Practical Genius (19 page)
Authors: Gina Amaro Rudan,Kevin Carroll
When you decide to surround yourself with genius, it all matters—who you spend time with, do business with, play with, even worship with. Your tribe should always consist of the best out there as measured against your own values, passions, and strengths. From the block you choose to live on to the small business you decide to support, both the tribe
and
the village matter to the practical genius.
It is my opinion that every practical genius needs some percentage of their tribe to be at least half their age. I consider these young advisers, whom I call “fat brains,” to be the next wave of global mentors for business leaders, entrepreneurs, executives, and game changers. Take it from me, having a Millennial as an adviser shifts the paradigm and transforms the way you think of your life and work in the day to day and the long term.
The reverse dynamic, in which the junior mentors the senior, upends your traditional approach to learning. A Millennial’s digital fluency,
gamer’s problem-solving skills, and scrappy creative resourcefulness can change your DNA, making you more nimble, adaptive, and more comprehensively exposed to the broadest spectrum of cultural influences.
Over half of the global population is under the age of thirty. And unless you’re under thirty yourself, I’ll bet you only a small fraction of your tribe, if any, comes from this demographic. What does that tell you? It tells me we’re missing a huge opportunity to dance with these worldly cultural modernists who were raised on a diet of bits and memes and threads of contemporary thinking. They invented the tools, hacked the tools, adapted the tools, turned the tools into toys and the toys into the tools that drive modern life. They are art and information junkies who live seamlessly in multiple worlds and feed off innovation, social change, openness, and transparency. How’s that for a reason to get some of these fat brains into your life
right now
?
When you know what you don’t know, the fat brain can fill the knowledge gap instantly and with urgency. Sunny Bates, who is a big believer in having young mentors, says, “When you decide to surround yourself with much younger people, you are deciding to look at the world in a different way. For example, they see the online persona, the offline persona, the physical world, and the virtual world not as different spaces but just as one world, seamlessly integrated. There’s nothing in a baby boomer’s past that could have prepared us for that, and so we are continuously smacked over the head with ‘Oh my God, that will never work’ followed by ‘Wow, that works!’ and finally ‘It’s just insane how much this is working!’ That’s why they’re our best guides, particularly for the future.”
I am so hooked on the young fat brains in my life who advise me on everything from writing to identifying new trends that I’ve created a little Fat Brains Advisory Board. The criteria for joining this exclusive group? You have to be under thirty, know a whole bunch about a subject area in which I am deficient, and be a trailblazer in your own right. Some members of my board include Atalia Aron, my in-house
scientist; Julian Amaro, my video and film expert; and Dan Lack, my small-business adviser. They are my personal mentors, and I am their protégée. Together we share, bond, and support one another and prove how magic can happen when you shift the paradigm.
Dan explains the value of this age-reversed mentorship as follows: “We’re at two totally different points in our life right now, yet we share similar passions and interests and I am able to bring a different perspective to your experience that sometimes helps you see things in a different light.” Dan has been out of college only three years, but in that short time he has created the Meeting of the Big Minds, which is a four-day ideation retreat at his family’s ranch in Texas. The meeting brings together his most innovative friends from across the country to connect and share ideas. I attended two of Dan’s retreats, and it was there that I became convinced that I needed this breed of young experts and innovators in my tribe—the more the better!
Now you see how crowded your genius life can be, with amazing supporters, sounding boards, instigators, and inspirers. When you’re running on all cylinders, it should feel like constant waves of connection and energy that go back and forth between you and your whole tribe. You know what kinds of geniuses you want in your life; now let’s talk about how to court them.
There are definitely techniques that work and don’t work when it comes to courting genius. I have three simple rules that keep me on the straight and narrow of authenticity, honesty, and transparency when I’m engaging with potential recruits for my tribe.
When building your tribe, your intention should always be to cultivate sustained, meaningful relationships. Although people come and
go in our lives, the world is getting smaller and smaller and the six degrees of separation/goes around comes around truisms are more relevant than ever. So when you begin to engage with people you may want to fold into your life, seek out only as many as you have the bandwith to follow through with. Some people are capable only of one-night stands, which are great interactions during the first meeting followed up with . . . nothing. People don’t commit to that when dating, and they don’t like it much in the rest of their lives, either. So your reach and sweep for geniuses should be broad, but only as broad as you can responsibly and effectively manage to build upon after a first engagement. Scattering a bunch of seeds and not watering or weeding them is a waste.
Cultivating a corps of geniuses also requires that you show discretion in where you place your efforts. Think about your Twitter followers. Do they participate in the conversation, or are they quiet observers, lurking and feeding but not contributing? There’s a big difference between a faceless mass of “friends” and “followers” and a band of devoted, engaged believers in you. Ten true believers will spread your message and build momentum around your genius faster and with far more impact than ten thousand passive followers who may or may not even understand your genius, never mind care about it. Better to play with ten amazing people than pander to ten thousand morons. Sorry, it’s true.
