DAY 11
Discover Your Inner Genius

‘Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.’

—Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist

TODAY’S ALL ABOUT playing to your strengths, because when you focus on what you’re great at you can create something really valuable for others and, as we saw on Day 9, VALUE is the building block of a successful business.

So today we’re going to uncover your inner genius. Yes, I know the G-word is a little contentious. But did you know that until the seventeenth century, ‘genius simply meant an innate ability, inclination or disposition? It was only later that the word came to mean something exceptional, excluded from the experience of the ordinary mortal.

When we think of genius today, we think of Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie or Jane Austen. This is a tough benchmark to measure ourselves against.

The education system doesn’t help with its narrow definition of talent. Anything that wasn’t deemed useful in an academic setting (or in a conventional corporate job) pretty much gets ignored as a talent – making people laugh, charming others into seeing your way, negotiating, inspiring people, imagining new possibilities, being creative, being good with your hands. This is why inventor and innovative thinker Buckminster Fuller said that, ‘Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.’

And once you get into the world of work you find that too often companies downplay the uniqueness of employees’ talents in order to maintain the belief that we are easily exchangeable. It’s no wonder so many of us have a hard time thinking of ourselves as talented, let alone a genius.

Warren Buffett is the world’s most successful investor with a net worth of $67 billion and has gifted over $37 billion to charity. He’s known for ignoring trends to try to make a quick buck and, instead, investing in companies based on their real value, holding their shares over the long term. And he steers clear of any company he doesn’t easily understand. Many consider Buffett a genius but he has a very interesting take on his own talents as he explained to Forbes in 2010:

There’s a whole bunch of things I don’t know a thing about. I just stay away from those. I stay within what I call my circle of competence. [IBM founder] Tom Watson said it best. He said, ‘I’m no genius, but I’m smart in spots, and I stay around those spots.’

Buffett built a multibillion-dollar fortune on his smart spots, his spots of genius. What can you do with yours?

Even if you are not Einstein or Da Vinci, we all have ‘spots of genius’

Give yourself an unfair advantage

Finding and using your spots of genius is one of the most important things you could ever do, because these spots are where you can create the greatest value, have the greatest impact and reap the greatest rewards.

Finding your genius spots can be challenging though. We often miss them or underestimate their importance for the very same reason they are valuable: they are easy for us. In psychology this is called ‘unconscious competence’ – you’re so practised at something it has become second nature.

We underappreciate our own skills and talents for the same reason they are valuable: these things are easy for us

There are two kinds of genius spots we’re looking for, both valuable in their own way. Firstly, there are the practical skills and knowledge we’ve built over several years in our professional career (or sometimes in our personal lives). We’ll look at those in a moment but the second type of genius spot is more easily missed. These are the skills and talents that are a core part of who you are because you’ve been doing them in some form all your life.

To find these natural strengths, we have to broaden our scope way beyond the narrow range of skills and talents that appear on a CV or résumé: connecting with new people, observing the natural world, seeing the patterns behind a situation, understanding technology, explaining complex concepts, getting the best price on everything, throwing a great party. Often these will be things you enjoy doing and you’ve been doing in some form since childhood.

Take a moment now to think of five natural strengths or talents and write them down. You can include personality traits in your favour. Don’t just pick the socially accepted ones – include things like ‘stubbornness’ and ‘incredibly good taste’. Also include activities or topics you’ve been fascinated by and immersed in for years.

Do something for long enough and it forms structures in your brain. That means your brain is literally wired differently; you see things others can’t see and find meaning that others can’t identify. Your way of seeing the world is unique but to you it’s just ‘seeing’. What could be more ordinary? What could be special about that? And yet you’re one in seven billion. Your unique experience is a special lens you can’t remove; you’ve never seen the world without it. If you can put these natural strengths to good use in your project you give yourself an unfair advantage.

Use your spots of genius to give yourself an unfair advantage

Put your skills and knowledge to good use

Aside from your natural talents, the more you can use skills and knowledge you’ve developed from your previous career (or from many years of personal experience), the faster you’ll be able to create value.

If you don’t enjoy your current work you might be tempted to wipe the slate clean and invent a new career that uses nothing from your old career. If you do that you will have a long road ahead of you before you create something of real value (and therefore be able to make money from it). Generally, the more skills and knowledge you can carry into your new project the shorter the time until you can get paid for it.

