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I commit to living in my Zone of Genius, now and forever.
Repeat it softly to yourself a few times, noticing how it feels to you. Then say it out loud a few times. Savor the different words and sounds of the sentence. When you are ready to make your formal commitment, speak the sentence from your heart,
Genius Question no. 1 Here’s the first Genius Question: What do I most love to do? (I love it so much I can do it for long stretches of time without getting tired or bored.)
I spent a lot of time wondering how to distinguish my genius from my excellence.
my genius is connected to what I most love to do. That’s why I want you to wonder about what you most love to do.
After wondering about it myself for more than a week, I began to get clear on what I most love to do. It’s translating big, important, life-changing concepts i...
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What work do I do that doesn’t seem like work? (I can do it all day long without ever feeling tired or bored.)
In my work, what produces the highest ratio of abundance and satisfaction to amount of time spent? (Even if I do only ten seconds or a few minutes of it, an idea or a deeper connection may spring forth that leads to huge value.)
Over and over I hear executives, in fits of frustration, give voice to complaints like this: “If I could just sit in my office and think for an hour without being interrupted, I could produce amazing results.”
It takes a certain ruthlessness to set a priority and stick to it.
What is my unique ability? (There’s a special skill I’m gifted with. This unique ability, fully realized and put to work, can provide enormous benefits to me and any organization I serve.)
I’m at my best when I’m ______________________________ ____________________________________________________.
When I’m at my best, the exact thing I’m doing is ________ ____________________________________________________. Go for a more detailed description, such as “When I’m generating ideas on a yellow legal pad, the exact thing I’m doing is doodling and enjoying the feeling of creating something out of nothing.” Go even deeper with a sentence like this one: When I’m doing that, the thing I love most about it is ____ ____________________________________________________.
I encourage you to look carefully at the number of times you say yes to things that do not fit in your Zone of Genius. Even if they seem beneficial for other reasons, those requests can eat up a great deal of energy that could be better invested in expressing your genius.
When I give speeches to executive groups such as the Young Presidents Organization, I hear one complaint more than any other: “We don’t have time to do the creative thinking that makes the biggest difference in our business.” In business as well as life itself, it’s easy to get so bogged down in handling details that you don’t have time to make new creative breakthroughs.
When you make the shift to Einstein Time, you experience a major surge in your productivity, creativity, and enjoyment. The shift takes place the moment you embrace one profoundly simple truth: You’re where time comes from.
Recall Einstein’s colloquial explanation of relativity: an hour with your beloved feels like a minute; a minute on a hot stove feels like an hour. This example has everything you need to understand Einstein Time and its powerful positive ramifications for how we live our lives.
The act of contracting your awareness away from space makes time congeal. It seems to slow down and harden into a solid mass. The more you cringe from the pain, the slower time gets.
To get on Einstein Time, you have to make one big shift, and it’s so unthinkable that I’ve actually heard grown-ups gasp in astonishment when I’ve suggested they do it. It involves taking full ownership of time.
Everybody’s got at least one persona, and most of us have two or three we wear for different occasions. Here’s the quirky truth that gets overlooked: most of us probably don’t realize that the persona we’re wearing is actually a persona.
Part of becoming a grown-up is learning to spot when we’re operating out of a persona. Part of growing up is discarding the personas that aren’t contributing to our happiness and success in life.
Let me give you two examples of time personas from opposite ends of the spectrum. At one end there’s the Time Cop, who gets there on time and reminds others to do the same. The Time Cop gets frustrated because people don’t show up on time, and gets particularly furious with those folks at the other end of the spectrum, the Time Slackers.
Quit thinking time is “out there.” Take ownership of time—acknowledge that you are where it comes from—and it will stop owning you.
Where in my life am I not taking full ownership?
What am I trying to disown?
What aspect of my life do I need to take full ownership of? The answer is always blindingly obvious, but we can’t see it until we get humble enough to ask the question.
Here’s the principle behind the question: stress and conflict are caused by resisting acceptance and ownership. If there is any part of ourselves or our lives that we’re not fully willing to accept, we will experience stress and friction in that area. The stress will disappear the moment we accept that part and claim ownership of it. At that moment, the disowned part of us is embraced into the wholeness of ourselves, and from that place of wholeness, miracles are born.
When you stop complaining about time, you cease perpetuating the destructive myth that time is the persecutor and you are its victim.
time is not something you have or don’t have. You’re the source of it, and you make as much of it as you want. Second, when you say, “I don’t have time to do that right now,” you’re telling a polite lie to avoid saying, “I don’t want to do that right now.” By placing the blame on time, you avoid confronting the blunt truth of the matter.
