Genius is one of my favorite ideas to work with.
It's a very powerful frame to simultaneously connect to an internal source of power and confidence and direction. And it’s crucial for working with the future. It's a great concept for individuals, and it's just as useful for thinking about teams, products, and companies.
One of my highest values for myself and for the Comma Club is "always learning and growing." For me as a coach and a leader, part of that means always learning and growing in my understanding of concepts and models and frameworks for development. And that means that my sense of what "genius" means, how it works, and what it's "made of" is always in an ongoing evolution.
Because of this, I've had some interesting insights around "genius" over the last few years. Since they are starting to come into a shareable shape, I wanted to share some updated thinking on the concept of "genius" itself, and some new ideas on how to work with the concept.
Genius, Meaning, and Destiny
Comma Club is all about living intentionally and choosing your path. Getting clear on desires, setting goals, and achieving them. We tie these all to our values and make the whole vision all coherent with the purpose we've identified for ourselves.
But there's another sense of purpose to connect to. And the need for it comes up a lot these days, when it's so easy to feel disconnected from the big picture and the story of the world.
In times like these, we feel drawn to something like how the Greek myths talked about destiny, something more like "what did I come here to do?" Not what you were "destined" to do, as though it's preordained, but "destined to do" because it's what your values and unique combination of gifts and capabilities seem to point to.
You can reflect and think about:
"I am who I am, knowledgeable and skilled in the ways I am. And I value what I value.
When I consider together what matters to me, in my life and in the world, and the things I know and am good at, it suggests that maybe what I'm here to do is…."
What it comes down to is that thinking about your purpose, values, and genius together like this can guide you to understanding the contribution to the big picture you're best suited to make. So many people, even people of faith, are so hungry for this kind of personal meaning and sense of how they can contribute to the world. This is a powerful path directly to it. It's especially useful at moments in life when you're trying to reorient or set a new course: career change, midlife, reaching financial independence, retiring from daily work, and more.
Opening up the language around "genius"
Because we're looking at genius in relation to these other powerful mental energies, making some distinctions can unlock more interpretations. And more insightful ones.
The classic way we talk about genius is that it’s what you're effortlessly brilliant at. But when we look at genius in a more profound way, as a way to think about how we might contribute most to the world we want to see, it helps to take apart and open up how we usually talk about it.
It may be that it seems effortless to work in your genius. But maybe it doesn't. Maybe you love the effort, the challenge, overcoming the difficulty or the odds. Effortlessness may not come into it at all. Maybe it always feels very hard but very rewarding.
Whatever the case, your genius is the thing that you can bring to the world—to a relationship, project, team, company, and so forth—in a special way. Maybe you're just plain better at it than anyone else. Maybe no one does it quite like you.
Genius unlocks future focus
So we’re considering genius with an eye toward destiny or contribution to the story of the world. One of the best things about this approach is that it helps clear up something I have often seen when people are first trying to define their genius: the sense that there's a "right answer," a genius you "ought to" have.
Maybe it’s what other people seem to be good at, or famous or widely admired people are famous for. Hoping, fantasizing, trying to keep up, wanting to take someone else's style. Sometimes people want to reverse engineer their work role into their genius. They define their genius as though they're responding to a job description. Maybe from a wish to prove to themselves or others that they're in the right place, they belong, and are especially suited to what they do.
It is definitely valuable to do work to establish personal confidence that you are where you should be. But genius isn't about something you aspire to. It's not about anything that you aren't. It's about something you are, on a deep enough level that you can count on it for the foreseeable future.
Because one of the practical reasons I have people define their genius is to put them in touch with something that feels unique and “theirs.” Something to tap into and pull from and use as a northstar. Thinking about yourself as a unique person with a unique offering for the world, which in turn, tells you how you can expect to connect to others and the world. Having real, accurate, high-confidence answers to questions like:
Who am I?
What do I have to offer?
What is my place in the world?
What do I want to do here?
