Geniuses look at problems in many different ways. Genius often comes from finding a new perspective that no one else has taken. Leonardo da Vinci believed that, to gain knowledge about the form of a problem, you begin by learning how to restructure it in many different ways. He felt that the first way he looked at a problem was too biased toward his usual way of seeing things. He would restructure his problem by looking at it from one perspective and move to another perspective and still another. With each move, his understanding would deepen and he would begin to understand the essence of the problem.

Geniuses make their thought visible. The explosion of creativity in the Renaissance was intimately tied to the recording and conveying of vast knowledge in drawings, graphs, and diagrams, as in the renowned diagrams of da Vinci and Galileo. Galileo revolutionized science by making his thought graphically visible while his contemporaries used only conventional mathematical and verbal approaches.

Geniuses produce. A distinguishing characteristic of genius is immense productivity. Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents, still the record. He guaranteed productivity by giving himself and his assistants idea quotas. His own personal quota was one minor invention every 10 days and a major invention every six months. Bach wrote a cantata every week, even when he was sick or exhausted. Mozart produced more than 600 pieces of music. Einstein is best known for his paper on relativity, but he published 248 other papers. T.S. Eliot's numerous drafts of The Waste Land constitute a jumble of good and bad passages that eventually was turned into a masterpiece.

Geniuses make novel combinations. Like the highly playful child with a bucket of building blocks, a genius is constantly combining and recombining ideas, images, and thoughts into different combinations in their conscious and subconscious minds. Consider Einstein's equation, E = mc2. Einstein did not invent the concepts of energy, mass, or speed of light. Rather, by combining these concepts in a novel way, he was able to look at the same world as everyone else and see something different.