Practical Genius (9 page)
Authors: Gina Amaro Rudan,Kevin Carroll
How many times have you heard “I work to live rather than I live to work” or my other favorite, “I do what I am good at rather than what I love to do.” To find your other G-spot, the place where practical genius is born, you have to let go of those ideas and begin to bust out of those limited boxes. How can you do this? You take all your human assets and combine them to form your new currency, your new operating system, and your new way of understanding what you do, how you do it, and why you do it.
This is your path to practical genius.
Do you think this kind of a life is a fantasy? Is it a pipe dream to find fulfillment
and
financial success in the world of work today, especially in these challenging economic times? I’m here to tell you that it’s not impossible. In fact, I’m telling you that it’s
imperative
that you integrate these different parts of yourself into a unified whole. All it requires is a bit of reprogramming.
Living a life at the intersection of who you are—professionally and personally—and meshing both worlds into one requires new
approaches toward your work and your life. Operating from a place of practical genius requires you to bring all of yourself to everything you do, whether it be running an organization, parenting, or community organizing. It’s a multidimensional approach, which will enable you to use your divine perspective right alongside your technological abilities. It will allow you to use humor right alongside your management abilities. It will allow you operationalize complex processes with the aid of nuanced creativity. Energy, passion, personality, intimacy, and many other personal attributes that were looked upon as inappropriate in your professional existence will not only be proper, but will become some of your most effective tools.
By now you are probably wondering, how am I going to find that sweet spot? Here is my practical three-step plan to get you there.
First, you have to make the decision to marry the hard and soft sides of who you are. Second, once that commitment is made, you need to quit cheating on any of the six assets that comprise your genius. The third and final step is to identify new and stimulating experiences and relationships that will allow you to explore and expand the facets of yourself you may not even know exist. I consider this step the “foreplay.” Give yourself the permission to experiment and taste new experiences. At first you may not know where to start, but listen to your intuition, which sends you loud messages and hints all the time.
For some of my creative clients, this means taking a business class or learning a new language. For some of my executives, this means learning how to salsa dance. Reach to the farthest edges, the fringes of your curiosities, and spend some serious time there. Go for the activities that will stimulate places in you that are currently underutilized. If you are a logical, analytical type, spend some time with activities that engage your creative abilities, passions, or values. If you are a creative type, focus on a hard skill you really need to move your creative passions forward. Eventually, a more balanced, more engaged, more brimming-with-possibility you will emerge. Don’t keep doing what you have been doing—change it! This foreplay is critical to reaching your other G-spot.
Yes, it takes practice and a great deal of trial and error, but over time an improved you, a more complete you, will crystalize. I have seen this happen with every client I have coached and with members of my audiences in corporate training. Once you begin to experiment with the practical genius model, you will begin to enjoy a new kind of openness to your own existence, and once the doors are open, your world will change.
For example, I coached a financial expert for a whole year, and by the end of our work together, he had realized that the place he could put all his assets into play was as a spiritual adviser. Here was an extremely accomplished finance professional who had spent his entire career in finance and his private, personal time as a student of scripture, and his revelation was the place where both of those parts of him met. So he decided to keep his job in finance and at the same time launched his own spiritual coaching practice. The result was a
happier husband, a more productive professional, and a well-centered practical genius who takes dance lessons with his wife, coaches and encourages folks from his “congregation,” and puts his financial expertise to great purpose every day.
In my own life I have learned through practice, persistence, and playing hard that in order to experience practical genius you must learn where it will flourish best. Once I identified the intersection of my talents, strengths, and skills with my values, passions, and creative abilities, I realized almost immediately that my practical genius came to life onstage as a high-impact speaker. Through storytelling, provocative imagery, smart content, practical advice, and good music, I was able to exude and leverage all of my human capital at once. This realization—or rather, actualization—was nothing short of a revelation, a moment of perfect grace and, yes, genius.
