Finding the spark of genius within you

"You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think."
- Mortimer Adler, American educator and philosopher (1902-2001)

Busy people believe they accomplish a great deal. And they do, if you measure completing tasks as accomplishments.

What we call genius may not be superior intelligence at all, but a different way of organizing thoughts and thought patterns. That takes time.

Albert Einstein was convinced that every baby is born a genius. It may well be true that every baby born with a healthy brain has that potential.

Something over the ensuing few years knocks that potential away so that most children are conformists by their early school years. The more involved with activities they are--the busier they are--the more they are apt to be social conformists and hardliners as adults.

Thinkers tend to be social misfits--not that the reverse is necessarily true. Thinkers spend more time alone, building with their minds, creating, rebuilding, reshaping, continually making something more. Thinkers are not necessarily loners, they simply spend some due amount of time alone with their own thoughts and mental castles.

It's not by accident that a large majority of good writers do most of their work alone. Artists, including musicians, tend to spend great amounts of time shaping their craft and crafting their shape in their own lonely cells.

Thinking requires time, a commodity so precious that most people today claim to have litttle of it to spare. Therein lie great lessons.

Just as Olympic athletes are great because they have taken great amounts of time to develop their skills, often practising alone for hours each day, thinkers become great by practising alone.

A thinker may be alone, but never lonely. There is, after all, too much to think about: thoughts not yet thought, castles not yet devised, symphonies of thought not yet written, universes of thought not yet explored.

Take time to do nothing. If you can handle the alone-ness, your brain will...think.

Think enough and you will find the genius within you. The spark is alive.

Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to help you find the genius within you.
Learn more at http://billallin.com