Gelb M.J. Discover Your Genius. How to Think Like History’s Ten Most Revolutionary Minds

London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002. — 415 p. — ISBN 0-06-008530-4.Michael Gelb invites us to explore and apply the essential qualities of ten geniuses in a uniquely engaging personal manner. These extraordinary individuals all changed the world, and Gelb guides us to use their inspiration and example to change the way we look at our lives. Each of the geniuses he introduces was driven by an unquenchable passion for their particular kinds of truth and beauty. Copernicus’s act of remodeling the heavens, for example, was one of aesthetic cleansing, creating, as he claimed, a harmonious celestial body or perfect temple where the efforts to save the old theory had resulted in a monstrous structure. We all have experienced the surprise at how different a street looks when we turn around and see it from another point of view. Most of his-tory walks in one direction. Some geniuses have enabled us to turn around and look the other way, backwards or sideways. Leonardo, for example, noted how the so-called vanishing point toward which furrows in a ploughed field appear to converge seems to move with us as we walk beside the field. The genius not only alters our viewpoint, but also pulls our perspective into line with his or hers. Through some magnificent act of insight, intuition, inspiration, brainwave, conviction, whatever we might call it, the genius sees or senses something from a different perspective. Their new perspective provides a view that ultimately proves so compelling that we can never see things inquite the same way again. What they see is often a bigger picture than we can readily grasp. And they can do this because they sense how the parts fit into the whole, the deeper harmonic resonance of things that may seem on the surface to be unrelated.