I hate to make generalizations here but ... it takes more than just genius to be successful in life. You have to have motivation, incentive, passion, and a vision for going beyond your existing paradigms and thermostat setting. A great deal of success depends on above average interpsersonal skills, social skills, intuitive skills, oral and verbal communication skills that many very intelligent individuals fail to develop. Who was it who said that the higher your IQ, the lonelier you are?

In short, one must look at success holistically and develop many of the abilities that school nerds have tended to avoid. To borrow a concept from nonlinear dynamical systems theory, you have to change your attractor fields to attract to yourself what you want in life. This is where you start using more of your brain and delve into nonlinear modes of information processing and Hegelian dialectics. The whole brain is not dedicated to logical, rational, linear, technical processing. Most people may use less than 10% of their brain but when they start using more of it, they find themselves going beyond the traditional logical, rationalist, positivist, materialist thinking into realms beyond. Real geniuses like Einstein and Tesla applied a more integrative mental processing approach as a matter of course.

People are where they are in life because they do not take action to get out of the rut they are in. In a feedback control system, you have to raise the setpoint provided by the negative feedback loop if you want to change the results. You change your mind and you can change your life.

One of the reasons we do not use more of our brain is because our brains are intensive consumers of the body's energy and oxygen and the body would have to work harder to support it. So the evolutionary efficient approach was to localize brain usage to a minimum area for efficiency's sake. If you want to use more of it, then first increase your efficient management of greater amounts of energy and oxygen. Pretty soon you'll be turning to yoga, meditation, and qigong but that's the kind of stuff that's normally avoided and outright rejected by most.

[This message has been edited by shr33m (edited July 05, 2003).]