Practical Genius (18 page)

As I look back on these sometimes rough-and-tumble reality checks, the only way I can describe the outcome is a kind of euphoria. With my editor, Karen, for example, sometimes after hanging up the phone or putting down a handwritten letter from her, I’ll be driving or walking somewhere and I begin to feel a bit taller, smarter, wiser, and, most important, humbled and grateful for the gift of strong, insightful guidance that lets me see my work or thinking in a different way. This is the big home run, when someone who knows you and cares about your success can help smooth your path in some way or, if necessary, get out of your own way.

Understand that being able to own the fact that they played an instrumental role in your success is a huge turn-on for good mentors. Like papas, they see a bit of the DNA of their own genius now running through you, which is affirming and gratifying, to say the least. When you succeed, they succeed. The opposite of success in these relationships is mediocrity, because this is an unacceptable reflection on themselves. This is a unique characteristic of this relationship, that each of you is a kind of reflection of each other. It’s part of what makes the relationship intensely personal but also potentially extremely powerful.

Besides being a “good student,” it is your responsibility as a protégé to keep the attention and maintain the attraction of the mentor by offering “value adds.” For me this means sharing advice with them on their own projects or challenges. It means being available as a resource to them, volunteering my talents and skills for their efforts, whether writing for them, hooking them up with someone who can be useful to them, or keeping them current, timely, and relevant. This boils down to paying attention and taking initiative in the relationship, even though the assumed focus is on you, the protégé.

Finally, do right by your Yodas. Be profusely, demonstratively grateful, acknowledge them both privately and publicly, and loop them into your genius network. You are genius assets to each other, after all, and when one of you grows, you both grow.

In the same way that countries use ambassadors to communicate and spread their agenda, the practical genius relies on ambassadors to be passionate, resourceful connectors who help create opportunities for growth, extending the reach of their message and helping to seed new
meaningful genius relationships for them around the globe. These are a unique breed of people; they are the believers, the loyalists, your passionate promoters. They get excited about your genius and are the first to talk you up to someone they “think you should know.” This is one of the primary roles ambassadors play in the life of a practical genius; they have strong networks and a geniune belief in the value of putting smart, dynamic people together just for the good of the universe. They’re quick, intuitive, 100 percent generous, and 100 percent nontransactional. They are in your life because they believe in your genius, and they are as eager to share you with others as they are to engage with you themselves.

I first considered the notion of ambassadors while going through Keith Ferrazzi’s Relationship Masters Academy (RMA), where we explored techniques in building what Keith calls “lifeline ambassador relationships.” According to Keith, these are intimate friendships, people with “refrigerator rights” who have agreed to support each other’s success. These are people who have chosen to be accountable in helping you achieve your goals.

My experience with ambassadors is more emotional. Unlike your Yodas, who may be available to you only once a month or even quarterly, your ambassadors are there for you day in and day out, whether sitting two doors down from you in your workplace or at a conference on another continent. In fact, proximity to and face time with your ambassadors aren’t nearly as important as a deep sympathy, a mutual admiration that makes you want to be backup bands for each other 24/7. The ambassador also has a natural gift for connecting people, a sixth sense for relationships where there might be genius synergy or entrepreneurial opportunity. Ambassadors seem to see the world through different eyes, always scanning the human horizon looking for potential sparks and other kinds of combustion they can instigate.

Like every genius, the ambassador operates with a heartfelt passion and a keen intelligence and intuition. My friend Katina is a classic ambassador. She is a comrade, a champion, and a “keep it real” kind of person who is the definition of unconditional support and generosity. Katina has an incredible eye for genius; in the last year alone she made over sixty-five introductions on my behalf, a few of whom went straight to the top of my core crew of practical geniuses. I consider her to be my greatest talent scout, and she has helped to expand my genius circle and grow my business more than any consultant or venture capitalist ever could. As a one-woman show, you can see how I would especially benefit from her efforts. She is such a good ambassador that some have mistaken her as my public relations agent, which always makes us laugh.

Perhaps the gold standard of genius ambassadors is the incredible Sunny Bates. For thirty years she has used her knowledge and intuition to create inspired marriages between ideas and capital, between creativity and sponsorship, between genius and its audience. Sunny has the unique ability to project and attract genius at the same time. As a result, she has effortlessly built a vast personal network and carries it with her wherever she goes. She is a tireless ambassador for her network, constantly feeding it and enabling strategic connections that benefit the individuals while strengthening the whole. As a master connector, her clear objective is to help others accomplish their goals. And it isn’t selflessness that motivates her but a kind of ambition she feels on behalf of the people she connects.

