Practical Genius (22 page)

A very type-A investment banker I know told me about a very unlikely discovery she made that taught her how to feed her genius first. On her last day in a vacation house she rented one summer, she found
a copy of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi’s classic
Love’s Ripening.
This is a woman who carefully avoided poetry and most other literature throughout her extensive education, focusing instead on the math and business courses she knew would get her where she wanted to go. When she found this book, she wasn’t any more interested in poetry than she had been in college. But she was fascinated by how worn the book was, with many dog-eared pages and a badly creased spine. She could see that someone (probably several someones) had read it with a great deal of purpose and absorption, and she succumbed to curiosity over what could have so engaged these readers.

She decided to pinch the book and take it home and read it, not in a big gulp the way you read a beach novel but in careful bites every morning after rising, mostly because she was a little embarrassed at what her partner would think when he discovered his hard-charging, career-first wife was suddenly reading love poems! What happened, of course, was that her little dalliance with Rumi on love and friendship, the feminine and the divine—well, it changed her.

It didn’t turn her into a poetry lover, by any stretch. But it revealed to her the tremendous power of spending this key bit of time in the day focused on her own growth and understanding, especially through the lens of something so different from anything she had experienced before. She was also surprised by the way that what she read every morning colored and informed her thoughts and energy throughout the day. She noticed that her perspective became more balanced and creative as a result of the exotic little vacation she was taking first thing every morning.

Now this is her habit—she paints for an hour before work, gets through four or five pages of the Proust she’s been reading (slowly) in the original French, or loads a shuffle of Brazilian music to listen to on her iPod as she walks the long way to buy her newspaper and latte. She didn’t set out to change the quality of her life, although it is
likely that it is better than it was before. What she has done is change the way she experiences the whole of her life, the way she sees it every day, by investing in herself this way.

I can’t promise swimming with dolphins before your first conference call of the day, but I can promise that focusing on input rather than output and feeding your genius first thing every day may be one of the most permanently transformative adjustments you can make to your life. Where to begin? Look no further than your own journal.

Besides any of the writing or thinking you’re working out in your journal, you should be keeping a list of what I call “curiosities,” little squibs and dabs of information about music, books, art, food, film—anything, really, that catches your eye or ear and makes you think you might want to know more. This part of my journaling life includes lists of musicians or songs I have read about but have not yet heard; notes about writers and interesting business types I want to investigate; even a recipe for an Andalusian
tortilla de patatas
I want to learn to make.

I refer to these lists and items often, constantly gathering the ingredients that would make a great genius “breakfast.” I always have an idea in advance of what I want to spend the time doing; sometimes I explore something for a single day, other times I explore a single subject over the course of a week or more. I also like to keep things like those wonderful Phaidon art books handy; once a quick glance at an Albrecht Dürer painting sent me on a very fun three-day exploration of Dürer’s illuminations. The idea is to be in a permanent state of curiosity seeking in order to have a robust menu of choices at the ready for every morning’s genius meal.

Establishing this ritual will change the way you experience your day. When you lead with your values, everything that follows has a purpose. It changes your perspective on why and how you’re doing your work, caring for your family, or whatever. Over time it creates an extraordinary genius state of grace that causes you to make the choices you know will nurture and sustain you throughout your day.

SUSTAINING PRACTICAL GENIUS PYRAMID

After you’ve set the stage for your day with a strong morning ritual that feeds your genius, do your best to prioritize what immediately follows to utilize and maximize your fresh, engaged brain. Forget racing to your computer to answer meaningless, genius-sapping e-mail. Instead, front load your day with tasks, projects, meetings, or conversations that require analytical ability, such as planning, evaluation, brainstorming, or problem solving. The goal is to prioritize the activities that enable you to use both sides of your brain simultaneously—the left, logical side and the right, creative side—which, of
course, means engaging your passions, creative abilities, values, skills, strengths, and expertise. Genius!

This is not just to encourage you to use your energy and best resources early in the day, when you have them, rather than later in the day, when they are depleted. Doing this will actually cause you to
generate
energy and fresh resources that will sustain you throughout the day. Instead of being beat when you turn your attention to your family after work, your engines will be running on a store of energy that will make the end of your day as rewarding and engaging as the start of it.

