This particular thread is one of the most interesting to me… i don’t think i’ll be able to resist rambling in raja-rant style!
No worries: genius itself is a myth, because a genius is simply perceived as being such by those who wish they could’ve grown into that particular uniqueness within that specific time. Decades later, the ‘genius’ of that same genius is often considered commonplace knowledge.
I started learning music when i was 3 on the piano via the ‘Suzuki method’
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_method ).
Particularly the idea of learning music by ear stuck with me. Later when i was a teenager i took up guitar and my teacher noticed I had a knack for picking up guitar solos by ear, so he encouraged it more and more(B.B. King, Django, Robert Johnson, Stevie Ray, etc.). I played and played til i got tendonitis(first traumatic change of my musician life… which led me to electronic music).
Nowadays with electronic music it definitely still comes into play, I write most of it by ear, but recently, even max patches/software comes out by ear.
Same thing happens when i use synths, particularly more complex ones(all comes from playing with patchable hardware synths and looking at some of the basic techniques in software environs like Max and SuperCollider… gaining familiarity with how the basic building-block techniques work, like words that make up a sentence).
Basically, if you really want to hear something in your head, it could be that it might start with listening to music and attempting to imitate it: because that’s how your ear trains to recognize the math of sound, same as how your tongue learns to speak the math of a language… all about familiarity with what’s possible and shaping it into something new or old from there. I say ‘math’ not in a number-crunching way, but because it’s a bit like saying that mathematical understanding is akin to any rationally organized familiarity with experiences you’ve already had.
But it’s nothing to be worried about if you don’t do this… more modern music starts from a different kind of intuition: moving through process, or using ‘The Power of Now’ so to speak 
(whereas hearing music in your head and then composing it from that prepared point-of-view is a bit like living in the past… or at least, that’s the way it feels to me personally).
I had to retrain my brain a bit in order to experiment with more of that newer kind of music, as it does afford a different perspective from which to learn newer forms of musical expression and sometimes makes it easier to work with newer, more multifaceted forms of technology too.
I’d say learning different techniques is important overall, so you can work from a place of having the most options to draw from.
Recently, I’ve fallen into a deep, dark, depression(don’t worry, though, i won’t go into it, instead, i’m setting up for the final positive take-away in my statements here 
), and my mother, so worried about me, gave me a bunch of gemstones to meditate on(she’s into some ancient Hindu hocus-pocus 
). As I meditated with gemstones in hand, a new insight dawned on me: the way in which gemstones(like diamonds) convey light energy through them in order to sparkle is alot like the human mind, heart, body, and action can transduce all kinds of energy from the universe into an overall experience that sparkles with an individuality recognized by everyone else as being the personality of that specific life. We cut the raw matter of our lives from the way in which we experience and familiarize ourselves with all the other lives around us, and form it into a specific shape which conveys the energy of the universe to everyone else in a way that is specific to us; how you learn to express yourself is completely up to you and that’s what gives you that specific sparkle.
(<-put another way: we’re all beautiful and unique snowflakes or some cheesy shit like that, nyahahahahahaha 
)
