Practical Genius (8 page)

In fact, creativity represents the new competitive advantage in corporate America. Why? Because it is only through creativity that we can begin to solve problems, innovate, and create better lives for our communities and ourselves. Organizations are seeking out MFAs at a faster rate than MBAs. And employers are beginning to recognize that
creative talent is actually good for business during a recession, and some are beginning to give their employees opportunities to explore many realms of expression in the regular course of their work.

Problem solving and reasoning are directly connected to creativity. Oprah Winfrey’s dear friend and life coach Martha Beck once told me, “Gina, the foundation of all genius is always looking for the problems because they open the doors to solutions.” She’s right. Engaging your creativity, reasoning, and past experiences will lead you to solutions that are expressions of your practical genius.

Now, if you are experiencing a bit of resistance to assessing your creativity, understand that it’s your inner critic speaking and it’s time to learn to manage her well. When considering the fear you may be experiencing in acknowledging your creativity, consider this quote from one of my favorite books,
The War of Art
by Steven Pressfield: “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.” Your inner critic is resistance, and the resistance within each of us acts as a hindrance to our creative potential. “Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor,” Pressfield wrote. “It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”

So what is it you’ve got? To give it credence and specificity in your own mind, take some time to think back over your whole life, even to your earliest childhood. What experiences do you remember giving you the unique satisfaction of having made or expressed something that didn’t exist before you did it? It doesn’t have to be something you held in your hand—it can be an idea, a phrase of music, a compelling combination of plants in your garden, even an outfit you wore once. It just needs to have been an original expression of something original about you.

If you’re not already in touch with your creative side, this may take a while to mull over. Search hard through the nooks and crannies of your experience, shake the moments and memories out of the trees of
your life. Eventually (I promise!) you will end up with a small collection of sometimes similar, sometimes disparate glistenings that represent the components of your creativity. Write a short but detailed description of each of those creative moments you shook from your tree. They don’t make you Picasso, but they do prove once and for all that creativity lives in each of us. Many of us chose to bury it long ago, preferring to watch and admire “creative people” from the sidelines of our own lives. Practical genius does not allow this; creativity is not a spectator sport.

A value is a belief, mission, or philosophy that is meaningful; it can range from the concrete, such as a belief in hard work and punctuality, to the more abstract, such as self-reliance, forthrightness, and authenticity.

Whether we are consciously aware of them or not, each of us has a core set of personal values, and these values are what motivates our genius. The problem for a lot of people is that they have trouble articulating their values. The late, great journalist Edward R. Murrow had a radio show called
This I Believe.
Each week he featured an essay written by notables of the time, such as President Harry Truman or the dancer Martha Graham, as well as by ordinary folks like you and me. The essays strove to express what the essayists believed in, what core values or day-to-day truths helped them live true lives. The pieces were, as you can imagine, surprising, touching, and, above all, deeply personal.

Ask the next person you see, even someone you know well, “Hey, what do you believe in?” You’ll be shocked at how many good, accomplished, highly principled people will have trouble answering the question.

More than any other aspect of your makeup, your values are the closest, most accurate reflection of who you are, what others would see if everything else was stripped away and all that was left was what you stand for. Albert Einstein often insisted that he had no special
gifts, except perhaps his curiosity, focus, and persistence. In other words, the all-time poster child for genius pointed to his personal values as the source of his accomplishment! When we take our values to heart and express them in the smallest details of our lives, great accomplishment and success will always follow.

Take a moment now to reflect on the values that are the bedrock of your belief system. Some common values include trust, integrity, generosity, inclusiveness, fairness, loyalty, fortitude, steadfastness, and independence. These are just a few of the many values that shape our worldview and are at the center of who we are and the choices we make. Values are also at the core of your soft assets and will be the motivators that keep you focused on what matters most to you.

Values seem to have been one of the “it” subjects of the last twenty-five years.
In Search of Excellence,
Tom Peters’s seminal book, started the ball rolling on the subject of values in the workplace. Religious leaders speak of family values, and national leaders speak of moral values. And most recently there has been a lot of thought about the notion of intrinsic (Type I) and extrinsic (Type X) values and motivations.

If you take a moment to think about the successful people in your life, you will realize that some have been leading their lives either focused on intrinsic value or in search of extrinsic value. The author Daniel Pink describes people as Type I (Intrinsic) people, who are intrinsic seekers, or Type X (Extrinsic) people, who are extrinsic seekers. Type I concerns itself with the inherent enjoyment of life, while Type X’s main motivation and value are external gains. Those whom
you know who have done well motivated by their passions have been motivated by intrinsic value.