Take all your human assets, and be prepared for them to become your new currency, your new operating system, your new way of understanding what you do, how you go about doing it, and why. Be ready to upgrade your approach toward the personal and the professional and let it all hang out. Accept the contradictions and let go of the fear, and I promise that not only will you be happier but you will attract much more to your life, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Aristotle once said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” I have to be clear that practical genius is about deliberate practice and painstakingly hard work. Unless the hard work is also your play, you’re not going to get anywhere. Finding your genius and deciding to work on it aggressively won’t be easy, so if you’re looking for shortcuts or easy solutions, go find another book.
Take time to study yourself. Deeply investigate what makes you you. Be mindful not to edit this body of knowledge; just accept it, all of it—the good, the bad, the needs-improvement areas, and, most important, the fun spaces in your life that have been neglected. Build the knowledge of self-understanding about what you love, how you want to live, and what you can’t live without. Become an expert in
you
. It’s difficult to understand your full potential if you haven’t studied yourself thoroughly. So get to it!
Explore your possibilities. Over the course of this book, I want you to indulge your curiosities. Google the activities you are curious about but haven’t dared to try. Try something new. Plan an escapade. You can’t go about identifying your genius without a shot of adventure, so please don’t sit still while you turn the pages of this book. Do one small thing everyday, even if it’s just walking your dog on a completely new route. The idea is to get your head outside itself and stimulate your senses through dashes of adventure. Over time the outcome will be increased self-awareness and a better idea of who you really are and what you have the potential of unleashing within yourself. Dare to discover something new about yourself.
When you bring opposites together or juxtapose things, magic happens. Bring the unlikely together in your life, and experiment. For example, take a painting class during your lunch break. Read a book in a category you know nothing about. Venture into a grocery store in a diverse neighborhood you have never ventured into and buy something you’ve never eaten before. Become a lab rat for your own transformation, one small experiment at a time.
In order to discover new truths about your genius,
you must play more.
This can mean carving out time for adult play, such as golf or a night out at the ballet, or really diving into playtime with your children. Play every day. Develop play habits. Jump rope. Skip down your driveway. Dress up with your children or fly a kite. I have a friend who plays like this: she gets her kids to open the phone book and randomly choose a name. Then they take turns making up a whole tale around the name, complete with physical description, an elaborate backstory, and a crazy misadventure the person must endure. This kind of play never fails to limber and lighten you up. Play is critical to the pursuit of genius. Whatever play looks like to you, do it.
PORTRAIT OF A PRACTICAL GENIUS
Always on the hunt for geniuses whose hard and soft assets mix elegantly, I was tickled to meet Mariano, a true practical genius. Mariano is an Argentine musician and IT executive who has found his other G-spot, the place where the professional and the personal get serious together.
“I moved to London three years ago, and it was only in a new country that I gave myself permission to be one Mariano rather than the two people I was in Argentina. I had been a high-level IT wonk by day and a raging musician by night, and those two worlds never met. I didn’t realize that this divide was pulling me into a depression. It was only when I moved to London and made the decision to connect the most important parts of myself that my life completely opened up for me in ways I never ever imagined possible. I outed my creative side at my company and began to use my creative assets to expand my IT
life. This called for me to take a more relaxed approach to my work life, and the change was dramatic. My quality of life improved, my work productivity went through the roof, and my music really began to evolve. By consciously bringing together all of the assets related to my work and creative life, everything I did became more intense and colorful, and more rewarding, too.
“For example, performing and sharing my music with large audiences gave me greater confidence sharing, presenting, and participating in meetings at work. I learned through my own experience that performing arts really help you become more aware of yourself and help your confidence and ability to work with other people. My understanding of the intricacies of technology helped me create and enhance the music I was making, quite literally. By incorporating a few laptops, which play samples as background, and creating a sequence, which takes signals from my guitar, the result is an amazing new sound.”
The road to practical genius begins with the extraction of six key ingredients that contribute to who you are and the embrace and acceptance of all sides of yourself. The war between your identities will come to a halt right inside your genius zone.
Practical genius is the intersection between what you love and what you do best. This sweet spot is where the professional and the personal joyfully mesh and is the essence of your practical genius.
Identify the foundation of your practical genius, which is your hard assets—your skills, strengths, and expertise.