Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant! Michael Gelb does it again!
Review: After reading and loving his book "How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci," I was thrilled to find "Discover Your Genius." Each chapter was a unique personal gift that that will enrich my life both personally and professionally. This is a must-read for anyone in search of personal or professional growth! Thank you, Michael!
Rating: 
Summary: Very Disappointed
Review: For a book on Genius, I couldn't have been more disappointed. Any arguments for identifying the specific characteristics were lost in the author's constant barrage of personal world views and prejudices. I found nothing in this writing at all that was inspiring, in fact just the opposite. Exercises were old and frame of references were non-existent. Not only did I waste my money but I wasted my time.
Rating:
Summary: Keys to a fulfilled life
Review: Gelb has done it again! Discover Your Genius harvests the core gift of each mind and provides direct access to the same greatness within each of us. Ulimately, Gelb hands the keys to a fulfilled life to us through this book!Undoubtly, I will use the suggested techniques in my work as a teacher and in my personal life as a mother, friend, etc. For sure to be another National Best Seller!
Rating: 
Summary: Read some REAL biographies instead...
Review: I didn't find this book the least bit inspiring. If you've ever read individual biographies of a few of the people the author covers in the book (namely Brunelleschi, Columbus, Copernicus, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Jefferson, Darwin, and Ghandi), then you probably won't find anything new or particularly inspiring about the book either. If on the other hand you don't even know who the above people are, then this book is for you! However, I found this to be an excellent example of how to package your high school research papers into a commercial book. Seriously, for someone who is supposed to be an engaging and uplifting speaker, the author didn't deliver.
Rating:
Summary: Useful book that helps you unleash your creativity
Review: I must admit to being a big Michael Gelb fan . . . I've heard him
speak (he is great!), and I loved his previous book: HOW TO
THINK LIKE LEONARDO DA VINCI . . . so naturally, when
his latest effort (DISCOVER YOUR GENIUS: HOW TO THINK
LIKE HISTORY'S TEN MOST REVOLUTIONARY MINDS) became
available, I tore into it--and was not disappointed . . . it is equally great! Imagine being able to draw upon the collected wisdom of Plato,
Brunelleschi, Columbus, Copernicus, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare,
Jefferson, Darwin, Gandhi, and Einstein . . . Gelb
looks at these great thinkers to help you unleash your own
creavity . . . each of the invididuals profiled embodies a
special "genius" charactersitic, ranging from
optimism to courage . . . you then get to integrate these principles
into your daily life through a series of self-assessment questionnaires
and a complete program of practical exercises. There were many memorable passages; among them:
[on how to read a Shakespeare play]
Each Shakespeare play offers a master class in emotional
intelligence and the lack thereof. As you read each play
approach it with the following questions in mind:
What can I learn from this play that will help me know myself better?
What can I learn from this play that will help me understand others better?
(It's useful to think of specific people you might wish to
understand better.) [Thomas Jefferson's ten-point plan for personal improvement]
1. Never put off til tomorrow what you can do today. (Jefferson rose
before sunrise each day to get a head start on his massive to-do lists.) 2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself. (Jefferson
believed in the spirit of personal as well as political independence
and thought that it began with the ability to solve one's own problems.) 3. Never spend your money before you have it. (Jefferson learned
this the hard way by violating this advice repeatedly and suffering
the consequences.) 4. Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap; it will be
dear to you. (Jefferson loved life and saw material objects as means
to experience rather than ends in themselves.) 5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold. (At the center
of power for many years, Jefferson witnessed the disastrous
effects of egotism and believing one's own publicity on many
powerful people.) 6. We never repent of having eaten too little. (Jefferson's
extraordinary vitality was in part a function of his healthy diet and
his practice of leaving the table before he was full.) 7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly. (As a natural
optimist, Jefferson was able to choose to see the best in all life's
circumstances. This was his way of saying, "To get what you
choose, choose what you've got.") 8. How much pain has cost us the evils which have never
happened. (Jefferson reminds us that worry is pointless. His
optimism helped protect him from anxiety about the future.) 9. Take things away by their smooth handle. (Jefferson was an
elegant mind with a talent for finding the path of least resistance.) 10. When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a
hundred. (As a man of the Enlightenment, Jefferson championed
the voice of reason and understood the great power of words to
cause harm as well as good.) [an exercise to help you think like Einstein]
In your notebook or on a piece of scrap paper, take two minutes
and write down as many uses as you possibly can for a paper clip. How many uses did you write down? Take the total number of
answers and divide by two to calculate your score in terms
of uses-per-minute. The international average score is four uses per minute. A score of
eight is excellent and a score of twelve or more correlates
significantly with other genius-level measures of idea generation
ability. Does the alternate use test creativity? Not really. It tests one's
comfort with free association, and free association is an important
aspect of the creative process.
