Practical Genius (5 page)

It’s rare that someone can promise you that what they are going to teach you will make you a better person. But that is what I am promising you. I am turning on all the lights, opening the doors and windows, and clearing out the closets to set you on the path to the transformation of your life. When I decided to live my practical genius, I remember feeling guilty about how much fun I was having. “Work is never fun, Gina. There’s probably something wrong with this,” I told myself. This was just the degenius devil on my shoulder, trying to throw me off my destiny. Instead of internalizing these false ideas, I learned to shut them up and embrace a more natural, exciting, and truly pleasurable approach toward life. My mother used to say, “Everything that is natural is good for you.” Working from a place of obligation and routine for a paycheck is not natural. Working for joy, innovation, and autonomy is.

That’s it for the practical genius foreplay. It’s time to get your genius on.

RANCESCA PRADO

When I coach my clients on identifying their practical genius and why it matters, the first question I present to them—what I like to refer to as the billion-dollar question—may be the most important one in this entire book:

This is the kind of loaded question that makes people nervous. But I promise that if you make yourself think about it, you will begin to have a visceral image of what you really care about and what you would like your life to have represented.

The idea is to be the master designer of your legacy and to think of your legacy as what’s in your heart—what you really love—right alongside what your mind is capable of accomplishing. Learn from the legacy of Alfred Nobel, who is best known for creating the Nobel Peace Prize. In fact, his most significant accomplishments during his lifetime were his invention of dynamite, explosives, and other inventions useful to the art of making war. At the time of his death he controlled factories for the manufacture of explosives in many parts of the world, but he was smart enough to ensure that his legacy was his greatest passion, which was world peace. Before he died, he set aside $9 million to set up a fund to establish yearly prizes for merit in physics, chemistry, medicine or physiology, literature, and world peace—the honor we know today as the Nobel Peace Prize. A true practical genius, Alfred Nobel made his wealth from his inventive mind but left his legacy from the heart.

If your legacy image is filled with accomplishments (degrees from fancy schools, social or corporate status, possessions, or wealth, for example), close your eyes and try to imagine it again—this time coming from a place of passion, not accomplishment. What do you see? Is it a meaningful project you led? Is it something you created with your own initiative? Maybe it’s a dynamic relationship you were a part of. If this is the kind of thing you see, now you’re getting somewhere!

But if you really can’t conjure up even a picture of your legacy—if you haven’t had a BlackBerry-free minute even to contemplate tomorrow because you are barely surviving and managing today—you need this chapter more than ever. In fact, you can’t afford
not
to take a moment to ruminate on this question.

I have always believed in the power of starting with the end in mind. If you take the time and effort to visualize the destiny you truly desire from a perspective of passion and accomplishment, you set yourself up to establish goals, create agendas, and seek opportunities that will push you closer to your legacy, which you will discover is a
true product of your ambitious self and your conscious self. Having goals simply for the sake of having goals sends you on a fruitless, uninspiring life’s journey. Having goals that point you toward the legacy you want to realize makes the journey rewarding and real.

Now that you have allowed yourself a glimpse of your life’s purpose, let’s talk about how it relates to where your genius really lives. If genius were to have a physical address, it would be located somewhere between your heart and your mind. Specifically, it lives at the intersection of what I call your hard assets (your skills, strengths, and expertise—the quantitative talents you’ve developed, usually on the job) and your soft assets (your passions, creativity, and values—the qualitative talents that are tougher to quantify but no less important). I like to refer to this intersection as “the other G-spot.”

It’s rare to accidentally stumble on the place where your heart and mind click. So rather than hoping to get lucky, I’m going to help you get to the other G-spot, which is where the truth and essence of your practical genius resides. When you identify the spot where your soft and hard assets intersect, the process of realizing your personal power begins.

This affects you in a personally profound way that catapults you forward in your professional experience. As you grow and your genius develops, your skill in closing deals, negotiating, and navigating important professional relationships will become more confident, more effective, more precise. Your genius will become your currency on every level, and its impact on your success in business (whether you are a corporate executive or an entrepreneur) will be nothing short of amazing.

