<p>Brilliance is a funny thing, it is subjective, and I think that people confuse brilliance with things like great grades or test scores. The kids who get 2400 SAT’s and 4.0 GPA’s and so forth don’t have to be brilliant, they simply have to be academic excellent kids,but there actually can be a negative association with brilliance there. Why? Because as someone else posted earlier in the thread, there are ways to get great grades by giving the teachers what they want, doing all the extra credit, etc, and you can get great grades in a typical class simply by knowing what the teacher wants, and also has great study skills and such, likewise getting a 2400 on the SAT’s doesn’t mean you are brilliant either (in fact, the new SAT has no correlation to intelligence as measure on IQ tests, Mensa allows using the old SAT I took for admissions, the new one doesn’t count). I am not saying that in a negative fashion, having the work ethic and good study skills are essential things to have…</p>
<p>The problem is that truly brilliant people often aren’t the ones who have the 4.0’s, the 2400’s and so forth, because the way their mind works, they often are the square peg in the round hole, they don’t necessarily do thing the way other students do, in their quest to figure things out they may spend time on a test working out a unique way to solve a problem and leave others blank, and they often drive teachers up the wall because of the questions they ask. A lot of people we now consider brilliant had trouble in school, didn’t really fit in (Einstein is a classic example, Beethoven was a musically brilliant, probably as much as any composer has ever been, yet he didn’t fit the mold either and was told by some he was destined to be a failure), and so forth. The kid who gets all the great stats, on the other hand, may do everything the conventional way, never really think of new things, and get the great grades, to go the great school, and do well, but never really achieve anything extraordinary.</p>
<p>I think the term is overused (not talking about the UK usage, which means something different) and yeah a lot of parents use it. I have met brilliant people, the guy who founded the company I work for truly is that IMO, because he created something totally new and had ideas few would have in my experience and his whole life has been like that, but he is one of the few people I would call truly brilliant I have met (the head of development at my old company also was up there that way). In the Novel Cryptonimicon they have a character, Waterhouse, who fits the description. He is taken into the Navy before Pearl Harbor, and they give him an aptitude test (he had been at Princeton, was a math genius of sorts, but bombs out because he is studying engineering, which bores him). On the aptitude test they give him they have the classic problem with rowing a boat upstream and downstream, with current x, how fast the rowers can row, and ask the round trip time. The character thinks that answer is too obvious and can’t be what they want, but starts thinking about it, and comes up with a totally revolutionary answer complete with a long proof spanning many pages of a new method to accurately calculate all kinds of things…but he only does the one problem, because he spent the whole time doing that work, he gets a 0, and the navy figures he is an idiot and makes him a glockenspeil player in a navy band…oh, yeah, he kept his scratch work and submitted it to a mathematics journal where it was published…:)</p>
<p>Brilliance really is in the eye of the beholder, Zoosermom mentioned a kid she thought was brilliant, that he had magnetic stage presence and such. What is interesting is in the training of classical musicians, magnetic stage presence, musicality and stagecraft generally count for very little IMO, the gatekeepers consider basically one thing, technical capability, how perfectly you play, and it shows because they admit and turn out musicians who can play a paganini caprice perfectly, but on stage are wooden and robotic and would put an audience to sleep, but pedagogues and competition panelists consider them brilliant…</p>
<p>To me brilliance is someone who can do things differently, who achieves a level, not on standardized tests and grades that measure the ability to do what is already been done, but to push things out that; the musician who can galvanize an audience and bring new light onto a piece of music, the scientist who comes up with a new way of looking at things, the artist who creates in ways not derivative of others that capture those viewing it, are brilliant. Beethoven’s symphonies and his late chamber works all created totally new vistas in music, Stravinsky’s music for the “Rite of Spring” broke new ground in many ways, and Einstein and some others helped change the way we understand the universe, that is brilliance. On the other hand, the CEO who brings in record profits is generally not brilliant IMO, just a good financial mechanic.</p>