One trick to this is being careful to address the transactional stuff you need to do
after
you have invested the time you need to in the smart stuff. E-mailing, returning calls, invoicing, anything that falls in the category I call the “housekeeping” of work should happen in the later part of your workday. Making this shift sounds radical, and you may have trouble justifying it to the people you work with. But trust me, if you make this change in the way your day unfolds, everyone in your life will fall into line. You will be profoundly more productive, and the quality of your work will improve. People will be begging to get to work with the “new you” and won’t even notice that the price for this privilege is that you don’t answer their e-mails until after three!

Here’s where I encourage you to make a pig of yourself. Really. Regardless of the time of day, day of the week, or month of the year, I want you to be a voracious consumer of content. Harking back to my definition of content earlier in this chapter, this refers not just to how you spend your time but what
exactly
you’re spending it on. Remember that every bit of content you consume is a choice.

Think of it this way: Are you phoning it in at Ordinary Joe’s yoga class? Or do you walk out of Extraordinary Joe’s spin class glowing with well-being? Do you eat your sandwich at your desk at work?
Or do you eat it on a park bench watching those awesome percussionists beating the hell out of a bunch of drums? Do you scan the horizon every day for new adventures and possibilities, or do you just double-check the TV listings to be sure you won’t miss your episode of
Closer.

These are choices, people! Every day is filled with dozens of exciting choices most of us simply don’t make. Or, to be precise, we make choices, it’s just that they’re often likely to be the choices that will degenius us (ahem,
Closer
). Things to read, see, listen to, taste, do—they’re out there, and they
will
grow your genius.

What I propose is nearly as dramatic in its transformative potential as the feed-your-genius morning ritual: do one thing every day that represents a conscious effort to expose yourself to the extraordinary instead of the ordinary, the profound instead of the pedestrian, the breathtaking instead of the mind-numbing. This is
so
easy to do, and the rewards of this simple effort are monumental.

All it requires is paying attention to what’s possible and then doing one thing a day. One thing! Don’t just sleepwalk through your morning newspaper; tune your radar to find the one quirky, playful, inspirational, beautiful thing you can see, do, listen to, read, or watch today. Subscribe to blogs or newsletters dedicated to keeping readers apprised of the best of what’s up in the world. Or remind yourself of the incredible resources that have been available to you all along—museums, local playhouses, concert halls and houses of worship, schools and universities.

I have one friend who’s a committed one-thing-a-dayer. He is great at ferreting out the coolest current doings in his city, as well as accessing ongoing resources. He’s also good at spending his time thoughtfully and efficiently in these pursuits. He rarely just eats his lunch; he’s always coupling his meal with his outing and often invites others along. When there isn’t an
au courant
experience that catches his eye, he makes his way to one of the dozens of galleries in his neighborhood
just to “take it in,” as he describes it. He also taught me one of his best tricks, to “make a date with art.”

I have to say that being a voracious consumer of content has the particular benefit of making you much more aware of how your own work and passions relate to the work and passions of others. The more you see and experience the product of others’ genius, the more alive and relevant your own will become.

One of the most valuable lessons I have learned in my journey has been the critical importance of shutting down. I don’t mean go into some kind of one-eye-open sleep mode or offline state, I mean
shut down.
This is purposefully closing off the entryways into your consciousness from all the memes and bits and mostly digital detritus that causes what is commonly known as information overload. I never really took shutting down seriously, frankly, thinking that some version of unplugging (i.e., checking the BlackBerry every twenty minutes instead of every five) was a good enough until I got straightened out good by Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, and David Rowan, the editor of
Wired
in the United Kingdom.

“It’s important to truly disconnect from time to time. To immerse yourself in nature, to immerse yourself in silence, to breathe, to exercise, to meditate,” says Chris. “To do all those things that would allow you to reclaim yourself and to purge some of the clutter and chatter and noise that comes in, because it can become too much. We’re natural devourers of information; it’s one of the key things that gave our species an edge. But in a world of infinite information, total information abundance, there’s a real risk of overload, of information stress, of destructive distraction. It can kill productivity; it can kill relationships.”