Rating:
Summary: Inspiring and Educational
Review: Michael Gelb provides readers with insightful glimpses of ten of history's most important thinkers. Each person offers a particular characteristic that Gelb emphasizes to teach the reader how he/she can imitate the great ones.
His profiles of each person also give the reader brief biographies covering the highlights of their lives and contributions. These were enlightening for the people I was not familar with before and even for the ones I am very familar with like Shakespeare. Gelb brings out details that are new to me about the famous Bard that I thought I knew inside and out.
He also discusses their weaknesses, such as Einstein's undisciplined personal life that contrasted greatly with his ideas of an orderly universe.
This book prompted me to do some creative thinking of my own and I hope it gave me some long-lasting ideas about how to develop and utilize my own abilities.
Rating:
Summary: Engaging biographies and life-improving advice
Review: Much like Michael Gelb's brilliant "How to Think Like Leonardo DaVinci" this book succeeds in giving the reader engaging and informative biographies, while at the same time encouraging you to live and think like them. The book is written in an easy, conversational style that gives the reader the feeling that he/she is having a delightful talk with the writer about the world's greatest thinkers. Many times I have attempted to read up on geniuses like Plato, Darwin, and Ghandi with the intent of modeling my life after their examples, but I couldn't find the time to finish the marathon-length biographies I came across; "Discover Your Genius" is exactly what I was looking for--it gave me vast amounts of interesting information on each of the 10 geniuses and immediately showed me what I can do to improve myself with their examples. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever wondered what a genius is like and how you can enrich your life everyday by emulating them.
Rating:
Summary: Engaging biographies and life-improving advice
Review: Much like Michael Gelb's brilliant "How to Think Like Leonardo DaVinci" this book succeeds in giving the reader engaging and informative biographies, while at the same time encouraging you to live and think like them. The book is written in an easy, conversational style that gives the reader the feeling that he/she is having a delightful talk with the writer about the world's greatest thinkers. Many times I have attempted to read up on geniuses like Plato, Darwin, and Ghandi with the intent of modeling my life after their examples, but I couldn't find the time to finish the marathon-length biographies I came across; "Discover Your Genius" is exactly what I was looking for--it gave me vast amounts of interesting information on each of the 10 geniuses and immediately showed me what I can do to improve myself with their examples. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever wondered what a genius is like and how you can enrich your life everyday by emulating them.
Rating:
Summary: Discover Your Genius by Gelb
Review: The author discusses various aspects of intelligence utilizing
the behavioral dimensions of historical personalities. For instance, Plato spoke of wisdom in a universalist context.
Brunelleschi demonstrated how to expand the human perspective
to encompass more possibilities. Einstein unleashed the imagination using mathematics and theoretical physics. Copernicus
showed how the revolution of the time could become global in nature. A good technique is to keep the pen moving so that
a stream of consciousness can be documented before any of its
contents are lost. The work is a solid value for students of
the intellect, theoretical sciences and philosophers.
Rating: 
Summary: These 10 are good. But, not as good as Leonardo
Review: This book seems like a sequel of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. And, this other book is superior to this one. Michael Gelb did a more cohesive and detailed job of fleshing out the cognitive faculties of the mind by studying Leonardo, than he did by studying this Dream Team. Occasionally, the exercises appear a bit repetitive, boring, and uninspiring. If I had not read this other book, I would have said that this book is great. Instead, it is very good. Michael Gelb touches on the same subjects, concepts, and exercises as in 'Leonardo.'
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