There's plenty of brilliant thinkers out there today.
Polymaths, wunderkinds, and savants abound and are amplified. We live in an age that glories in the praise garnered by individual excellence. Coming off the academy awards this past weekend (personally mourning Timée's loss, while celebrating MBJ's much-deserved win), we sit at the feet of greatness and look to the stars our culture creates, crucifies, and relegates to subsidiary positions in the economic churn of celebrity-ism.
What is less valued, but certainly more needed, is the average creative, the consistent worker, or the exemplary student.
The poetically-afflicted and certainly not average David Foster Wallace used to say about writing that, "Good nonfiction is a chance to watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives."
In the midst of genius, simple and stable examinations of life's happenings may actually be the most brilliant thing we can experience.
The un-relatability of the virtuosic and visionarily gifted often keeps us at a distance from their ideas and artistic expressions. Nietzsche and Chopin generated fields of scholarship entirely devoted to understanding their intellects, their essential contributions. The works of Einstein and Heidegger are still being unraveled in their implications by theoreticians and engineers today.
Henry James wrote that, "We work in the dark, we do what we can, our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task," with the intent of communicating the blindness of the creative process and the effectiveness of the amateur at groping through this darkness to the other side of light.
In the internet age, it's never been more important to show your work, display your blindness and insufficiency to the world.
How you show up, presenting yourself as an expert, arm-chair expert, novice, or nobody, being transparent about your creative process and incomplete offerings, does matter.
And for those of us gifted only with the ability to see, sometimes, creating enough of a hole for the eyes of others to peep through and witness a newfound perspective side-by-side, is itself enough.