7 Distinctive Habits Of A Genius

Thomas Alva Edison once said, ‘Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration’. What he meant to say is that nothing in this world comes for free. All of us are geniuses, just that not all of us are at 99%. Here are 8 common habits adaptable by anyone who has a brain.

  1. Look
  2. To get over a problem, understanding it is important. The easiest way is to break the problem down and look at it through different angles. Come up with ways, perspectives that may not be heard of before. For example, I use the computer everyday.

    My problem was pain in my right wrist. I am a right hander, therefore it is natural to use the mouse on the right hand. However, I do a lot of surfing and picture editing, 2 activities which includes a lot of clicks and mouse movement. For the first few months, I couldn’t come up with a solution to it. Then it struck me. I switched hands. It took me a few weeks to get used to the left hand. But once it became normal, I stuck to it. Somehow, my entire left hand moves along during mouse movements, minimizing the usage of wrists. That made my right hand pretty happy. =)

  3. Imagine
  4. Once, Albert Einstein was asked this question, ‘If you had only 1 hour to save the world, what would you do?’. His answer was, ‘I’ll use 55 minutes to think, 5 minutes to act’. Cool. He always found it necessary to formulate his subject in as many different ways as possible, including using diagrams. He visualized solutions, and believed that words and numbers as such did not play a significant role in his thinking process.

  5. Productivity
  6. Thomas Alva Edison failed hundreds and hundreds of times before achieving success. Did you know that he had a whopping 1,093 patents? His assistants were given idea quotas to ensure productivity. Dean Keith Simonton of University of California studied 2,036 timeless scientists and found that the most highly acclaimed ones produced not only amazingly useful products, but also many amazingly useless ones. The thing was, they braved through failure to arrive at excellence.

  7. Mix And Match
  8. Darren Rowse of, was the first few bloggers to come up with making money online with blogs. Was he scared? Yes, he was. At the time when everyone was blogging out personal matters, he came up with the idea of blogging for money. What a cool idea.

    Grego Mendel, an Austrian monk, combined maths and biology to create the base of the law of heredity. This new universal law came from his innovativeness of mixing 2 minimumly related subjects.

  9. Relating The Unrelated
  10. Da Vinci forced a relationship between the sound of a bell and a stone hitting water that enabled him to make the connection that sound travels in waves.


  11. Resembling Separate Things
  12. Explaining through unrelated things like how Einstein used simplicity to explain his theories. Aristotle considered metaphor a sign of genius, and believed that the individual who had the capacity to perceive resemblances between two separate areas of existence and link them together was a person of special gifts.

    For example, here’s a simple explanation of Newton’s second law.
    If a truck hits a car, the car moves forward.
    The truck provides the force, the car is the mass, and the acceleration is how quickly the car (mass) moves forward.
    The larger and heavier the car (mass) is, the more force it takes to move it.
    If the car is very light, it will move forward quicker than if the car is very heavy.
    Thus, force = mass X acceleration

  13. Luck
  14. Luck = preparation + opportunity

    For example, if there’s an opening for an accountancy job, it’s an opportunity. However, I am an IT graduate and can’t answer the advert. I could, if the opportunity was for IT related.

    The first principle of creative accident says that failure can only be productive if we do not focus on it as an unproductive result. The question should not be “Why have I failed?”, but rather “What have I done?”.

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