Genius Needs Double the Self-Discipline
What does genius look like?
For the longest time, I thought of a genius as a person burried in their thoughts, behind a huge desk burried in papers. They’re constantly absent minded, and not paying attention to what’s going on around them. Their brain is jumping around from one thought to another and back again a thousand times a minute.
But that vision sucks. Genius shouldn’t mean you disconnect from this world completely, and rely on other people to support you while you solve “big problems”. It especially shouldn’t mean your mind is incapable of focusing on a specific problem for an extended period of time.
As a matter of fact, if you’re not an eccentric professor with students worshipping your every move, it’s probably impossible to live this “genius lifestyle”. For people with gifts of above average intelligence, they’ve got to figure out a way to relate to the rest of the world in a meaningful way. One that challenges them without boring them.
For intelligent people, solving difficult problems is how to give back to the world. Flipping burgers won’t cut it, and neither will empire builing. Finding and solving difficult problems the world needs solved will ensure a better future, and a greater financial power for you to solve more problems.
But the process of finding the right problems to focus on can get an intelligent person stuck. They realize that time spent finding the right problem guarantees the most effective results. So they get stuck in a loop of looking for the right problem. Or, once they’ve found it, they begin to work on it, find an even more important problem and move onto it.
They constantly start solutions, work them out in their heads, but rarely see them through in the real world.
It’s the genius’ curse. They finish problems much quicker than they can be translated into the real world. By the time a solution is 50% completed in the real world they’re already bored and moving on to the next problem.
The Solution: Being doubly intelligent means you need to develop double the self-discipline to break even.
Smart people are less efficient with their time because of the constant distraction of side-thoughts. The professor with his cluttered desk only enhances his propensity for side-thoughts and distraction while working. He would be better off breaking his time into chunks of hyperfocus.
By chunks of hyperfocus, I mean devoting chunks of time (at least and hour and a half) to accomplishing a specific task. Breaking things down into chunks makes staying on task a whole lot easier, and boosts your productivity exponentially.
So for the professor, he should clear his desk completely and shut his door. Then speed read the material for a specific problem for an hour and a half, one page at a time. And focus only on the information being processed. Then, take a break to let the material “sit”. Finallly, do an hour of eyes closed, no distraction concentration on while working the problem out. If the problem is too complex to be solved visually in your head, solve it with a pen and paper. Make drawings, make diagrams, make mental maps, whatever works for your specific brain. It sounds like a lot of work, but again, the quality of your solutions will rise exponentially, and the time necessary to get hyperfocused will be less and less.
If you don’t understand the idea of hyperfocus, a good way to get started is by picking up Drawing on the right side of the Brain
Athletes at a professional level already know what hyperfocus feels like. When they reach a professional level, they’re consistently pushing the human body to its limits. If they had the same level of focus they had when they began their chosen sport, they’d be hurt all the time. It is only because they’ve developed a higher level of focus that they can compete without injury.
If you’re not an athlete or a visual person, and do better with words, just devote an hour and a half to writing about your problem. Start out by writing a question, “What is the problem I’m trying to solve?” Then just start writing. When you’ve found out what it is, ask, “How do I solve this?” Let the words come and don’t try to force a solution right away. Keep writing and the solution will come.
You will probably have problems getting hyperfocused at first. But stick with it. Even the smallest increas in your level of focus while working will pay off in the long run.
Related Posts:
