Craig Wright > Quotes

“At every single moment, the whole creation is beginning again, stretching the tent of the present moment to bursting. And the waves that push up through the oceans, and the waves that push up through the stars; and the waves that push upwards through history are the same waves that push up through us. And so we have to say yes to time, even though it means speeding forward into memory; forgetfulness; and oblivion. Say “no” to time; hold on to what you were or what she was; hold onto the past, even out of love... and I swear it will tear you to shreds. This universe will tear you to shreds.”
― Craig Wright, The Pavilion

“This is the way the universe begins. A raindrop (that isn’t really a raindrop) drops, like a word, “rain” drops, into a pool (that isn’t really a pool, more like a pool of listening minds), and tiny waves circle out in an elegant decelerating procession, -cession, -cession. Then, after a time, the pool of listening minds grows still once more.

Now, but backwards, this is the way the universe begins: the still pool of listening minds, the sudden shrinking circles dissolving at the center, conserving at the center until boom, sloop!, up goes the droplet, up towards the voice that raindrops words, up towards the voice and it hangs in the air — remember it there — because that’s the way the universe begins. A little pavilion. A momentary sphere. A word made of stars, dancing.”
― Craig Wright, The Pavilion

“Apposite here is a saying attributed to Einstein: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Everything since the beginning of time was working together to make my happiness possible: and then you. You walked into the audiovisual lab in your flannel shirt...and you fucked it up! You fucked everything up! Do you understand that? Because of you, the entire universe is ruined...forever!"