A clever definition of intrinsic value is when you do something for the enjoyment of “it”—whatever “it” is. That means you live your life driven by what you adore, value, and care about most for no other reason than the act itself. Folks driven by intrinsic value are not motivated by money and tend to self-actualize their full potential much sooner than others do. What is also interesting about intrinsic value–driven folks is that they play more, live longer, are healthier, and usually end up wealthier in the long run. I believe intrinsic seekers today are the true modern geniuses. Think of Richard Branson, Tony Robbins, Oprah Winfrey, and Steve Jobs; they are all motivated and have been energized to do what they love to do for its own sake—and as a result have never had to chase a dollar. Extrinsic value is value driven by external gain and reward. If you are of this tribe, which is solely motivated by material quest, you are operating from extrinsic value.

Many of the values we think define us are values we were encouraged to adopt rather than those we chose for ourselves. Your dad taught you to be frugal. Your favorite teacher encouraged you to be thorough. If you think about what you really love and what truly motivates you and align yourself with those intrinsic values, you will discover your ability to work patiently toward mastery and to work autonomously with great satisfaction. Ultimately you will find that this sets you up for sustainable success. Believe me when I tell you that living by intrinsic value—defined as living a life filled and prioritized by activities that give you pleasure and engage in for the inherent satisfaction of the activity rather than for some other reason—will transform your life from top to bottom. “The good news,” according to Dan Pink, “is that Type Is are made, not born—and that Type I behavior leads to stronger performance, greater health, and higher overall well-being.”

This Type I idea matters because it is your connection between what you value and what drives you. If you haven’t realized it by now, those drivers are directly connected and in many cases are the same. Pink’s masterpiece is called
Drive
for a reason; intrinsic value and the elements that contribute to sustaining a life around what really matters is what will motivate you toward autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And isn’t that what every genius aspires to?

Each of the six ingredients (skills, strengths, expertise, passions, creative abilities, and values) you’ve just explored within yourself all contribute in a unique way to your genius, and none is more important than the other. What you’ve probably uncovered about yourself while going through this evaluation is that you may be tilting too far toward the hard or too far toward the soft. For example, many of my executive clients have invested 90 percent of their time, energy, and mind share on their hard assets and their soft assets are weak, scrawny, and completely underutilized. For some of the entrepreneurs I advise, the opposite is true. They are creative self-indulgers who haven’t invested enough in their hard assets and wonder why they are broke. The art
and science of practical genius are the mastery and maintenance of purpose for both your heart and mind.

Now that you’ve moved through an audit of your hard and soft assets, let’s look at where they intersect—at that sweet spot where your practical genius resides. When I think of contemporaries who are making a significant impact on society, I realize that many of them—whether they are business leaders, writers, entrepreneurs, artists, technologists, designers, or scientists—are operating at the unique intersection of their hard and soft human assets.

Consider the musical behemoth Bono; the editor-in-chief of
The Huffington Post
, Arianna Huffington; the performer Lady Gaga; Chris Anderson, the curator of the TED Conference; or the architect Zaha Hadid. They are all great examples of folks living at their other G-spot, using all their ingredients to do extraordinary things. To be precise, they are living fully realized, utterly and comprehensively engaged lives. Those people don’t have it all—they are making it all happen for themselves by running on the curl of the big wave of all of their human assets. What’s their secret?

In order to be an effective influencer, forward-thinking leader, or change agent, you must tackle today’s problems in a very different way than was required even twenty years ago. Today there is no room for being one-dimensional, because today’s challenges are three-dimensional and require three-dimensional approaches. Life and business were simpler back in the day, but with the technological revolution and the global economic downturn, today we are experiencing high-definition, 3-D challenges, and you don’t have to wear those funky glasses to notice both the plentitude of opportunities and
the complicated challenges we face. Gone are the days where business could be tackled without empathy. Gone are the days where technological innovation could exist without the prioritization of human psychology. Contemporary geniuses today are tackling problems by connecting the unlikely assets within themselves and bringing them to the solution, meshing all that contributes to their genius capital.

An article in the
Harvard Business Review
discussed a study that showed that “strategic thought entails at least as much emotional intelligence as it does IQ.” Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure brain activity in a study of managers in a Wharton executive MBA program, they found that the best strategic performers showed less neural activity in the prefrontal cortex than in the areas associated with “gut” responses, empathy, and emotional intelligence. Call me crazy, but I see this as proof that integrating the heart and mind does indeed produce better strategists, problem solvers, and bottom-line geniuses.