Blueprint For Success, Stephen Covey, Ken Blanchard, Jay Niblick, What’s Your Genius?, Anthony Robbins, Dan Lyons, Francis Hesselbein, Laurence Higgins M.D., Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, Michael Lorelli, Randy Haykin, Rosemary Hygate, Mickey Rogers

Welcome to the home of the book, What’s Your Genius…How The Best THINK For Success, the latest book by Jay Niblick, contributing author in Blueprint For Success with Stephen Covey, Ken Blanchard and eight other professionals.

What’s Your Genius is the result of seven years of research, interviews and personal work with some of the most successful people in the world in a wide variety of fields. The book explores how these successful people think and make decisions, and details what the research discovered about the Success Traits that these extremely successful people possess that guide them to success over and over again. It shows how the most successful people reject many of the commonly accepted beliefs about self-development and in many cases do the exact opposite of what traditional teachings would have us believe. Finally, it provides practical exercises that will teach the reader how to develop their own Success Traits and learn to think for success like the best do.

Some of the successful people studied for this book include:

Anthony Robbins – Personal Life Coach and Peak Performance expert
Dan Lyons – CEO of Team Concepts Inc., seven-time National Team member, World Champion and Olympian in rowing
Francis Hesselbein – Founding Director of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation and CEO of Girl Scouts of America
Laurence Higgins M.D. – Chief of Orthopedics, Harvard
Dr. Marshall Goldsmith – NY Times best-selling business author & executive coach to Fortune 500 CEOs
Michael Lorelli – former Chief Marketing Officer and Pres. of PepsiCo Inc. International
Randy Haykin – Co-Founder of Yahoo
Rosemary Hygate – one of the best Professional Executive Assistants in Hollywood (Sammy Davis Jr., Patrick Swayze, Melanie Griffith)
Mickey Rogers – World Authority Demolitions Expert
and growing...

Introduction
Did you ever have that one class in school where no matter how hard you tried you just never seemed to get it? No matter how hard you studied; no matter how hard you worked; results just never seemed to come easily if at all. Even if you did do well it was always a struggle. But, if you are like most people, there was also another class that was the opposite and things just came to you almost effortlessly? The whole concept just made sense and you achieved success with little to no real effort. One reason for this is because each of us has certain innate talents for thinking and making decisions. These natural talents or decision-making styles allow us to see some aspects of reality very clearly while filtering out other aspects almost completely. For example, some people naturally see the big picture very easily (the talent for strategic thinking), or intuitively understanding how various parts work together (the talent for integrative ability). For others it is the ability to understand people and how they are feeling or what they are thinking (the talent for emotional intelligence), while still for others – understanding complex problems is like second nature (the problem solving talent).

Our thinking talents and decision-making styles comprise the very core of who we are. They make us the unique individual that we see in the mirror each morning and they hold the best potential for delivering our greatest levels of performance and success.

For the most part, science agrees that our decision-making styles are engrained in our genetics and then made concrete early in life through our experiences. As a result, these are not things that you can develop through training exercises or sheer effort. If your job depends heavily on a talent that you don’t possess; or if it doesn’t align well with what talents you do have, you are in trouble. You will always be that student sitting in the difficult class, working harder than anyone else just to keep up and achieve less.

Here’s the great trick, though! The most successful among us understand this fact and they don’t spend their lives trying to become the A+ student in that difficult class. Because they understand that they are who they are, instead of wasting vast amounts of energy trying to become something they are not, they invest it instead in trying to better apply that which they already are. In a sense, and to Quote Dr. Robert Hartman, “they stop trying to put in what God left out and instead work with what he put in.” That’s what the very best do, and that’s what this book is meant to show you how to do as well. What’s your genius is about helping you learn how to become more self-aware, more authentic and much more successful.

The study at the foundation of this book separated performance into five levels, the fifth level being the absolute peak of performance or what the book calls “Genius.” The results of this research shatter the conventional wisdom on personal development, and deliver a radical new approach to improving performance by freeing individuals to become more true to their natural talents, strengths and weaknesses. The end result is a process that helps you reach your highest level of performance - your 5th Level or Genius.

Background
The results of a seven-year study into what drives the most successful people reveals that there is a significant, direct and positive correlation between self-awareness and individual performance. Self-awareness is concerned with your level of awareness for your natural talents, skills, motivations and preferred behavioral style. In addition, the research uncovered a single variable that connects self-awareness with performance, which is called Authenticity. In other words, when you put it all together, the more completely you know your own strengths and weaknesses (i.e., self-awareness), and the more true you are in applying them to what you do and how you do it (i.e., authenticity), the greater your performance will be.

