A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius — the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’ — it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene.’
— Brian Eno
Extremely successful people benefit from the scenius within which they get to operate. But as that context changes and evolves over time, they fail to recreate their earlier wild successes — not because they lost any of their skills (although that can also happen), but because the skills aren’t sufficient, and the deep, layered conditions that enabled those wild successes just aren’t there anymore.
Actually, very interesting idea.