#beyond genius

Griffiths, an alumnus of the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management, said he strives to be a Renaissance man, someone with a wide range of expertise in many different areas. He describes the path to becoming one in his new book “Beyond Genius: The 12 Essential Traits of Today’s Renaissance Men,” published recently and co-authored by Eric Elfman.

“Beyond Genius” presents the culmination of Griffiths’ ideas on reaching the epitome of man’s greatness, drawing examples from the lives of figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs.

“(Griffiths) is an idea-man, brainstorming ideas and propelling them forward, ultimately trying to push the envelope,” said Dale Griffiths Stamos, Griffiths’ editor.

The concept for “Beyond Genius” originated during Griffiths’ studies at the Art Center College of Design. He said he was fascinated by the depth of character and capability of artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who invented technologies and techniques in contrasting fields.

He said he realized his book, which advocates traits such as having the courage to take risks and challenging the status quo, was a necessary reminder for a modern world where intellectual curiosity has become stigmatized.

“We are all born as Renaissance men and naturally have the capacity to manifest these traits,” Griffith said. “Throughout our lives, though, we are molded by teachers and parents to focus on getting a job, making it hard to maintain creativity.”

During research delving into the lives of these Renaissance men, Griffith said he began to see constant traits showing up throughout history. Eventually, he was able to narrow the focus of the book down to 12 essential traits that were present in every Renaissance man he studied.

“Beyond Genius” is not Griffiths’ first book, having previously published a book on airbrush art during his studies at the Art Center.

Griffiths said when he walked by a bookstore and saw his first book on display, he felt ecstatic. He decided he wanted to try and build upon that experience with further writing.

Although he already wrote a successful book and had been CEO of two companies, Griffiths decided to go back to school and pursue an MBA at UCLA because investors at his microbrewery Rhino Chasers wanted a CEO with more business expertise.

At Anderson, Griffiths said he was forced to develop analytical thinking skills, which allowed his passion for multi-faceted Renaissance men to resurface. Not until the startup of his 18|8 salons, upscale barber shops advertised for men interested in self-improvement, did he have an opportunity to fully explore his passion for Renaissance men. Elfman said Griffiths had already thought extensively about this topic and knew what he wanted in the final product from the beginning.

“We would talk about his ideas and you could tell he sees the future clearly and has to work backward to bring his vision back to the present,” Elfman said.

As he delved deeper into the lives of Renaissance men and saw how much they contributed to the world, Griffiths said he realized just how important these types of men are in a modern world that focuses so much on specialization.

“The complexity of problems in our world is getting bigger and we need somebody who can look at the big picture and connect the dots,” Griffiths said. “Specialization is necessary but will not lead to greatness.”

While striving to uphold the virtues extolled in his new book, Griffith said he believes that although the path to being a Renaissance man can be arduous, it is ultimately worth it.

Dogged opposition was Lincoln's lot in the political struggles of his life.

It is this power that Lincoln tapped into. As with Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, both of whom had a comparable gift, this may be an aspect of Lincoln's literary genius, but it may also owe something to the fact that dogged opposition was his lot in the major political struggles of his life: Jacksonian political rule, the hegemony of the Democratic Party, the Mexican War, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott Decision, the expansion of slavery, and the dissolution of the Union.

It must also be acknowledged that slavery, the predominating factor in Lincoln's political struggles, was no ordinary problem and, because of its moral dimension, elevated the passions on all sides. Notably reserved and self-possessed, Lincoln admitted that the prospect of the extension of slavery into the free territories in 1854 "aroused him as he had never been before." From that point on, almost all of Lincoln's rhetorical efforts were in the service of resisting both the expansion of slavery and the destruction of the Union, a resistance which gave his negative constructions a moral focus. "If slavery is not wrong," he famously wrote, "nothing is wrong."

For some examples of the ways that Lincoln makes rhetorical use of the negative, the antithesis is a good place to start. To address the all-important issue of public opinion in a democracy, he first crafted on paper and then proclaimed in the first of his 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas: "With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed." In his closing speech in the 1858 campaign, he summarized the constitutional stance his opponent had worked so hard to distort: "The legal rights of the Southern people to reclaim their fugitives I have constantly admitted. The legal right of Congress to interfere with their institutions in the states, I have constantly denied." In writing down a concise version of his extemporaneous Springfield Farewell Address after delivery, he wrote: "Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him [Washington], I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail." In speaking forcefully to Southern dissidents at the conclusion of his first inaugural, he said: "You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect, and defend' it."

With antithesis, the negative is often, if not invariably, the fulcrum upon which the expression turns, but the danger is that such a device readily calls attention to itself, which can cheapen the effect. Remarkably, Lincoln's antitheses rarely fall into this category, perhaps in part because of the plainness of his language.

Negation is often employed to emphasize restraint—what is not claimed, or not to be done. When he spoke of his presidential oath in his public letter to Albert G. Hodges, he said: "It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using that power." In this letter, he was at pains to present in detail the numerous provocations he had addressed with restraint in the matter of emancipation. And this is the letter that climaxes with the riveting line, "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me."

But the rhetorical force of the negative in Lincoln's writing is by no means restricted to the expression of restraint. One of his most fervid lines—"Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history" —was offered as a call to action. The Gettysburg Address, the work that makes the most brilliant rhetorical use of the negative, was also something of a rallying cry. Its opening sentences proceed logically toward a pivot point: This is who we are, this is what has happened, this is why we are here, and this is all very well, but . . . . That pivotal "but" prepares the way for the most powerful anaphora in all of American letters: "We can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground." These three parallel denials are, in effect, implacable affirmations. Their force as affirmations is partly due to the rhythm and symmetry of these artful repetitions, but also to their being framed in the negative. Nor is this the speech's only notable use of the negative to energize its affirmations: "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here."

