Practical Genius (15 page)

Cultivate the art of telling your story. Be both an editor and a listener. Become acquainted with your voice. Get your body into the game. And practice your story until it’s as familiar to you as a song on the radio.

Marry your authentic narrative to the themes of your aspirations and the language of your strongest assets, both soft and hard. Provide illustrations that fascinate and illuminate. Invest the necessary time, energy, and resources in the story you have to tell about your genius.

You know where your genius lives, and you’ve developed the story and tools that will help you convey your genius to others. You are beginning to understand that genius isn’t a part-time commitment; it’s a 24/7 proactive, strategic experience, and your full-time job is to grow it in yourself and project it to others while you work, play, listen, dream, sell, negotiate, speak, volunteer, travel, read, present, breathe, sleep, and live!

FRANCESCA PRADO

If you did an inventory of your relationships—your friends, family, colleagues—what would it say about you? Specifically, are the people in your life an accurate reflection of who you are? Do they share your values, support your passions, and encourage your growth as a human being? Do you see your own joy, curiosity, and energy in them? Have you handpicked them with care, or are they in your life by happenstance?

I almost don’t have to say another word here, do I? You’re already flipping through the snapshots of your people in your head. Some are 100 percent solid and reflect every good and genius thing about you; others make you scratch your head a little, don’t they? How did they fall in with your crew in the first place? Oh, right. There’s family—you can’t choose them, you get what you get. And there are people you’ve collected over the years in the workplace—that guy who sat next to you at your first job, the woman who partnered with you on a project. And your friends? They’re your peeps! You can call them anytime, day or night, to laugh, cry, gripe, commiserate. They know your secrets and share your inside jokes.

Well, news for you: None of these is a good enough reason for any of those people—even your family—to hold a place in your life. Here’s why.

The people in your life are the cast of characters in your genius story. If the characters don’t support the story, what do you have? An incoherent, out-of-balance, unrewarding script, like one of those ridiculous movies that you walk out of at the theater. You are also likely in a situation where you work and work to sustain these relationships but can’t quite account for their benefit to you. Look, we all feel a little guilty about the less-than-gratifying relationships that we continue out of emotional laziness or fear of change or wanting to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. But if you can see the shimmer of the promise of your genius right before you—and by this moment in your journey, that’s right where you should be—you have an obligation to consider whether the people in your life are feeding and supporting your genius or causing you to spend emotional energy and precious time at great cost to your potential.

Don’t worry—no one’s going to make you throw your friends and family overboard. I’m just going to make you level with yourself about what you’ve got and make a plan to improve the company you keep.

Shortly after I quit my job to start my own practice, I took a hard look at the people in my life and realized that 95 percent of my personal and professional crew consisted of wonderful, loving people who were content with a life of conformity, security, and safety—which was precisely what I was walking away from. And these people are important to me!

Over the course of my life, they’ve been there for me and I for them. But I had made this life-changing personal discovery and now saw clearly that most of those folks were not the characters who would populate my genius story. They would never lose their place of importance in my heart, but I had to be truthful with myself about who I needed to be walking with on the revolutionary journey I had just begun.

Feeling quite alone on my risky new exploration of heart and mind, I longed to meet other risk takers, unconventional thinkers, and folks who were already succeeding at a life at the fringes of their organizations and communities, driven not by the acquisition of wealth but by the acquisition of new ideas. I knew I needed to surround myself with people who were exploring their intellectual curiosities with great fervor, and I wanted to spend time with others whose work had become their play. And most important, I knew I needed to forge meaningful relationships with people who were already living nontraditional lives at their genius axis.

So I set out on a quest to surround myself with genius, to populate my life and time with people who were right where I wanted to be, who would stimulate and inspire me, share their wisdom and enthusiasm, and seek the same from me. I had no intention of throwing my people overboard—or “weeding my friendship garden” as one mischievous pal likes to say. I was just going to invite some amazing new people into my boat.

