genius?

If you want to be a genius, you probably need to start with some talent. Peyton Manning, who will go for his second super bowl ring tomorrow, is widely considered to be a football genius. Stefan Fatsis, writing in Slate, reviews the evidence, and throws in some discussion of the nature of genius.

The 18th-century writer and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, quoted in Nobel-winning neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal's 1916 book Advice for a Young Investigator, put it even more neatly: "Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme."

As the privileged son of an NFL quarterback, Manning the genius is no "outlier." But his genius isn't innate, either; with his Opie face and boyishly parted, short, brown hair, Manning looks more like a dentist than an NFL superstar at first glance. In his forthcoming book The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong, David Shenk tells the story of how Ted Williams would use his lunch money to pay friends to shag baseballs so he could keep hitting. The point: Like other brilliant obsessives from Mozart to Newton to Darwin to Bird to Manning, Williams worked harder than everyone else. He hated when people described him as a natural. "Why wouldn't he?" Shenk says.


Peyton Manning has narrowly focussed his life on football, seemingly from his earliest years. His fanatical devotion to study and practice is legendary, and so is his performance in the pinch. His signature accomplishment is the second half comeback. Teams throw their best and most complicated stuff at him in the first half, but by the second, he has figured it out and picks them apart. There are quarterbacks with more impressive records but they mostly seem to have played for teams so good that no comeback was required - the other team got blown out in the first half.

Still, if Manning had been 5' 6" and slow of foot rather than 6' 5" and quick, his genius likely would have confined itself to the high school arena. The element of talent is still crucial. Besides his physical skills, though, he needed his quick mind but above all his power of concentration and focus. The last is probably the most fundamental element of genius - patience carried to an extreme.

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