It is, in this context, quite notable that the final and most far-reaching affirmation of all is rendered in the negative: "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

In his last great speech, the Second Inaugural, Lincoln skillfully borrowed a famous biblical use of the negative to build onto it: "but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully." Finally, there is, perhaps, no better example of what we have been discussing than the phrase that captures the spirit of the president's message in four words: "With malice toward none."

With Lincoln's special affinity for the rhetorical use of the negative, it is little wonder that he continues to be credited with this much-disputed saying: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

Spectacular detective An illustration by Frederic Dorr Steele that accompanied the 1904 publication of 'The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez' in Collier's magazine.

Holmes's supreme rationality is of a piece with his interest in science. "The Scientific Sherlock Holmes," by James O'Brien, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Missouri State University, explores the forensic methods and scientific content in the Holmes canon as well as his creator's own scientific background. Born in 1859, Conan Doyle took to books at the encouragement of his mother. Frustrated by the rigidity of his Catholic schooling, he moved toward science. At 17, he began medical school in Edinburgh. There his mentor was Dr. Joseph Bell, a man with sharpened diagnostic abilities who would serve as a model for Holmes. In one instance, Bell gleaned that a woman who had come in with her child was from the town of Burntisland (her accent), had traveled via Iverleith Row (red clay on shoes), had another child (a too-large jacket on the one present) and worked at a linoleum factory (dermatitis on fingers).

After his schooling, Conan Doyle's rich uncles offered to set him up with wealthy Catholic patients in London, but he sacrificed the opportunity by proclaiming that he was now agnostic. His first tax return, listing an income of £154, was mailed back to him with a note: "Not satisfactory." He returned it with an addendum: "I agree entirely.

Lack of patients gave Conan Doyle time to focus on fiction. His greatest influence was Edgar Allen Poe, who had invented detective stories in the 1840s. Poe's protagonist, C. Auguste Dupin, was, like Holmes, a clever eccentric with a narrator sidekick and a dim police force as his foil. But Conan Doyle saw room to improve: "I had been reading some detective stories, and it struck me what nonsense they were, to put it mildly, because for getting the solution to the mystery the authors always depended on some coincidence." So came his heavy reliance on science, as well as those enigmatic clues. He published the first of his 60 Holmes stories in 1887, and by the third he was boosting sales of the magazine that ran them by 100,000 copies per issue. People were hungry for the stuff.

Mr. O'Brien spends most of his slim book, a volume most suitable for those already fond of Sherlock and not afraid of section titles with catchy names like "Section 4.2," exploring the various fields that Holmes draws on—principally chemistry, with a little biology and physics. We learn about the use of coal-tar derivatives and handwriting identification in both Holmes's world and ours. Some techniques, such as fingerprinting, appeared in the stories even before they were widely adopted by real police.

Mr. O'Brien is particularly interested in the question of how good a scientist Holmes actually was. Isaac Asimov, who was a biochemist as well as a science-fiction writer, called Holmes a "blundering chemist," alleging slips in terminology and in the identification of gems. Mr. O'Brien defends his man in detail, concluding that Holmes the chemist falls "somewhere between Watson's 'profound' and Asimov's 'blundering.' 'Eccentric' sounds just about right."

Conan Doyle went out of his way to place science in the stories, even if merely as set decoration. In one, Holmes and Watson discuss the Earth's axial tilt after tea. But more than any particular discipline, he focused on the value of a scientific mindset. At one point, Holmes tells Watson: "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." When, in the second half of the canon, science begins to fall by the wayside, the stories suffer. Mr. O'Brien argues (non-scientifically but plausibly) that this correlation indicates causation: "The science lends a robustness and occasional complexity to the stories which contributes to their authenticity and provokes thought in the reader." A detective tale that doesn't place demands on the reader is a dog that just won't hunt (or bark).

Another look at the cogs under the deerstalker is offered by "Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes," by Maria Konnikova, a psychology graduate student at Columbia University. Following Holmes's metaphor of the "brain attic," she describes how Holmes stocks his attic (observation), explores it (creativity), navigates it (deduction) and maintains it (continuing education and practice). In the process, she lays out the habits of mind—both the techniques Holmes employs and the errors he avoids—that we might usefully emulate.

Much of the material will be familiar to readers acquainted with Daniels such as Ariely, Kahneman and Gilbert ("Predictably Irrational," "Thinking Fast and Slow," "The How of Happiness"). The availability heuristic, the halo effect, confirmation bias: Your favorite mental short-cuts and slip-ups are all here. But Ms. Konnikova finds an ingenious delivery system. Holmes and Watson, she shows, respectively personify our rational and intuitive modes of thought. In story after story, taking the time to think carefully allows Holmes to school his slack-jawed sidekick.

Scientific thinking is not just for scientists or detectives. In almost any domain, it's a good idea to frame a problem well, research it thoroughly, conjure a hypothesis, test it and repeat as necessary. In a chapter called "We're Only Human," Ms. Konnikova details how Conan Doyle himself lost his way. After years as an agnostic, he dove into spiritualism, even "verifying" several photographs of fairies. We believe what we want to believe.

Ms. Konnikova's thoughtful book duly put me in a Holmesian mindset in which I spied a few minor mistakes in the science (she at one point says only one side of the brain processes visual input), but overall she covers a wide variety of material clearly and organizes it well.