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. There are exercises in the book designed to help you understand what hyperfocus feels like by drawing. For people who learn best visually, there is no better place to start.

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.

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Getting things done is impossible without the motivation to do so. Most people have enough motivation to pay their bills and keep a roof over their heads. A lucky few seem to have unlimited motivation to create and do awesome things with their lives, taking years off to travel, starting businesses, and creating and participating in meaningful work.

So what gives the lucky few the extra motivation to do so much more?

First off, there is no such thing as “extra motivation” from the people who get more. Take the single mother, about to get evicted from her home. Does she not have more motivation than the guy who’s a millionaire and works three hours a day? Rather than the amount of motivation, successs in life is determined by the type of motivation that drives us.

Let’s look closer at the two different types of motivation, and how we can incorporate the better one into our lives.

First, let’s take the employee’s motivation. They work only when being told what to do, and stop when done. This type of person is motivated primarily by survival, focusing only on immediate needs. How to pay the mortgage, stop feeling so lonely, get over being sick, whatever. This is the wrong way to look at life; this is a “negative” motivation. This viewpoint looks at the world, and says “I have to do (x), because if I don’t I’ll suffer these consequences”. By doing so, they are constantly looking at the world asking where things are going to come from.

On the other hand, there’s the entrepreneur mentality. These type of people are motivated by a desire to create what doesn’t yet exist. These people rarely think of their own survival, and instead focus on what they can create and give back. I call them “positively” motivated people, because their motivation comes from a primary need to help provide what’s needed. This subtle difference in motivation creates huge rewards.

Nothing great is ever created by someone with negative motivation. It’s a viewpoint that does just enough to dodge the negative consequences and then gets distracted. With positive motivation there’s an unlimited amount of focus to create what must be created. Positive motivation has no deadline, only a level of quality and a quantity to the people it helps. Positive motivation is where the world’s greatest books, businesses, architectures, and people come from. Ideas and concepts that span the test of time are only created when we ask what’s missing.

It’s a scary mindset to adapt to, especially if you’ve come from a background of negative motivation. I know I sure did.

For me, the conscious adoption of a positive primary motivation started on the 7th of December (2006). Months of work on my website weren’t producing the amount of visitors I needed, and something needed to change. So I decided to start giving away my web business ideas, write an article a day on what I thought would change somebody’s life for the better. I did this mostly out of frustration.

Within a week traffic to my website doubled, and revenue quadrupled.

I was ecstatic. I started making projections of how much I would be making in a year, two years, and I just got so excited to keep giving back. So I continued doing what I started, and soon my traffic started going back down again. I panicked after a few days and spent two days focused on promoting my website to other people instead of creating what I thought the world needed. My traffic went down further still.Then I had an “Aha!” moment. I realized I was just circling back down into the negative motivation. By focusing primarily on promotion, it’s impossible to create a site anyone would ever want to be loyal to. Ultimately, providing value to the world is how things grow. Not by telling others their worth. This post is my makeup for falling off track.

So how can you apply positive motivation to your life?

First ask yourself, “What would I give to the world if I knew everything else is taken care of?”

Then, take the time to let the power of a fundamentally positive motivation sink in. It took me hundreds of times of hearing it for it to sink in, but you have no reason to be as inattentive as me. Grasp the fact that we can look at the world in two ways: asking where things are going to come from; or asking what we can give. Realize that giving and creating is the only way we’ll ever live in a world we want. (Both for ourselves and the people around us.)

Finally, realize the path of positive motivation is more difficult, at least in the short term. We don’t see instant results like people who are motivated by shallow, negative motivation do. We come from a higher calling, and it’s not necessarily instantly rewarded. Patience is a fundamental part of being positively motivated.

Remember, if you steer off course, don’t beat yourself up. Just notice that you went off course or slipped up, fix it, and move on. Beating yourself up will only cause you to fall back into the negative motivation trap all over again.

So what are you waiting for? Start giving now.

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