By Tommy
When most people think about genius, they generally think about it a personal trait, i.e., someone is a genius. Another paradigm which has emerged (or reemerged as Elizabeth Gilbert points out in her famous TED Talk) is that genius is a state of mind one enters into.
I want to put forth another framework for interpreting genius which was presented by someone during one of the discussions. The idea is that genius should be viewed as events that occurs in time and space, independent of the doer or way by which they came to the genius event.
One thing which is fascinating about this view is, it seems to open up the conception to allow for different avenues by which people can come to bring about genius events, e.g., by intellectual hard work, intuition, chance or otherwise.
It simultaneously improves the mindset of creatives as Elizabeth Gilbert's paradigm does, but it also places more hope and control in their hearts and hands. Rather than sitting and hoping to fall into a genius state, i.e., be visited by a muse, creatives are emboldened to take more of a by-any-means-necessary approach, and to embrace things that may generally be seen as antithetically to pursuing genius now, like guessing, for example.