A relationship is a choice, not an accident (no matter how many accidental people there seem to be in your life). I knew that the relationships I wanted to invest in should be both an expression and an extension of my genius. So I made a plan. My plan was based on the idea of curating an experience, as at a museum or another kind of exhibition. A good curator knows how to take a theme or concept and identify and assemble all of the components that will make the experience extraordinary. The best-curated experiences reflect a broad view that ensures an appreciation of the “big picture,” as well as a creative perspective that enables intuition, personal experience, and serendipity to come into play.

With that in mind, I developed a list of twenty-five very different people whose stories intrigued me, whose work I had read or read about, whom I was intensely curious about, but whom I didn’t know—yet. Fueled by a crazy, nothing-to-lose fearlessness, I began reaching out to these people with a simple request for a conversation. Very much in my own very focused, very dynamic genius zone, I was delighted but not surprised when those people agreed to meet or speak with me. After all, my passion and my purpose were not to be denied! What does surprise me is that more than half of the people on my “genius wish list” are now a part of my life. But that’s what you’ll discover when you make the effort to make genius connections in your life: genius loves company.

As you shift the balance of the people in your life from “just because” to “on purpose,” this is what you have to look forward to: playdates of genius and even trips of genius with people as curious and dynamically motivated as yourself; a life filled with givers versus takers, creators versus destroyers, feeders versus vampires; and days shared with visionaries with real smarts who are committed to changing the game in their own lives and in the lives of others. The transfer of knowledge and insight is best experienced through the lens of others, and finally deciding to surround yourself with nothing shy of amazing is not a wish but a demand that practical geniuses must make of themselves.

Every genius is unique, so the possibilities are endless when considering the kinds of folks you want to begin to fold into your life. I find it helpful to think of the geniuses in my life in three broad categories: the Yodas, the ambassadors, the fat brains, and the tribe. This isn’t to pigeonhole anyone in your life, but rather to be sure you’re surrounding yourself with the range of geniuses that can really make a difference. I also believe there’s an effective process for courting genius that causes you to identify, initiate, seed, and grow the successful relationships you seek.

Warning: if you are thinking “I don’t need any new friends” or “I have enough people in my life,” you are about to miss the personal paradigm shift of a lifetime. But if you’re ready to curate your cast of characters and you’re prepared for the extraordinary rewards that will result, let’s get to work.

When I set out to surround myself with genius, I first focused on an array of authors, educators, and entrepreneurs who I suspected were living right at the intersection of what they love and where they excel. Your genius wish list may consist of musicians, techies, or innovative policy makers. The idea is to identify the kinds of folks you want in your life and go about building bridges to the meaningful relationships you believe will feed your genius.

For example, one of the first geniuses on my wish list was the amazing Dan Pink. I had read
A Whole New Mind,
and it was one of those books that made the light click on inside me at just the time I needed it, in the early months of my new venture. I e-mailed him and
asked for an interview, and to my surprise he said, “Sure, why not?” So I flew to Washington, D.C., drove to a school in Maryland where he was speaking, then interviewed him on a playground after his presentation. Our conversation was everything I’d hoped for and nothing like I’d expected. But it was then I realized that not only was it possible to spend the rest of my life surrounded by genius, it was an imperative. Now I realize that I had aimed straight for the top in reaching out to Dan but the courage it took to ask and secure this “win” from someone whose words inspired me, gave me the confidence to begin to reach out to others who ignited me in one way or another.

I remember thinking to myself on my flight back from D.C., “If Dan Pink could open up his heart and mind to me, maybe others will as well.” After that first success, one by one, I went after each person on my list and invited them for what I call “nontransactional practical genius meet-and-greets,” where I made it clear that I was looking for nothing more than a conversation, a chance to ask a few questions and be exposed to their thinking. And most agreed to do it. After Dan, I contacted Martha Beck, who kindly gave me an interview backstage at a conference where she was speaking. This exchange was invigorating for both of us and led to her inviting me for a weekend retreat she hosted in Arizona. Next I met up with Eva Longoria for an intimate interview on Latina genius, then bonded with Suze Orman over our shared connection with the ocean.