Performance for this study was divided into five levels with each higher level incorporating increasing degrees of self-awareness and authenticity (A&P):
1st Level – Below Average/Poor performance
2nd Level – Average performance
3rd Level – Above average/Good performance
4th Level – Excellent performance
5th Level – Genius

The key to being “true”, however, is not about identifying weaknesses so you can turn them into strengths, which is what most theories on personal improvement would argue. This study shows that the very best among us take a very different approach to their weaknesses. While the best do indeed seek to understand their weaknesses very well, they do not do so for the purposes of fixing them, rather they use this knowledge to create objectives, goals, and roles that simply do not depend on those weaknesses.

Such thinking runs counter to conventional wisdom, which teaches us that the key to greater success lies in eliminating weaknesses. Most people interpret this to mean eliminating the weakness itself through developmental efforts (i.e., becoming better at blank). Here the focus is internally based and on fixing “you”. The most successful people we studied, however, take a radically different perspective that finds them leaving their weaknesses be, and instead eliminating only their dependence on them. For them the focus is not on fixing themselves, rather they adopt an externally based focus on fixing their environment and their goals (e.g., what they do and how they do it).

The level of success these people achieve is hard to argue with, and every single one of them holds the same belief about maximizing dependence on strengths and minimizing dependence on weaknesses (not fixing the weaknesses themselves). Those who do this achieve significantly more success and with less effort, while finding more passion, satisfaction and happiness at the same time.

It is exactly this kind of external focus on change that you will learn to create and master in this book. When you manage to create goals, objectives and successes that rely only on your strengths, and not your weaknesses, you will find greater passion, greater satisfaction and greater success – with less effort and stress. We call this type of performance “Authentic Performance”.

Figure 1 below illustrates the simplicity of the model.

authentic performance chart

While we have intentionally made these concepts very simple to understand, we also caution people not to underestimate the difficulty of actually doing it. Understanding is one thing - doing is quite another. Our work in coaching individuals and corporations around the world has proven that it is actually quite difficult to achieve the levels of self-awareness and authenticity required to reach the highest level of performance. Many top-performers possess good ability in these areas, but just as in any case of moving from good to great, getting from the 4th to the 5th level of performance requires learning new skills, accepting that what got you where you are my not get you where you want to go, and creating a whole new perspective on what it will take to get to a whole new level of performance.

Only a very small percentage of those studied actually managed to develop the levels of self-awareness and authenticity required for 5th Level or Genius performance. Only 9% of the people studied had developed this level of self-awareness on their own. The average level of self-awareness for the rest of the participants was a shockingly low 49%, compared to the average of 96% self-awareness found in the Genius performers. This means that the most successful people we studied possessed a level of self-awareness that was roughly 96% higher, or almost twice as high, as the average person. The good news, however, is that what these geniuses do is no secret. There is no magic to gaining better self-awareness, or becoming more authentic, so while the vast majority of people don’t do these things, there is no reason why they can’t learn to. This book is designed to help ensure you can.

It is also rare, much rarer, to find someone who possesses not only such a high degree of self-awareness, but also someone who is then very authentic to that knowledge. The vast majority of people often let their roles determine what they need to be good at. They then set about trying to turn any weaknesses that their role depends on into strengths so they can fit the job better. Those who reach the 5th level of performance do the exact opposite. They thumb their nose at conventional wisdom and instead of trying to fix Who they are, they decide to fix How they are. The difference being that instead of focusing on who they are at their core (e.g., their natural talents, strengths, weaknesses, etc.), they focus instead on how to apply that which they already are, even better. The results are astonishing for the most successful people outperform the next closest level not by 10 times, nor 100 times, but by as much as 1,000 to even 10,000 times.

When we really know ourselves, and our natural talents - when we are completely authentic to those talents and have certainty about who we are and what we do and create goals and objectives that feed off those strengths - an almost mystical energy seems to show up in what we are doing. The stars seem to align and as Basil King put it, “mighty forces come to our aid.” It’s not about “fixing” what we don’t have, but rather learning to trust what we do have and letting it do its thing. In that moment, when we are in “the flow”, where all of our talents are perfectly aligned with what we are doing - we really can become a genius.