What if... abundant genius?

Photo by Oshomah Abubakar on Unsplash

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What if we stopped thinking of genius as something rare and started seeing it as something abundant?

Inspired by this quote from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are (2017):

"Of all Google searches starting 'Is my two-year old'..., the most common next word is 'gifted'."

Full reflection below.

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Why might so many parents think their toddlers could possibly be gifted?

Certainly new parents can be starry eyed about their children.

But could it be something else?

Could it be that every two-year olds is gifted?

After all, they are hard-core learning machines. Their brains are sprouting neurons and making synaptic connections faster than almost any other time in their lives.

Most of all, "a child asks about forty-thousand questions between the ages of two and five" (Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question, 2014).

One way to think about genius is that it's the art of asking questions no one else thinks to ask.

So maybe it's not surprising that the most common Google search by parents of two-year olds is asking about giftedness.

Maybe every two-year old is a genius.

The best part is, we can relearn to ask great questions--if we choose to do so.

What if we stopped thinking of genius as something rare, and start seeing it as something abundant?

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Each Wednesday we share a "what if" scenario. These are not suggestions as much as provocations.

If you have a "what if" scenario you would like to share, just send an email (and indicate whether you would like it attributed it to you).

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