Thomas Edison is known for saying that genius is 1% Inspiration and 99% perspiration (among other things). As I am perspiring studying, I come to think is this really true. If we were to study really hard, would we really become geniuses, or are some people just born smarter than others.
I had always been a firm believer that hard work pays off, (maybe that’s why I work so hard... (That was a joke I'm actually super lazy)). However, while talking to my friend I found out that in South Korea most school students keep studying after school and only go home at 8pm.(he might have been exaggerating about the 8pm) I then asked him why aren't people in South Korea super smart then? He said 'Quantity is not better than quality' to which I replied: So people in SK (South Korea) just pretend to study but really they are waffling around messing on their blogs while really they should be studying (ok I didn’t really say the bit about the blog but I thought it would be appropriate here)'. He told me that some people just don't become smart no matter how much they study. Although I had accepted this for learning disabled people I hadn't really thought the same for normal people (I had disregarded people telling me how they measure a different scale of intelligence for people from west brom, which would suggest that intelligence is hereditary). This would bring the question to people in SK whose minds are saturated (or so I have deduced from the evidence given) "What is the point of studying? “In all seriousness the reality isn't quite as clear cut there are probably both 'nature' and 'nurture' factors in this.
My personal theory is that the brain is not like a computer hard drive where there is a fixed limit in which once you have reached it you can't fit any more illegal movies on there (just a random example), but instead it is infinite (maybe like the internet) which means that no matter how much you study you will never saturate it (ok that was kinda lame because the internet is stored in various hard drives/servers but i suppose it kinda works because as long as people keep making hard drives its (the internet's) size is infinite). Also I think people can have various levels of potential, but no one will ever reach their full potential and the difference in potential between people can be made up by hard work. An extension on the theory could be that when people fill up there brains (imagine it’s a hard drive) they get diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Back to tommo's quote,
The irony in this whole thing is that Thomas Edison was a famous inventor yet he claims that inspiration is only 1% of genius. Without that inspiration, regardless of the 99% of perspiration, he would have been nothing and I would be typing this blog in the dark (ok that's a lie because it's day time) (also that's a lie because someone else would have invented it)
This brings me to another point, Why do people say things like 'if it weren't for Alexander Graham Bell we wouldn't have telephones, (if this was an episode of QI the buzzer would have gone off, but screw Stephen fry for now), because in reality if Alexander Graham Bell hadn't invented the telephone someone else would have invented it. Another example would be :'if Pythagoras hadn't discovered Pythagoras' theorem we would still be measuring all 3 sides of a right handed triangle to find its perimeter'.
Anyway I need to get studying now.
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