Is something most people don't have. And it stops them from thinking about the future in a practical way. Which cuts off working with goals effectively. Why? Because they imagine too many possibilities, and too many generic possibilities.
When you answer these questions, you focus your mind and you focus your energy. And you can focus clearly enough to set goals and paths to goals in a way that will actually work.
Self-knowledge and genius
We're not interested in talking about genius like it's something to aspire to. We're most interested in genius as a fact. That means that we're interested in accurate self-knowledge.
Sometimes we don’t want to know about ourselves. This interferes with understanding and working with our genius.
Sometimes it’s just a simple matter of words and definitions. Sometimes it's a tricky mental/emotional block. And sometimes a nuanced confusion pops up between working with information and feedback from others and making them responsible for how you define yourself.
Walter Payton said something like, "When you're good at something, you'll tell everyone. When you're great at something, they'll tell you." When it comes to knowing what you're particularly great at, the unsolicited feedback of those who know you, and know your abilities, is very powerful.
The flip side of this is when someone is always promoting a story or image of themselves with others. This is a strong indicator that they're not in touch with self-knowledge about their capabilities and worth. They need someone to tell them. Often.
Sometimes a person like this just needs to do a little reflection. Other times, it's part of a deeper set of issues.
Lacking self-knowledge is normal. Even after we've learned about ourselves, we will change and need to dig back in to understand who we are now. That's the kind of work we do in Comma Club.
But leaving self-knowledge up to others doesn’t work. And it is often a sign that someone doesn’t trust the endeavor to know themselves. They may have shame and think that self-knowledge will just make them feel bad. They may have some other mental/emotional wires crossed.
Whatever the case, avoiding self-knowledge is something people can spend years and lots of energy on. You see it often in coaching at advanced levels. People want to do development work, they want better results, but they get stuck at a plateau. Ultimately, it turns out that the logjam is caused by avoiding self-knowledge. Not wanting to know. Avoiding honest reflection.
This is one way to say it, and how people tend to talk about it. But the psyche is strange. Often, they already know, at least on some level, what they don't want to know, or don't want to admit, or don't want someone else to know. They might even be able to say something about it in a safe environment like with a coach. But something stops them from really accepting the knowledge in a way that lets them work with it.
Breakthroughs in situations like this are always amazing. You have the privilege of watching someone have insight they have spent energy avoiding for maybe 20, 30, 40 years. You watch a very heavy burden leave them, and you can see their eyes seem to take in more possibilities from a wider vista.
This is as good a time as any to say that whenever someone only values other-approval and doesn't value their own self-knowledge, it will prevent any meaningful development. Because all growth starts with the truth.
Other people are a powerful source of feedback, perspective, and advice, and they help ground us in the universal experience, even as they show us the range of individual experience.
But you know something's up if someone has given up the responsibility of knowing themselves best and leaving it up to others to define them.
In sync with your destiny
When your genius and your story are pointed in the same direction, something shifts. Effort seems more meaningful. Your motivation runs deeper. Your results speak for themselves. Genius isn't a destination. It's something you keep discovering, keep refining, keep learning to work with more skillfully. That's true for individuals, and it's true for teams and companies too. Which is why it's one of my favorite ideas to keep coming back to. I hope you’ll make some interesting discoveries about your genius, and I hope to hear about them.
Cheers,
Dave
Reflection: Getting a new sense of your genius
So with all of this in mind, think about your genius. Think of the words you use, and think of what you mean. Try to bring up the feeling of being in your genius. Visualize times you know you've been working in it. Make some notes about all of this, just to get your eyes and body into it a bit more.
Think about activities you love, the accomplishments, achievements, contributions you made that mean the most to you. Look at the moments when you felt most alive in your work. What do people come to you for, want your unique input into? Those moments are full of information.
What do I want my story to be? What are my real dreams? Not just dreams that sound good or make sense, but dreams that actually belong to me. How do I want to contribute to the story of the world?