Commoners usually can’t recognize the true Genius because what he’s doing is so far advanced that he’s miles away from the rest of us. In fact the true genius does not even recognize his own work as genius because it’s more often than not rejected by the masses.  He just keeps doing it because the work matters to him.

We finally come to see the genius as he is because when we view the entire body of work it dawns on us that this person has left us better off than we were before, and suddenly his work matters to us because nothing before his work was like it, but everything after him bears his mark.

Although the true genius is hard to spot, we can easily spot the imposter – he’s the one calling himself a genius, brilliant, or something akin.