I think that’s the key to understanding what makes a killer ambassador. For both Katina and Sunny Bates, it’s a fierce energy focused on the people they believe in—so you see why it’s so important to have an ambassador or two surrounding and supporting your genius. Sunny emphasizes the importance of what she calls
“intellectual honesty.” The relationships she enables are only as good as the truth each represents and the integrity each brings to the relationship. One smart, honest relationship leads to another and another, and before long you have a network of geniuses who are building one another up, enabling one another’s success, helping one another grow.

It doesn’t matter where in the world they are, your ambassadors are thinking of you in a constant loop, sending you genius vibes of support, ideas, connections, and sometimes even some nice chocolate! You don’t, however, get to shop for your ambassadors the way you do for your Yodas or the rest of your tribe. That’s because so much of the relationship with your ambassadors is based on a kind of kismet, a love at first sight, a true love forever. In other words, there’s an organic kind of passion to it that you can’t manufacture. That said, I can tell you that the secret of cultivating kick-ass ambassadors is to be one yourself.

To be an ambassador, you have to operate in a constant state of generosity, honesty, and enthusiasm for the people you believe in. It’s a give-give-give situation that on the surface sounds like a lot of work, but the fact is that it’s the fuel that runs the engine of genius. I’m not kidding. You see genius in someone else, you do everything you can to help that person realize and activate that genius. You admire someone’s work, you make sure everyone you know knows about it. Be a shameless fan, a wizard of word of mouth, a constant peddler of other people’s genius. This is not a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours kind of thing; it’s a 100 percent authentic and purposeful approach to surrounding yourself with genius by pimping the hell out of someone else’s genius. How does that help you? You promote their genius, your genius shines. Oh, and you’ll find yourself with more ambassadors than you know what to do with. And you can take that to the bank.

Your tribe represents the leaves on your tree, the people in your life who give it color and texture, movement and change. Your Yodas and ambassadors are part of your genius tribe, to be sure, but together with a vast complex of folks with innumerable skills, passions, and values that challenge and complement your own. One big distinction is that you know your Yodas and the ambassadors well but you can go a whole lifetime without actually meeting some of the people in your larger genius tribe. The other distinction is that your Yodas and ambassadors tend to be constants—the anchors, if you will, of
your genius tribe. The rest of your tribe can be changing all the time, coming and going, bringing new faces, new ideas, new events, new content, fresh blood, and fresh energy to your day-to-day life. This pulsing organism is comprised of friends and strangers, each chosen as carefully as the other and never with an emphasis on quantity over quality. I don’t want 100,000 nameless, meaningless followers; I want 100 eclectic geniuses committed to their own experience and therefore improving mine.

As I travel around the virtual world in search of what I like to call “tell me something I don’t already know” moments, I am always surprised and delighted by who I am able meet online and eventually fold into my tribe. I have found that the farther out at the fringes I explore, the more original and interesting the people are. And the more original and interesting the people you stir into your stew, the higher the quality of your tribe. Granted, you have to be willing to invest the time in skipping around online, following trails of intriguing clues and signs of genius life in the universe. On any given day, I will linger on a foodie site where molecular gastronomy chefs gather, check in with my preferred news source, globalvoicesonline.org, which has more than three hundred bloggers and translators who pull together reports from citizen media around the world, and poke around in the experience labs at Business Innovation Factory.

Sometimes I make contact with the geniuses I discover online to ask to know more about what they’re doing or test the potential of a relationship. Other times, I pull them into my tribe just by reading them, following them, staying aware of what they’re doing. In this case, it’s my curiosity and interest in their work and content that connects us, though I tout the “invisible” members of my tribe as much as those who inhabit my real-time life. It doesn’t matter if I find you standing next to me in line at the cleaner’s, on an index card tacked to a bulletin board at the library, or you’re an anonymous deep-space star in the farthest reaches of the online universe—it’s about
the sharing, the spreading, the absorbing and growing, nudging one another along on our genius journeys. Today, for example, I’m following a yacht manufacturer, a scientist, a group of astronauts, a break dancer, and a Zen master. The greater the global mix, the greater the global learning.

If you had a party and invited all of the flesh-and-blood people in your tribe, who would they be? How many geniuses would be milling
around, feeding and snacking on one another’s genius? I’m not talking about just the people in your power contacts list; I’m talking about the whole range of people with whom you choose to align yourself—your neighbors, the chef from that tapas restaurant you love, the parents from your kid’s school, the chick who runs your favorite flower shop. These, too, are characters in your genius story. Have you chosen them carefully because your tastes and talents and values sync up, or are you random travelers who are thrown together by proximity and circumstance?

You don’t need any more random people in your life. You need people you believe in and who believe in you. Going back to where this whole conversation started, every relationship is a choice. You can make a choice that feeds your genius, or you can make one that doesn’t get you anywhere or, worse, makes you move backward.