--Kari, The Pavilion”
― Craig Wright, The Pavilion

“The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer cleverly made this point in 1819: “A person of talent hits a target that no one else can hit; a person of genius hits a target that no one else can see.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“On the other hand, in a famous “genius test” conducted at Stanford by Lewis Terman and colleagues from the 1920s into the 1990s, a cohort of 1,500 youngsters with IQs over 135 ultimately failed to produce a single genius.48”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Oprah Winfrey said in a Harvard commencement speech in 2013, “There is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Steve Jobs was quoted in Business Week as saying “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Jack Ma recalls saying to his son in 2015, “You don’t need to be in the top three in your class, being in the middle is fine, so long as your grades aren’t too bad. Only this kind of person [a middle-of-the-road student] has enough free time to learn other skills.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age,” said the novelist Aldous Huxley.22”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Musk always had a book in hand. Said his brother, Kimbal, “It was not unusual for him to read ten hours a day. If it was the weekend, he could go through two books in a day.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Benjamin Franklin: “If we don’t all hang together we surely will all hang separately.” “I probably should be proud of my humility.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“But his sister, Nannerl, in a short biography in 1800, defended Mozart’s memory, saying “It is certainly easy to understand that a great genius, who is preoccupied with the abundance of his own ideas, and who soars from earth to heaven with amazing speed, is extremely reluctant to lower himself to noticing and dealing with mundane affairs.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Thomas Edison described himself as being “not at the head of my class, but the foot.” Einstein graduated fourth in his class of five physicists in 1900.54 Steve Jobs had a high school GPA of 2.65; Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba (the Chinese equivalent of Amazon), took the gaokao (the Chinese national educational exam) and scored 19 out of 120 on a math section on his second try;55 and Beethoven had trouble adding figures and never learned to multiply or divide. Walt Disney was a below-average student and often fell asleep in class.56 Finally, Picasso could not remember the sequence of the letters in the alphabet and saw symbolic numbers as literal representations: a 2 as the wing of a bird or a 0 as a body.57”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Fortunately, a few educators and parents are pushing back with “dangerous” playgrounds that encourage creativity and risk and the “free-range parenting” movement.50 Want to raise a bold, brilliant, original thinker? Permit your children to explore alone, take risks, and experience failure. Let them have fun and break the rules once in a while. It’s more work, worry, and pain for parents, yes, but the ultimate outcome will be better. As Steve Jobs once wondered, “Why join the navy when you can be a pirate?”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“First, at the outset, the Berlin psychologists failed to test students for natural musical ability. They did not compare apples to apples but rather compared the talented to the truly gifted. Extraordinary natural ability makes practice fun and easy, encouraging the participant to want to do more.24 Parents and peers tend to be impressed by those to whom things come effortlessly, and they offer praise, thereby strengthening the positive feedback loop. Ericsson and company have confused cause and effect. Practice is a result. The initial catalyst is the natural gift.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“They experience a ‘divine discontent,’ as Jeff Bezos called it,” between what is and what might be—and they act.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Work ethic (chapter 1) Resilience (chapter 2) Originality (chapter 3) Childlike imagination (chapter 4) Insatiable curiosity (chapter 5) Passion (chapter 6) Creative maladjustment (chapter 7) Rebelliousness (chapter 8) Cross-border thinking (chapter 9) Contrarian action (chapter 10) Preparation (chapter 11) Obsession (chapter 12) Relaxation (chapter 13) Concentration (chapter 14)”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“My curiosity is interfering with my work!” Einstein lamented in 1915 while trying to finalize his Theory of General Relativity.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“To be sure, most dropouts do not become geniuses or success stories. But prominent among the dropout titans of recent history are Bill Gates (Harvard), Steve Jobs (Reed College), Mark Zuckerberg (Harvard), Elon Musk (Stanford), Bob Dylan (University of Minnesota), Lady Gaga (New York University), and Oprah Winfrey (Tennessee State). Jack Ma never went to college, and neither did Richard Branson, who dropped out of high school at age fifteen. Creative force Kanye West dropped out of Chicago State University at age twenty to pursue a musical career; six years later he released his first album to great critical acclaim and commercial success: The College Dropout (2004). The point is not to encourage dropping out but rather to observe that these transformative figures were somehow able to learn what they needed to know. Here successful people and geniuses share a common trait: most are lifelong learning addicts. It’s a good habit to have.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Leonardo was a doer. He painted, of course, but he also went into the mountains to examine rocks and fossils and to the tidal marshes to look at the wings and flying habits of dragonflies. He took apart machines to see how they worked and took apart humans to the same end. He recorded all of his discoveries in what amounted to about thirteen thousand pages of notes and drawings.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“As Picasso said with his typical oxymoronic wit, “It takes a very long time to become young.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“In the 1920s, a tech engineer’s “half-life of knowledge” was thirty-five years; in the 1960s, it was a decade; and today it is five years at most.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Oscar Levant: “What the world needs is more geniuses with humility. There are so few of us left.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“If the portraitist Chuck Close cannot remember faces, the artist Stephen Wiltshire sees and remembers everything. Wiltshire has an eidetic, or photographic, memory. He can look at a cityscape or scene in London, New York, Rome, Dubai, or Tokyo just once, for twenty minutes or so, and later meticulously replicate what he has seen in every detail.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“As the eternal child Albert Einstein said in 1929, “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Eleanor Roosevelt would have said curiosity. As she declared in 1934, “I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.”45 Indeed, recent research has linked curiosity to happiness, satisfying relationships, increased personal growth, increased meaning in life, and increased creativity”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Winston Churchill was likewise a poor student, admitting that “Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Leonardo da Vinci has been called “the most relentlessly curious man in history.”7 That’s hyperbole, perhaps, but Leonardo asked a lot of questions, both of others and of himself. Consider, for example, a single day’s “to-do” list that he wrote while in Milan around 1495.8 Calculate the measurement of Milan and its suburbs. Find a book describing Milan and its churches, which is to be had at the stationer’s on the way to Cordusio. Discover the measurement of the Corte Vecchia [old courtyard of the duke’s palace]. Ask the Master of Arithmetic [Luca Pacioli] to show you how to square a triangle. Ask Benedetto Portinari [a Florentine merchant passing through Milan] by what means they go on ice at Flanders? Draw Milan. Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are positioned on bastions by day or night. Examine the crossbow of Maestro Gianetto. Find a Master of Hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill, in the Lombard manner. Ask about the measurement of the sun, promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

“Leonardo’s questions extend to many fields: urban planning, hydraulics, drawing, archery and warfare, astronomy, mathematics, and even ice skating. How many of those subjects had he studied in school? None, for Leonardo was of illegitimate birth and thus barred from the only system of formal education then available, that of the Roman Catholic Church. He had received no instruction in Latin or Greek, the learned languages of the day, and accordingly later said of himself, “I am a uomo senza lettere”9—an unlettered man. Thus Leonardo belongs to the first of two types of curious individuals: those who learn experientially and those who learn vicariously by reading—in other words, those who do or discover and those who read about what others have done or discovered.”
― Craig Wright, The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit—Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness