Last night, I watched an interesting program about child geniuses. How does one become one and how do their brains work? What was it that made these kids special? 

One boy is a human calculator.  He isn’t just that.   He can easily remember hundreds of numbers in the same sequence and maps.   He is a 10-year-old finishing university and moving on to a PhD in Mathematics.  He has a fascination with planets and is obsessed with Physics.   He’s autistic but on the low end of the spectrum.  He is very social and can make friends easily.  His love of Maths started when he was three years old and he was bored with school before he was in third grade. 

It was his mother who enrolled him in evening courses at the university when his parents realised that their son taught himself the whole high school algebra, trigonometry and statistics in just two weeks! Imagine that. “I’ve never seen anyone so focused on accomplishing something like that before, so we just supported his interest”.

The next boy is a chess champion, who started playing chess at five.  He went on to play ten people at a time and won each series.  By the time he was 10, he was facing the world’s number one.   His opponent was much older and looked like a man in his forties who did not even say hello.  In the middle of the match, the boy stood up and ventured to other tables, he got bored.  He and the champion drew that game and a few years later, he was top of the game. Today, he travels 200 days a year to defend his title and chess is his life.

The last genius was a 15-year-old boy who was still finishing high school.  It was the death of a family friend from pancreatic cancer that inspired his genius.   He told himself that surely he could find a way to test for pancreatic cancer early on, so he set out to prove his theories.  He is a Science enthusiast who enjoys fun experiments in his basement with his older brother.  He needed a Science laboratory which his school and 199 other professors wouldn’t allow.   One professor finally said yes and this genius went on to win the top prize at the biggest Science fair in the world.   He is getting closer to finding the solution to the problem.

It isn’t the geniuses' stories that made this memorable. It is the common factor in these stories for me.  It isn’t how brilliant they are, it’s the support their parents give them.   It didn't matter how crazy or bizarre the experiments were, it was how the parents gave their children room to flourish.  It is simply believing in them that makes a difference.  Imagine all other geniuses whose parents said ‘no’, end of the story.   Enjoy the rest of your week Samoa and remember there is a genius in everyone.