GettyThroughout life we ask ourselves a whole catalogue of questions. The most important of which tends to be, am I a genius?
It’s a question I ask myself almost daily. Am I the next Ernest Hemingway? The next Louis Ferdinand Celine? Ferdinand Celine 2.0.
Most probably, but the road to answer that question, am I a genius, has never been too clearly cut. If only there was a series of things that a lot of geniuses do.
Well strap yourself in comrades, as now there is just that. So if you do any of these seven things, well you may be one helluva lot smarter than you thought, according to Elite Daily.
Here they are:
1. You are curious about everything.
In the first three years of a baby’s life they learn more about the world than they will for the rest of their lives. Unless that is, they’re a genius.
The genius never stops thinking, never stops questioning, and trying to answer the unanswerable.
If you find yourself yearning to learn, even about the most bizarre of subjects – taking to the Internet and asking ‘who invented the baguette?’, ‘why isn’t Ireland united?’, or ‘if a tree falls’ etc, at half four in the morning – then you may well be an intellectual.
Getty2. You talk to yourself.
Leaving work and heading to the train station, do you ever notice you’ve been speaking your thoughts out loud instead of uttering them internally?
Don’t worry, you could be a genius.
3. You read constantly.
The works of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Camus, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky you know too well as you dive headfirst into pretty much any book in sight.
Sound like you, you genius?
Getty4. You enjoy challenging your own intellect.
But you are not content with the art of learning – no, true geniuses are obsessed with challenging themselves.
Do you enjoy setting yourself challenges and obliterating them? Taking quizes, playing trivia and word games, to blow your mind? This is just another sign that you’re a genius.
Getty5. You are forgetful.
However – the genius isn’t perfect. Overloading your brain with complex knowledge, being plagued by endless questions, and thinking intensely for your every waking hour comes at a price.
Forgetfulness is that price.
6. You have a checkered past.
Another frequent sign of imperfection in geniuses is their dependancy on substances such as alcohol or drugs.
Some of the brightest minds throughout history have used such substances as a coping mechanism for millenia. Others used them for experimentation.
Arthur Rimbaud filled his liver with absinthe when he was in his late teens, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde on a six day cocaine binge, Brendan Behan drank until his stomach burst. Hell Aldous Huxley’s last words were ‘LSD, 100 micrograms’.
What does that tell you?
Getty7. You worry and overthink things.
You’d probably figure that geniuses are these extroverted God-gift like types that just float through life emitting self-confidence and oozing self-pride, but they don’t.
For the genius life can prove hard. There are no answers to life, the philosophical questions of our very being come to no conclusions – and this can be too much, forcing geniuses to be rife with doubt.
GettySo fuck your I.Q., this is the definitive list. The guidebook for geniuses here, there, and everywhere.
Even if you don’t live by the seven commandments up above – start treating yourself like a genius and you’ll teeter ever closer to the finish line, the end goal, you genius.
As Einstein once said:
Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.
Yep.