To get an idea of what life looks like in this genius zone, consider your life an absolute acceptance of contradiction, where there isn’t a battle between the personal you and the professional you any longer. The life of practical genius is one life, a healthy marriage between your heart (what you care most about) and your mind (the manifestation of your intellectual curiosities, strengths, and expertise). Think of your other G-spot as the ultimate measure by which you make every decision, whether it’s choosing your next employer, your next lover, or the next place you want to live. You can also consider it a formula that will never fail to hold you accountable to staying at the authentic, powerful core of who you are.

The other G-spot is a place that is never tilted too far toward the soft (personal) side of who you are nor too far toward the hard (professional) side of who you are. Think of the little bubble of air in a carpenter’s level. When the bubble is squarely in the middle of the viewer, there is perfect balance. In
you,
that bubble is your other G-spot. Once you find it and learn to stay there, life becomes much easier, goals become more attainable, relationships prosper, and you will find that achieving results is far easier.

Ultimately, as you get comfortable residing in your other G-spot, you will begin to notice which environments are most conducive for you, which relationships support your genius, and which activities allow both sides of you to engage harmoniously—and dynamically. With practice, your entire life will be kicked up a notch just by your having a constant measure of the ideal intersection of your heart and mind.

In my own life, I use my other G-spot as my benchmark for every decision I make, from the foods I choose to eat to how I spend my time, even to how I facilitate meetings. For example, when I meet with prospects, I strategically open up the meetings with soft-asset probing questions about interests, inner passions, and desires, exploring the sweeter soft side of their lives. Once they are a little “emotionally undressed,” I nudge them toward the business discussion, always managing the flow of the conversation so that it never veers too far toward the mind nor too far toward the heart. They don’t know it, but I’m keeping the meeting within their practical genius zone as well as my own. The result is always powerful; 75 percent of the time the outcome is new business, and 99 percent of the time it’s a new, meaningful relationship. Many are wowed by our “first date” together, and what’s fascinating is that the “wow” has nothing to do with me and everything to do with my ability to keep their other G-spot stimulated. It’s extremely effective to frame your experiences—both small and large—within the genius zone.

Whether managing a career change, a new relationship, or a routine sales call, your experiences are transformed from everyday to extraordinary.

The big secret to implementing this model and to unleashing possibilities you may not even know exist within yourself is maintaining and working on all assets simultaneously, without favoring one area over another. Everyone has a different G-spot, and once you know where yours is, you can really see what’s possible when you stimulate it in others.

In order to get to that spot, however, we first have to identify and
extract the six basic ingredients of your genius. On the hard asset side, there are skills, strengths, and expertise; on the soft asset side, there are passions, creative abilities, and values.

What exactly are hard assets? Your hard assets are the concrete attributes that make up the professional you and are the foundation and framework of your practical genius. They are a critical component of your overall human capital. I use the vocabulary usually associated with one’s financial portfolio on purpose. If you try to examine yourself through some sort of soft-focus lens, you’ll never really grasp or appreciate what’s at stake.

The simplest way to view your hard assets is to think of your skills, strengths, and expertise. These are the professional capabilities that are predominantly cultivated on the left (logical) side of your brain. You have likely been programmed to assess your market value based on those attributes since you were a child. Hard assets are the skills, strengths, and areas of expertise that are highlighted and glorified on your résumé and that for most people are the best measure of human
capital, at least in the workplace. That’s because those are the assets that are measurable within a common context of accomplishment. As we move closer to your other G-spot, you’ll see that this is only part of the asset side of your balance sheet.

Your hard assets include all of your natural and cultivated aptitudes and skills. They are what landed you your first job and are what you are most often measured by today. What is interesting about our hard assets is how so many of us have framed our adult lives and identities around these predominantly professional, work-related qualities. For example, if you are a doctor, your life is defined by the role that encompasses the aptitudes and skills required to be a doctor. If you are an economist, your identity is structured around that expertise. We have become our titles, and our titles have become us. But in truth, they are very limited descriptors of our hard assets.