Ola!   A little something about finding your genius.

There is a food chain, a pecking order of sorts as to how the world works. At the top we have Einstein, Du Bois, Steve jobs, Mozart, Andrew Carnegie and Beyonce and Cardi B, and Mr. Bean and Marie Curie and Shakespeare–you get the drift?

These are people who lived or are living in what Gay Hendricks calls the @The Zone of Genius.

Here’s the thing:

The system has baited humanity into following a certain path that majority of the people in the world have followed: Go to school, find a job, work to eat for the rest of your life.

And the system keeps you so busy earning your keep and obeying rules, to a point that many people have forgotten the most significant question of existence:

Who are you?

What excites you?

What makes you giddy with excitement?

What is it you do so well that people keep praising you for it?

It could be in the telling of a joke, the way you execute projects. Your voice, your dance moves, your mathematical mind. Your design acumen. What is it about you that you do extremely well?

Pss..ssttt…Geniuses don’t fit in

The system has trained you out of seeking your own happiness and fulfillment. It has taught us that we must ‘fit in’ and the cost of being different and standing out is rather high.

The system has taught you to dilute your personality too much, to a point that if someone else wore your body for a day, we might have a difficult time deciding who the real ‘you’ is. But that’s not how life is supposed to be.

We are all born different and it is in our uniqueness that our genius arises.

1. Mozart was just a guy whose music took a long time to be accepted, even in his own hometown and played as a court musician before anyone ever saw his genius.

2. Einstein was just a little boy who was slow in learning and was thought to be ‘daft, and would never amount to anything’. He was the awkward guy who did not score so well in school except for the subjects he really enjoyed, and had difficulties getting a job as a result. People only recognized him when he was deep into The Law of Relativity, and only then was he acknowledged as a genius.

3. Genius exists everywhere, in the awkwardness even. Look at Mr. Bean. Only he can be Mr. Bean.

Take notes:

When something makes you extremely happy, write it down.

When an idea keeps bobbing in your mind, write it down.

When something touches your heart or gives you immense joy and fulfillment, write it down.

And these things don’t have to be the mega supadupa stuff–no.

The smile of a child. Applause after a presentation. Solving an accounting problem. A line of poetry. After a week of taking notes, you will get the drift of where your genius lies, and where it wants to take you