I've now and then been called a visionary. What does this mean, for the term is nebulous and amorphous. It certainly has something to do with envisioning the future. Leaders have many times been so described, but a brilliant and timely idea leading to something monumental is also worthy. Is a visionary born or created? Read an article from The Atlantic. Can you become one?
Visionaries early in time seemed more into religion and art. Jesus Christ? Leonardo da Vinci for sure. More recently, business leaders like Steve Jobs would make this list. SyfyWire selected 25 most visionary visionaries of the last 25 years. Aside from the movie types, you won't recognize too many of them. Steven King, a visionary?
Forbes cites four visionaries of particular import: Vannevar Bush, Marshall McLuhan, Richard Feynman and Tim Berners-Lee. There's a book, Top 10 Visionaries that Changed the World, by George Ilian. 
There's one female to the left. If you want more, here is CNN's recognition, with ten more, and if you even recognize one, you're really into this.
You look around your life, and how many of the people you have ever known can be considered to be a true visionary? Few, if any. One in a thousand? Million? Billion?
Around the world, 2% of the population end up with doctorates. Would this be closer to the rate for visionaries? A more likely percentage of visionaries would, I think, be somewhere between 0.002% and 2%. Even at the lower percentage, there would then be 15,000 visionaries on Planet Earth today.
- #1 225 Johan Goethe
- #2 220 Isaac Newton
- #3 215 Albert Einstein
- #7 200 Leonardo da Vinci
- #11 195 Aristotle
- #11 195 Galileo Galilei
- #19 195 Nikola Tesla
- #27 190 Erwin Schrodinger
- #27 190 Friedrich Nietzsche
- #27 190 Archimedes
- #27 190 Thomas Jefferson
- #27 190 William Shakespeare
- #47 185 Richard Feynman
- #47 185 Thomas Edison
- #86 180 Stephen Hawking
- #86 180 Charles Darwin
- #86 180 Napoleon Bonaparte
- 263 Ainan Celeste Cawley (19, right): from Singapore, so too young yet
- 250-300 William James Sidis: passed away in 1944
- 225-230 Terence Tao (48): he has won the Fields Medal, which is significant in math
IQs of people you know:
- Warren Buffet 145
- George W. Bush 124
- Mariah Carey 95
- Jimmy Carter 153
- Madonna 140
- Hillary Clinton 140 (yes, Hillary is smarter than Bill, but not by much)
- Bill Clinton 137
- Cooper Anderson 123
- Francis Coppola 117
- Tom Cruise 125
- Matt Damon 160
- Snoop Dogg 147
- Dwight Eisenhower 122
- Brett Favre 104
- Gerald Ford 121
- Al Franken 110
- Benjamin Franklin 160
- John Wayne 118
- Lady Gaga 166 (wow)
- Bill Gates 180 (wow)
- Al Gore 134
- David Hasselhoff 73
- Adolf Hitler 141
- Steve Jobs 160
- Angelina Jolie 120
- Michael Jordan 154
- Gary Kasparov 192
- John F. Kennedy 119
- Alicia Keys 154
- Kris Kristofferson 154
- Aston Kutcher 160
- Jay Leno 110
- David Letterman 120
- Rush Limbaugh 137
- Dolph Lundgren 160
- Peyton Manning 116
- Jayne Mansfield 163
- Charles Manson 109
- Dan Marino 92
- Marilyn Monroe 168 (never would have guessed)
- Benjamin Netanyahu 180 (wow)
- Conan O'Brien 160
- Michelle Obama 115 (surprising)
- Barack Obama 145 (smart)
- Shaq O'Neill 101
- Katy Perry 115 (she is so articulate on American Idol)
- Brad Pitt 115
- Ronald Reagan 105 (hmmm)
- Seth Rogan 110
- Bernie Sanders 119 (he surely sounds smarter)
- OJ Simpson 89
- Sylvester Stallone 160
- Howard Stern 99 (he, too, is so articulate)
- Meryl Streep 143
- Quentin Tarantino 160
- Alex Trebek 143
- Donald Trump 156 (hey, he's not an idiot, at least in terms of IQ)
- George Washington 118
- Mark Zuckerberg 152
Sorry, had to continue, for some of the above certainly shocked me. How authentic are they? Don't know.
So what is a visionary? Characteristics of a visionary leader:
- imagination
- big-picture oriented
- focused and present
- open minded and fan of new ideas
- positive energizer
- never afraid of failure
- ability to share and communicate the dream/vision
Hey, that's me. However, visionaries don't just try to predict the future...they create it. Here I've failed, miserably. So I'm not a visionary, yet. Here are some of my ideas:
So maybe someday I'll attain visionary status.
That was me, but how do YOU become a visionary?
- get born reasonably smart
- follow those attributes of most visionary leaders
- travel (my blog tomorrow will explain why)
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