All kids are born geniuses, but are crushed by society. — Michio Kaku

All kids are born geniuses, but are crushed by society.

Author: Michio Kaku

Insight: Most of us remember that feeling from childhood—the urge to take things apart, ask endless questions, see patterns others missed. Kids genuinely do operate with a kind of unconstrained creativity. They haven't yet learned which questions are "supposed" to matter or which ideas are "impractical." Then something shifts. We get grades, rankings, feedback loops that reward certain types of thinking and penalize others. The system isn't evil; it's just built to sort and standardize. But that sorting comes with a real cost. The surprising part isn't that society shapes us—that's inevitable. It's that we often internalize these limits so thoroughly we forget they were ever choices at all. An adult who loves puzzles might never try engineering because they decided years ago they weren't "math people." Someone artistic avoids writing because they got a mediocre grade on an essay. We don't just follow the rules; we become convinced the rules reflect actual boundaries of who we are. The point isn't nostalgia for childhood or dismantling all structure. It's recognizing that many of us are still working within constraints we accepted without question. That creative impulse you had at eight? It didn't disappear. It just got quiet. Paying attention to what still pulls at you—what questions still feel worth asking—might be the most useful thing you can recover.

Source: The Future of Humanity, p. 183, 2018