It wasn’t that I missed being in a hurry; I just realized that my very nature is saturated with an urge to be creating something all the time, and preferably three or four things at the same time. That’s when I feel most alive. So, I said farewell to retirement and have been happily in ferment ever since.
I learned the real truth—that I’m the source of both the time and the pressure—it was like a huge weight lifted off me.
As you know by now, the essential move we all need to master is learning to handle more positive energy, success, and love. Instead of focusing on the past, we need to increase our tolerance for things going well in our lives now.
John Cuber and Peggy Harroff conducted one of the few in-depth studies ever done on the relationships of successful people. The authors found that 80 percent of the 437 successful people they studied had unsatisfying marriages and long-term relationships.
Only about 20 percent of the couples had relationships the authors called vital.
other 80 percent had three main styles of unsatisfying relationships: In devitalized relationships, the partners remained together in spite of having fal...
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In passive-congenial relationships, the partners had never been passionate about each other in the first place. Their relationship was based more on affectionate friendship; they were much like business partners. Their expectations were low, so they were seldom disappointed with each other. Because of the low expectations, they didn’t fight much and so remained together in a state of ho-hum harmony.
In conflict-habituated relationships, the partners had created a lifestyle based around constant conflict.
There are two main reasons that successful people have dismal relationships: (1) simply because they’re successful; and (2) because they don’t know how the Upper Limit Problem works.
I had seen the power of projection, a subject that in my opinion should be in the curriculum of all elementary schools everywhere. A vast amount of energy can be liberated in relationships by dropping the habit of projection. As mentioned, projection occurs when you attribute to others something that’s true for you inside yourself. For example, a man may complain to me that his wife is too passive. If he were to own the projection, he would say, “I have not learned to handle a relationship in which a woman is being powerful and equal, so I create relationships with women in which I require
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Projection is the source of power struggles that eat up energy and intimacy in relationships. Power struggles are a war between two people to see whose version of reality will win out. Much of the energy in troubled relationships is drained through power struggles about who’s right, who’s wrong, and who’s the biggest victim.
Relationships—healthy ones, that is—exist only between equals. When both people are not taking 100 percent responsibility, it is an entanglement, not a relationship.
There is only one way to transform an entanglement into a relationship: both people must drop projection and see that they are 100 p...
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The Upper Limit Problem is magnified in successful couples, because each person is synergizing the other’s quest for a life in the Zone of Genius. At the same time, though, they are synergizing each other’s tendencies toward self-sabotage.
Make sure you take plenty of time for yourself, in a space apart from your partner. It could even be in the next room, so long as the intention is to nurture the independent part of you. Human beings have twin drives of equal power: the urge to merge and the urge to be an autonomous person. For a relationship to thrive, both drives need to be celebrated. A close relationship stirs up powerful transformative energies, and you need lots of rest time to integrate the rapid-fire stimulation that a relationship provides. If you can learn to take time off from the relationship consciously, you won’t
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Put a priority on speaking the microscopic truth, especially about what is going on in your emotions. Get skilled at simple microscopic truths such as “I’m sad,” “I’m scared,” and “I feel angry.” Communicating about feelings, dreams, desires, and other inner experiences creates deep intimacy in relationships.
When emotions are in the air, as they often will be in close relationships, don’t try to talk yourself or your partner out of them. Eliminate phrases such as “Please don’t cry” and “There’s nothing to be angry about.” Feelings are to be felt, so encourage each other to go through complete cycles of emotions. If you’re sad, let yourself feel that way until you don’t feel sad anymore. Same thing with fear, anger, happiness, and other feelings. It’s the act of stifling and concealing feelings that causes problems in relationships.
Give yourself and your partner plenty of nonsexual touch. Sexual touch is great, but humans need nonsexual touch in large quantities. A loving hand squeeze or a touch on the shoulder communicates love and caring in ways no words can.
After soaring to a new height of intense intimacy, bring yourself back to ground in a positive way. Many people, when they enjoy a time of deep closeness, unconsciously create an argument or accident to get their feet back on the ground. It’s not necessary to use a painful method of grounding yourself. It works much better, and is much more fun, to come back to earth by doing some earthy dancin...
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The Upper Limit Problem is our universal human tendency to sabotage ourselves when we have exceeded the artificial upper limit we have placed on ourselves. The Upper Limit Problem is caused by a too-low thermostat setting on our ability to achieve and enjoy our ultimate success. The thermostat gets set low early in our lives, at a time when we could not think for ourselves. Later, as we dream about big goals and move up into realms of love, abundance, and creativity that are above our old thermostat setting, we bump up against the artificial lid that was placed on our success through
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The first barrier is the false belief that we are fundamentally flawed in some way. If we carry this feeling within us, we sabotage our success because we think we’re essentially bad. If something good happens, we must mess up to offset it, because good things can’t happen to bad people.
