International Handbook on Giftedness

If you publish... you are trying to create something thatisoriginal,thatstandsoutfromthecrowd...Above all, you want to create something you are proud of... Richard Branson (2002, p. 57). After the publication of my bestselling International Handbook on Innovation, p- lishers from around the world began to invite me to work on new books with them. When Springer invited me to prepare the International Handbook on Giftedness,I was on a maternity leave with my 3-months-old and my 5-year-old was just starting school. I, however, had wanted to prepare such a Handbook for a long time and was waiting for just the right moment to dive right into such an endeavor. The time had come and I agreed to prepare a Handbook that would expose readers to new views, great discoveries, and signi?cant advancements of scienti?c knowledge, exactly as Richard Feynman advised (see his opening quote at the beginning of the introductory chapter). I have always been convinced of the paramount signi?cance of the topic of gi- edness and gifted education to the world as a whole. There is no doubt that gifted individuals were, are, and will be extremely important to society. One way to und- stand the history of human civilization is via inventions and discoveries of the gifted. All human cultural development builds on the amazing technological, scienti?c, e- cational, and moral achievements of the human mind. Today, people increasingly realize that gifted and talented individuals are even more important than in the past.