Just because you’re not enjoying your current job doesn’t mean you should throw away the skills you’ve spent years developing – particularly if you would enjoy using them in the right situation. If you’re sick of software development in a bank but you still love coding, use it in a different environment – create an app, teach coding to kids or simply use your general tech skills in something that really excites you. If you hate your sales job but you know you would still enjoy using your skills in communication, relationship building and persuasion, if it was for something you really cared about, take advantage of them in your project.

How Rik Spruyt used his genius to launch a global business network in 30 days

RIK SPRUYT HAD a good job in international logistics based in Beijing but he had always wanted to start something of his own. Having lived and worked in China for the past six years and Africa for seven before that, he was particularly interested in the burgeoning trade between Africa and Asia – currently $300 billion a year.

So he joined my mentorship programme and started work on a membership network to connect logistics companies in Africa with those in the rest of the world, particularly Asia and Europe. He created a website on WordPress and reached out to his personal network to invite them to join for an introductory annual membership fee of $2000. Within 30 days he had a membership website set up and his first paying member. CrossTrades was born.

Given Rik’s good standing in the industry, he continued to pull in major players across the world. And while in the early days there wouldn’t be that many others for people to connect with, Rik promised personal attention to these ‘charter members’ to help them find contacts and do more business.

Before long CrossTrades had 50 members. One year later the membership is on track to reach 120 members and Rik recently held the first global CrossTrades conference in Johannesburg. The results have been remarkable, with members winning multi-million-dollar contracts through the network. Now Rik has attracted investment in CrossTrades from inside the network and a commission deal on future business development.

Check out Rik’s business at www.crosstrades.net.

What if my project is something completely new for me?

Hopefully you’ve chosen a project that at least suits your natural personality traits and strengths. If it’s also something that can use skills and knowledge you’ve built up over many years (even if in a different field or environment) then you’re in for a relatively short game. But if your project doesn’t use any of your hard-earned skills and experience, realise it will be a much longer game.

Do you want to play a short game or a long game? The choice is yours; just make it consciously and be honest with yourself. If you choose to build your project around an emerging talent, you’ll be in for a longer game because you will need to invest the time to get good at it. But you won’t be starting from scratch if you’re able to use some of your natural strengths. I’ve never taken any formal writing courses but when it came to writing my first book it really helped that I’d been a lifelong voracious reader of non-fiction.

Having knowledge or skills that are rare can be a real benefit. If you make a great cup of tea, that’s something a lot of people can do. It’s not much of an advantage in creating a teashop or an innovative new tea brand. But if you have an encyclopaedic knowledge of tea and its history, or you have connections with importers, or perhaps a knack for finding underpriced commercial property, or creating a unique and desirable experience for visitors or creating successful brand identities then you might have a head-start.

Whatever your abilities are you can and should grow them even further – in fact that’s such an essential part of entrepreneurship we focus the day on it tomorrow.

Today’s tasks: find your genius

Player pointers

You may feel that none of your spots of genius is particularly valuable. But what if you combine them?

The power of combining multiple skills

CREATOR OF THE Dilbert cartoon strip, Scott Adams, wrote in his excellent book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big:

I’m a perfect example of the power of leveraging multiple mediocre skills. I’m a rich and famous cartoonist who doesn’t draw well. At social gatherings I’m usually not the funniest person in the room. My writing skills are good, not great.

But Scott discovered that

When I combined my meager business skills with my bad art skills and my fairly ordinary writing talent, the mixture was powerful. With each new skill, my odds of success increased substantially.

Dilbert now appears online and in 2,000 newspapers worldwide; 20 million Dilbert books and calendars are in print.

Can you combine several of your genius spots into your project to boost your odds of success?

Workerbot thoughts to challenge

‘What if I find out I don’t have the talent?’ Ah, that old one. This fear is big enough for many people that they never actually start doing the thing they really want to do, just in case their worst fears that they are talentless nobodies after all are confirmed. But science is casting a new light on talent and it turns out not to be as cut and dried as we thought. Much of what we think of as innate genius is in fact learned. We’ll find out all about that tomorrow.