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 where the exact opposite was true and things just came to you almost effortlessly? The whole concept just made sense and you achieved success with much less effort.

One reason for this is because each of us has certain innate talents for thinking and decision-making. These natural talents 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), 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 greatest potential for delivering our greatest levels of performance and success.

For the most part, science agrees that these decision-making styles are pretty much permanently engrained in who we are by both our genetics and early life experiences. As a result, these are not things that you can develop through training exercises or sheer effort in adulthood. If your job (or class) depends heavily on a talent that you don’t possess, or if it doesn’t align well with what talents you do possess, 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.

Conventional wisdom, however, would argue that you should do just that. The traditional view of self-improvement says that it is good to place yourself in that difficult class, to stretch yourself, to become well rounded in a wide variety of areas and to identify your weaknesses so you can fix them and turn them into strengths. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom, which this book will challenge, is based on time-honored principles. And the problem with such principles is that they can become subject to less and less consideration over time. Eventually, such “wisdom” becomes such a part of the norm that it fails to be questioned at all, becoming accepted without question – even when it is wrong.

More specifically the conventional wisdom I’m talking about here is a legacy of beliefs concerning how companies manage people and how people allow themselves to be managed. It is a legacy created in a bygone era where the world operated in an industrial economy, but this era has passed. Today the world’s organizations, and those who work in them, find themselves in a new and very different kind of era – an intellectual age. Had the beliefs of the old era passed silently into history, along with the era in which they were built, there would be no problem. Unfortunately, they didn’t fade away. The beliefs on how to manage people, and how to be managed, survive today in the very foundations of the management principles most companies employ, and given that they were created in a different time – for a very different environment - they are out of place and inappropriate for both the organizations and individuals of today.

This legacy of beliefs has created a significant problem throughout the world where we find people in every culture feeling unfulfilled, dissatisfied and frustrated with roles that bind their performance and management beliefs that limit their potential. The problem this creates has grown to such levels as to legitimately be considered a pandemic. All over the world people are suffering from this problem and this book seeks to address that problem by seeing what we can learn from those who do – and don’t – suffer from it.

What’s Your Genius is the result of seven years of research, statistical analysis of over 197,000 people, and interviews and personal work with some of the most successful people in the world in a wide variety of fields. This study separated performance into five levels, the fifth level being the absolute peak of performance or what the book calls “Genius.” So this isn’t a book about how to increase your intelligence; it’s a book about how to help anyone reach peak levels of performance (i.e., their genius).

What the study teaches us is that the most successful people don’t follow conventional wisdom. They understand that their natural talents are fixed and therefore 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 that energy in trying to better apply the natural talents they already possess. 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.” This is what the very best do, and this is what this book is meant to show you how to do as well. What’s Your Genius is about helping you learn how break from conventional wisdom, become more self-aware, more authentic and much more successful.

In the industrial management belief the job was sacrosanct and the individual was sacrificial. If the job required talents that the person didn’t possess, it was assumed the person would change to develop those required talents. Today’s geniuses, however, understanding that their natural talents are what they are, reject this mentality and instead of fixing themselves, they fix their role’s (either its requirements or the role altogether). Whereas non-geniuses focus on making themselves a better fit for the job by attempting to develop new talents (as championed by the outdated legacy of management beliefs), the geniuses I talked with simply focus on making the role a better fit for the talents they already possess. The big difference, instead of fixing themselves, they fix the role. To the geniuses of today, they are sacrosanct and the role is sacrificial.

After crunching all the data and conducting all those interviews, it really is as simple as turning right instead of left when it comes to reaching the highest levels of performance. What do I mean by turning left or right? Below is a visual of this disarmingly simple, yet incredibly effective difference between becoming a genius at what you do, or not.

The Non Genius Approach to personal improvement:
• Step One – take on a new role
• Step Two – learn what the role needs in the way of talents, ability, etc.
• Step Three – identify a need for some natural talent I don’t possess
• Step Four – fix myself by developing that talent (empathy, problem solving, planning, etc.)

The Non-genius approach of “fixing myself” (turning left on the flow chart above) returns fewer results, decreased consistency and less satisfaction, while requiring more effort and creating more stress and discomfort.

Geniuses, though, turn right instead of left. Instead of focusing on fixing themselves, they fix the role or job.

The Genius Approach to personal improvement:
• Step One – take on a new role
• Step Two – learn what the role needs in the way of talents, ability, etc.
• Step Three – identify a need for some natural talent I don’t possess
• Step Four – fix role so that success isn’t dependent on the natural talent I don’t possess

The Genius approach of “fixing the role” returns greater results (faster), increased consistency and higher satisfaction, while requiring less effort and creating less stress and discomfort.

The single greatest differentiator between those who suffer from The Problem, and those who don’t is that those who don’t turn right instead of left.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith captures this whole mentality best when he says, “There are a whole lot of things I stink at. I just make sure I don’t have to do them to be successful.”

When we really know ourselves and our talents, when we are completely authentic to those talents and when we create goals and objectives that feed off those talents - 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.”

In the end 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 optimally aligned with what we are doing – anyone really can become a genius. This book will not only show you what The Problem is and what causes it, but also what happens when we suffer from it, why we suffer from it and how to change directions so we don’t suffer from it anymore.

Like the research, this book has been written in a dozen different countries, from a thousand individual thoughts inspired by a world of sources. From the margins of a book read on a flight to Johannesburg, to cocktail notes in a Tapas bar in Madrid, to sticky notes on my bathroom mirror - bit-by-bit these thoughts have gathered. Eventually, however, they coalesced into one coherent thought. A thought that holds the potential to help you eliminate any problems you have with feeling frustrated, dissatisfied or unfulfilled with your role.

The global creation of this book is fitting since the world it was written across is the same world affected by its story, and the very world intended to benefit from its message. If benefiting the world seems an overly ambitious goal, please understand that my audience in this regard is only as large as the problem itself. That audience is individuals in every organization, at every level, on every continent, and the problem they suffer is a growing lack of motivation, satisfaction, fulfillment and success. My hope is that this book helps you become true to yourself and all of your potential. If this book offers only one promise – I believe it is the promise of a truth worth learning.

Some of the successful people studied who helped teach us that truth 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

• Frances Hesselbein – Founding Director of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation and former CEO of Girl Scouts of America

• Laurence Higgins M.D. – Chief of Sports Medicine and Shoulder at Harvard

• Dr. Marshall Goldsmith – NY Times best-selling business author & executive coach to Fortune 500 CEOs

• Michael Lorelli – former Chief Marketing Officer and President of PepsiCo Inc. International

• Mickey Rogers – World Authority Demolitions Expert

• Randy Haykin – Founding Vice President Sales/Marketing Yahoo Inc.

• And more…

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