上个月晚些时候，麦克阿瑟基金会宣布了最新一批“天才奖”获得者。而再一次，你暗想说不定，真的说不定，今年就该轮到我了。
And why not? These days, we’re all geniuses. We might be “marketing geniuses” or “*culinary geniuses” or “TV geniuses”. We have so *diluted “genius” that it’s fast joining the company of “natural” and “mindful”, words rendered inert through overuse and misuse.
为什么不可能呢？在当今，我们人人都是天才。我们可能是“营销天才”、“烹饪天才”或者“电视天才”。因为过度使用和误用，“天才”这个词很快和“纯天然”、“正念”这样的词一样，被“稀释”词义，失去了原有的深度。
Admittedly, the word is tough to nail down. Sometimes we equate genius with raw intelligence. But many of humanity’s greatest breakthroughs were achieved by those with only modest IQs.
不可否认，这个词的含义很难明确。有时，我们将天才等同于天生智力超群的人。但很多人类最伟大的突破都是由智力非常普通的人实现的。
Sometimes we think of the genius as someone extremely knowledgeable, but that definition also falls short. During Albert Einstein’s time, other scientists knew more physics than Einstein did, but history doesn’t remember them. That’s because they didn’t *deploy that knowledge the way Einstein did. They weren’t able to, as he put it, “regard old questions from a new angle”.
有时，我们认为天才是那些学富五车的人，但这种定义也有缺陷。在爱因斯坦生活的年代，其他科学家要比爱因斯坦懂得更多的物理学知识，但历史并没有记住他们。这是因为他们没有像爱因斯坦一样调配那些知识。正如爱因斯坦所说，他们不能”用新的视角来看待旧问题”。
The genius is not a know-it-all but a see-it-all, someone who, working with the material available to all of us, is able to make surprising and useful connections. True genius involves not merely an *incremental advance, but a conceptual leap. As philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it: Talent hits the target no one else can hit; genius hits the target no one else can see.
智者非知之者而悟之者也，是用人人触手可及的材料创新且建立有效联系的人。真正的智者不仅进行量的积累，更能实现质的飞跃。正如哲学家亚瑟.叔本华所言：能者达人所不能，智者达人所未见。
We’ve lost sight of this truth, and too often *bestow the title of genius on talented people hitting visible targets. A good example is the much-*ballyhooed announcement earlier this year that scientists had, for the first time, recorded the sound of two black holes colliding, a billion light-years away. It was a remarkable discovery, no doubt, but it did not represent a *seismic shift in how we understand the universe. It merely confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
我们已丢失了“天才”这个词所蕴含的真谛，太过频繁地将“天才”这一头衔授予那些实现了看得见目标的有才之人。一个恰当的例子就是，今年早些时候人们大肆宣扬科学家首次记录到了10亿光年外两黑洞碰撞的声音。毫无疑问，这是一个非凡的发现，但它不会对我们理解宇宙产生任何颠覆性的改变，它只是证实了爱因斯坦的广义相对论。
As Plato observed, “What is honored in a country is cultivated there.” What do we honor? Digital technology, and the convenience it represents, so naturally we get a Steve Jobs or a Mark Zuckerberg as our “geniuses”, which, in point of fact, they aren’t.
正如柏拉图所说，“一个国家会培养他们引以为傲的东西”。我们以何为傲？数字技术以及它所带来的便利让我们很自然地赋予乔布斯或马克•扎克伯格“天才”的称号，但实际上，他们不是。
The iPhone and Facebook are *wondrous inventions. In many ways, they make our lives a bit easier, a bit more convenient. If anything, though, a true genius makes our lives more difficult, more unsettled. William Shakespeare’s words provide more *disquiet than *succor, and the world felt a bit more secure before Charles Darwin came along. Zuckerberg and Jobs may have changed our world, but they haven’t yet changed our worldview.
苹果手机和脸书都是奇妙的发明。在很多方面，他们都让我们的生活更加轻松，更加便捷。然而，如果现在存在真正的天才，那么他会让我们的生活更加困难，更加不安。莎士比亚的作品带给我们更多的是忧虑而非救助。而在达尔文出现以前，人们感觉世界是更安全的。扎克伯格和乔布斯或许已经改变了我们的世界，但他们还没有改变我们的世界观。
We need to reclaim genius, and a good place to start is by putting the brakes on Genius Creep.
我们需要收回“天才”这个词，而一个不错的开端就是限制对这个词的滥用。
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