Genius Overlooked and Lost
When I was a kid – from about the age of 9 to 13, I played piano. I absolutely loved it. I could sit and play for eight hours straight. One of the conductors at our school once heard me practise from morning to evening, and apparently later told my parents that I'm a genius. Neither they, nor I, really understood the significance of this at the time. I was surrounded by kids who could listen to a piano concerto a few times and then within a few days, could play it by ear. Compared to them, I was less than mediocre.
Later, when I read about the idea of 10 000 hours of practise being what often sets the “great” apart from the average, I understood that the conductor might have recognised in me not that near miraculous ability to listen and reproduce music, but the power of my natural desire to just play, and play, and play.
To this day, the mere thought of this fills me with a deep sense of loss and longing. One of the first things I am going to do when we have expanded our current, very small home, a bit, is to buy myself a piano, and start playing again.
This keeps happening
It is too late for me now to try and become a professional musician, but recently as I was looking back over my life, I realised that there had been times when I stumbled over similar interests, yet had remained blind to them. It seems to me that when things come so naturally and easily to us that we can do it with no effort, and be engaged in it for hours without having to apply any motivational energy or discipline, we tend to discount those as having no value, because in our own lives they are so freely and abundantly available. School teaches us that valuable work is hard and unenjoyable. Economics teaches us that value and scarcity go hand in hand. So we undervalue that which is abundant, even if it is only abundant in our own hearts, minds and bodies.
So we go into the workplace always focusing our time and energy on the things we find hard (because that is real work), and procrastinating and avoiding the things we find easy and enjoyable (because that is not real work.)
It may be happening to you
I have often spoken to entrepreneurs who started a business doing something they love and are passionate about, and five years later they are spending all their time managing the people who are now doing the work. The entrepreneur is no longer doing any of the work they love and are passionate about, they are burnt out and overwhelmed by the tasks of management that they hate and are often not very good at, and they are frustrated because the people who are doing the work are not doing it as well as they should be doing. But they are so busy managing these people and the customers that they don't have time mentoring these people in the things they are best at, either.
I think there are a few reasons this happens to us:
We are not consciously aware of it
Like me with my piano, we do not even recognise what our natural genius is. It comes so naturally that we do not notice it. So we do not protect it. I just stopped playing piano when I left that school, because we did not have a piano at home and it did not seem important.
It's difficult to become consciously aware of it
That lack of being consciously aware of it is slightly more complicated than just “not noticing.”
There is a concept called, “Flow.” Flow happens when you are working in your natural strengths. Natural strengths would be work that you are talented at, and that you enjoy. When you do this, you tend to get engrossed in it, lose track of time, and forget about everything around you. It absorbs all your focus.
One of the most interesting aspects of flow, is that when we are in flow, we are unaware of ourselves. However, it is also one of the times when we are the happiest. It is a deeply enjoyable, meaningful, fulfilling state to be in. Do you spot the strange paradox – Basically we are most happy when we are not even aware of the fact that we are happy. We don't consciously notice when we are in flow.
The opposite of flow is grinding. Grinding is when you are taking every bit of self-discipline, motivation, inner energy that you can muster, and applying it to get a job done. Grinding is how most people work most of the time. When you are grinding, a significant portion of your energy goes into just generating the motivation to actually do the work. That discipline can be built. But it never becomes flow. It always remains grind.
So here's the rub: When you are working in flow, you are totally unaware of yourself. You literally do not notice what you love doing. Especially in the rush of a day – if you end up spending three hours in flow, and five hours grinding, your conscious mind is going to remember the grinding. When you evaluate what was important that day, you will tend to think through the things you were doing when you were grinding, and not even think about the things you were doing when you were in flow.
It is really difficult to consciously recognise your own genius.
We feel guilty when we are not “working hard”
As entrepreneurs, we feel guilty when we see others “working hard” and we are not. We also don't want to ask other people to do things that we would not be willing to do ourselves. We want to lead from the front. And we have this idea that when we grow our businesses, we need to grow by “duplicating ourselves.”
So the first people we start employing are people that can do what we do. We give them the work we love doing, and we keep the work that we don't like doing. We think this is the right thing to do, because we are working very hard, and hard work is necessary to be successful. This is not necessarily true, and it is definitely not the whole truth. For one, we twist the definitions of “hard work”, “necessary”, and “success” – creating a whole structure of confusion on which we then build our professional lives.
From Grind to Genius
If you have read thus far, chances are you recognise some of this. Chances are that you recognise that you have built your business in a way that is compelling you to grind, and you've employed people around you that are grinding.
So here are a few practical steps you can take, to start moving away from grinding and towards unleashing the genius in yourself and your team.
- Recognise that your business will be most successful when everyone is working as centrally in their strengths as possible. That means they are all doing work that they are naturally very good at, passionate about AND naturally enjoy, most of the time.
It doesn't have to be 100% of the time. That's probably impossible. But even if you can get to 50%, you will be building a business that is massively outperforming the average around you, where less than 26% of people get to work in their strengths at all.
- Think back of when you were a child, a teenager, a young adult. Think back of when you started your business. Think of what you enjoyed, what you were passionate about, and what you were naturally good at. Think about why you started this business in the first place, as opposed to the million other businesses you could have started. Write down what comes to mind. Look at what you've written. Identify your own genius.
- Create two notes on your phone. Call the one, “Loved it,” and the other one, “Loathed it.” In the course of the day, open these two notes a few times, and write the activities you were doing, under either of those headings.
- Look at what your days currently consist of, look at the team you have, and make a deliberate decision to begin to make every effort to delegate as much of the work that does not fall in your genius zone, to your team, as you can do, as quickly as you can.
Notice that I am not saying try to do all of it tomorrow. This will be a process. However, if you start today, and begin to move in this direction, you might be amazed at what you can achieve in the next year, two years, five years and ten years.
- As you begin to grasp and master this concept, get your team together, and explain this to them. Have them walk around for a week or two with similar “Loved it” and “Loathed it.” notes. Then have “work bartering” meetings. Sit down around a table, tell each other what you loved and loathed, and begin to swap work. I'll do that documentation you hate, if you will call this difficult customer, since I love documentation and you love conflict resolution.
- When you employ new people, make sure you employ for the gaps of genius in your organisation. Don't try to duplicate yourself. Employ someone who loves what you hate, and who are absolutely great at what you are terrible at.
- Don't just do this once, and then think it's over. Make this a routine. Have these work swapping and bartering meetings once a month. You will be amazed at what you will learn about your team and about yourself. A year from now, you will find yourself in a totally different headspace, and your business will be performing at levels you could never achieve with close supervision and grinding.
- Lastly, and maybe most importantly: Notice and encourage genius. Because we tend to be blind to our own genius, it is massively helpful if someone around us notices it, points out that what we are doing is valuable.
If you like reading, here are a few really good books to read on this topic:
To your success
Ashton
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