Successfully Using Your Genius

“We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with. We already have capacities, talents, direction, missions, callings.” -Abraham Maslow

Everyone has an area of genius in which they are especially talented. This genius thread weaves its way through your whole life; affecting the career you pursue, the hobbies you undertake and the things that appeal to you.

Since it’s so important to personal success, let’s briefly review ways you can discover your genius. One way is by relaxing and reviewing the times and activities where you were most engaged and having fun. What skills do these activities have in common? Determining this puts you on the path to discovering your area of genius. (This exercise on my website that may be helpful.) It may also be useful to get outside perspectives. People who know you well can often see the threads of your genius area better than you can because they are more dispassionate. Success tip number one: To find your area of expertise, look for the common elements of the activities you like and why you like them.

Once you have determined your area of genius, start building upon it. You have probably heard that to be more successful, you need to improve your weak skills. I disagree with this as it is often stated. We each have an area of genius where we produce better results, enjoy ourselves and naturally excel. You are much better served by spending time strengthening that area of expertise. Ignoring it to attempt to build skills in areas you do not naturally excel often causes strong areas to languish and weaken. It’s much more difficult to build weak skills than strong ones. Success tip number two: focus on developing strengths that will better serve you than improving your weaknesses.

This does not mean you should only spend time developing your area of genius. You need to develop other skills that do not come quite as naturally to make the best use of your area of genius. Failure to do this may result in you being a wizard with no audience. My area expertise involves learning complex and difficult concepts and translating them so that they make sense…to me. However, since success always involves working with other people, understanding complex ideas is not very useful. If I go through my life doing nothing but this, I take a storehouse of knowledge to my grave. This is not exactly what we think of as being successful, is it?

I remember taking a calculus class with my father where he struggled with some of the concepts. He asked me how to do a problem, so I showed him how I did it. Not understanding how I got from one step to another, he asked me how I did it. I couldn’t easily explain this, so I told him, “That’s obvious!” While it was obvious to me, it was not obvious to him. To make the best use of my talent, I have learned that I need to be able to explain my ideas to others. Success tip number three: To be successful, you must develop the weaker skills that will allow you to fully exploit your area of genius.

Once you recognize your area of genius, you will find working there is very empowering. It will increase your energy and excitement allowing you to work longer and harder. My father built his entire business from his area of genius. He loves to solve problems; he particularly excels at examining non-working devices and processes, diagnosing the problem and quickly finding ways to fix them. You can actually see his enthusiasm increase as he delves into such challenges. He’ll get up early to begin these projects and go to bed late after spending an entire day working hard on them. Success tip number four: aligning your job with your area of genius is a great way to increase your energy and create personal success.

You should be wary of getting so wrapped up in your talent that you become arrogant. Just because you understand something doesn’t mean others are going to be able to do so. As my calculus example highlights, if you do not recognize the challenges others face when trying to work with you in your genius area, you’re not going to be very successful. When you can explain what you intuitively grasp to others so that they can understand it, they will think you’re ingenious and you will improve your own understanding of your skills. The best way to expand your knowledge is to teach others. Success tip number five: To succeed, avoid arrogance so you can find ways to share your gift with others.

A wonderful thing about working in your genius area is that you are uniquely qualified to have a great deal of impact on others and society – when you focus. You’ll notice that when I talked about my area of genius, I said it was, “learning complex and difficult concepts and translating them so that they make sense”. When I talked about my father’s area, I explained that he, “excels at examining non-working devices and processes, diagnosing the problem and quickly finding ways to fix them”. These are pretty generic; there are many different things each of us could do and still be successful. However, we are most successful when we focus our energies. Focus allows you to acquire the background, skills and education needed to use your genius in a specific area. You can move to other fields, but this requires once again learning what’s needed to succeed in that specific area. Success tip number six: to make the best use of your genius, focus your energy.

Have a great month!