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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This year was a very successful one for a group of my friends. Their band got picked up by a major label, they’re touring with a band they grew up admiring, and they’re getting more success every day. I spent a good bit of time with them on tour this year, and it made me realize the real danger and temptation of living through other people.

See, each of us live through someone (or something) to an extent. It may be a child, a lover, a friend, or even a job or a TV show. Either way, you’re letting someone else’s work give purpose to your life, instead of taking the time to find your own. You’re setting yourself up for a fall.

Stop Living Through Others

Nobody else wants to be in charge of your life. Giving yourself over to a cause (or a person) is the quickest way to get taken advantage of. No matter how good the cause, nobody is ever going to magically give you a direction you’ll be happy with. It’s something you’ve got to discover for yourself.

Vicarious living happens a lot in relationships. One partner is successful or extremely gifted, and the other decides to live to enhance and facilitate the other’s gift without developing their own gifts. The “gifted” partner is under constant pressure to produce from the one who doesn’t, and when he or she does, the other feels as though they can take some credit. Round and round they go, until the gifted partner decides they don’t need the “ungifted” anymore, and that’s where the “ungifted” suffers big time.

See, they never developed their own gifts, figured that was too difficult. But nobody is ever going to develop our gifts for us. We’ve got to get out there, figure what they are (by ourselves), and start working on them every day. The universe “owes” them nothing, because they were already born with everything they needed – the tools to become successful or gifted themselves. Because they chose the path of worshipping someone else’s gifts instead of pursuing their own, they’re destined to suffer the consequences.

Not taking the time to find and develop your own gifts should be illegal. But most people don’t do it anyways, and instead decide to seek out people who do, and latch onto them. But that person owes you nothing. You can undergo the same difficult growing process they went through, only on your own. You may do it slower, but you can still do it.

This is why I think it’s so important for kids to take a year off to travel between high school and college. If that’s out of the question, then between college and career. It becomes so much more difficult to take a year off for yourself later.

Discover Your Own Gifts

Long term travel is the best way to find out your gifts. But most people think it’s only for the rich, or people with huge savings. Let me be the first to tell you, taking a year off to travel doesn’t necessarily have to cost a million billion dollars. I took my entire first year off after high school for under $2,000. I moved to Costa Rica, began volunteering, and got my room and board paid for. I spent very little money in an entire year, and when I decided I wanted to back to the United States, I still had enough left to ride a bus up through Central America. I got to see every country in Central America after a year’s stay. It was a great gift, and it made me realize how lucky I was to have been born in a first world country. It also made me realize how brave the people who come to the United States illegally really are. It’s a hell of a trip to make; a human life is worth a whole lot less in most of those countries.

But after I left, I really had no clue how I could make my travel keep paying for itself. Sure, I could volunteer in one spot long enough, but then what about the cost of a flight to another country? I couldn’t really earn it working in that country, that’s illegal and very sketchy in corrupt governments. It also sucked to come back home and save money. I now realize the solution is the internet.

Technology has improved 100 fold since my time in the jungle. Even the smallest countries have an internet café; and if you can write in English, you can run a website successful enough to pay you to travel around the world. Just write stuff people want to read about, build a readership, and then put advertisements on your site.

You may have to start with a time of volunteering while you get your website up and running, but that’s really no problem. There are plenty of great organizations that will put you up with room and board in exchange for a few hours work every day. At the most, building a profitable website will take you six months. Just save up enough to go where you want to live, volunteer for six months, and write something of value every day. If you’re a horrible writer, take the time to become a great one. Post to your website daily or weekly for six months, and eventually you’ll have a large enough readership to pay you to travel around the world. On a budget, yes, but you’ll be seeing the world nonetheless.

You’ll also develop into a much more complete human being than you ever thought possible. Seeing different cultures firsthand is a quick way to learn compassion, and to understand the shortcomings of your own culture. By stepping outside of the environment you were raised in, you allow yourself to grow beyond it. That’s one thing people who never leave their home country can’t do.

The tools to do it are all there. But very few people ever really take the plunge. It seems so much safer to do what society tells us to, but how rewarding are 40 hour work weeks, really? I’d much rather take my chances with personal discovery than wait for the world to produce more people for me to worship.

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