> Yet talent is unequally distributed. Some innovators (like Edison, or Newton, or Kelvin) are simply better than others. But if genius is not jumping ahead of the inevitable, where do the "greats" fit in? Simonton discovered that the higher the prominence of a scientist (as determined by the number of pages their biography occupies in encyclopedias) the greater number of simultaneous discoveries they are involved with. Kelvin was involved in 30 sets of simultaneous discoveries. Great discovers not only contribute more than the average number of "next" steps, but are heavily involved in those steps that have greatest impact, which naturally are the areas of investigation that attract many other players, and so produce multiples. If discovery is a lottery, the great buy lots of tickets.
You can control your environment if you see and understand its connections. Whatever Jobs saw and understood enabled him to create Apple, NeXT, and Pixar, and ultimately build Apple back to the most valuable technology company in the world.
The thing Jobs and Einstein had in common was an insatiable curiosity that helped them get to a place where they could see the world in a way that few others do. Jobs saw the connections between technology and humanities and relentlessly worked toward making his vision reality.
Einstein became a genius because he would relentlessly explore a problem, following it out farther than anyone had taken it before. This allowed him to see how the universe connects in a way that no one had seen before, and his discoveries were valuable to humanity.
Getting to these rare perspectives is usually a product of building up a mental framework and then seeing patterns in- and making associations or connections among seemingly unrelated phenomena. True genius is seeing associations among things previously unseen. A high IQ gives you more ability to build the mental framework needed to see these associations, and a genius has actually applied it.