Never, ever initiate a relationship with the intention of “getting something” from that person. Nontransactional behavior looks like this: you share your story, find a connection, and explore the mutual genius potential of your relationship. That’s it. You’re not selling anything. Transactional behavior looks like this: You meet an amazing person
who would be a tremendous addition to your tribe. She’s also someone you could do business with. You choose the prospect over the person and leverage the positive connection you’ve made with her in order to make a sale. This is a ridiculous, shortsighted trade-off, throwing the real potential asset of the relationship out for the more immediate financial gain you may or may not realize from it. Trust me, if you lead with your genius intention and connect with the people who can really help you reach your potential, all the profit in the world will follow. Doing business with geniuses is fine, but not until long after you are genuinely invested in and care for each other.
Now what? How do we actually start the courtship process with the geniuses we want in our life?
Start with intimacy.
Don’t beat around the bush. Go straight into emotional intimacy mode with them to telegraph your openness and accessibility. In late 2001, single and curious about all the talk about “speed dating,” I attended an event where participants were organized to spend six minutes with one person, then move on to the next. Playing it safe, most of the guys across the table from me shared the typical data points (birthplace, college, occupation, etc.). That kind of talk isn’t very scintillating over the course of a real date, so I’m not sure why any of them thought it would close the deal in six minutes! Then one guy, Stephen, sat across from me, and instead of talking about himself, asked me where I was from, and when I told him New York City, with real concern, he asked how I had been affected by the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The six-minute conversation turned out to be an extraordinary deep dive in which Stephen explained that he had lost both his parents as a teenager and had come to believe that you can’t manage destiny. He skipped the small talk and established a genuine intimacy that absolutely got my attention. Two years later, Stephen and I were married. Rather than picking off the leaves of the artichoke layer by layer, go straight for the heart.Use your stories as your currency, no matter who you are talking to.
This is especially true when meeting people of great wealth or power. Instead of feeling intimidated or hung up by class disparity, your stories put you on an eye-to-eye, toe-to-toe footing that opens the doors of connection every single time.Share the experience with your partner.
Many of us meet amazing new people and keep them all to ourselves, neglecting to bring our partners along on the relationship-building journey. It’s easy to grow apart from your partner when you don’t include him or her in your growth experiences.Finally, remember that there’s a shelf life to that initial buzz of connection you feel with a fellow genius.
I make a point of following up with a call or an e-mail immediately and attempt to have lunch or dinner with that person within two weeks of meeting. I also quickly try to find a way to connect that person with someone else in my tribe who can help solve a problem or who I think would be a great genius fit, chemistrywise. I also make a point of making global connections between my new friends and my established tribe. Your new friend is traveling to Japan for the first time? Hook her up with your former colleague who’s now working in Tokyo. These are little efforts that have large rewards. But if you don’t make them quickly, you will discover that the initial spark between you may already be extinguished.
Once you feel the engine of your new relationship humming, nudge it along by getting to know what drives the other people and what their passions are. Follow them online in the social media, read what they’re blogging about, ask questions. This is when you begin to discover the places and spaces you have in common, where you can begin to add value to each other’s lives.
Begin a pattern of outreach, starting with a handwritten note. I find this to be one of the most important gestures to establish
intimacy, to make the terms of your relationship personal. E-mail is great; so are phone calls and face time. But a thoughtful letter written in your own hand is like a touch on the shoulder, a brush of the cheek. It matters a lot.
Almost as important as meaningful communication is generous sharing. This is a
mi casa es su casa
thing. Make introductions with abandon; share your assets, share your tribe. Be bold in your sharing; just be clear that every connection you enable, every circle you expand, is nontrasactional.
The most important thing you can do to build and sustain a new relationship is to add value to the person’s life. Be there, share, invest in that genius’s success. There’s been a lot of talk lately about “relationship management” and tools you can use to automate the upkeep of your relationships. I’m a little more organic than that. As a visual person, I find that keeping a photo or another reminder of the essence of each of my geniuses in my sight is the most effective way to keep them at the front of my mind and constantly brainstorming about how to support and connect them with others.
In the end, you are the designer of each of these relationships. It is up to you to apply your unique style to seeding, feeding, and sustaining them. Be creative, strategic, even provocative. Be a champion of the others’ passions and causes; be an always-accessible, entirely generous resource. To serve another person is to help him or her grow, and there is no better way to ensure that you are surrounded by exactly the people who care about
your
success and are there to help
you
grow.
I am as big a believer in the power of extraordinary group experiences as I am of experiences based on individual relationships. A truly original group experience can change you, expanding your understanding of yourself in the world. Contrary to the popular perception of
conferences and other group events as opportunities to “network,” I believe that the successful group experience is about how it personally impacts each individual, not how it inflates their Rolodexes. Whether it’s an intimate dinner party, an off-site work session, or an international conference for change agents, the key to ensuring that transformative impact on the individual is to curate very purposefully the participants in the event.
Cathy Leff, the director of the Wolfsonian-FIU museum in Miami, emphasizes the importance of being a “people collector.” What she means by this is to be deliberate in assembling a wide array of multigenerational, multidisciplinary, culturally diverse minds. I worked with Cathy to put on the first TEDxMIA, a program celebrating local geniuses in Miami. Created in the spirit of TED.com’s mission—“ideas worth spreading”—TEDx programs are designed to give communities, organizations, and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level. TEDx events are fully planned and coordinated independently on a community-by-community basis and are a tremendous example of the power of strategically curating your group experience.
When I decided to launch TEDxMIA, I joined more than 1,800 plus curators in ninety-six countries worldwide who have put on more than 1,900 events in more than forty languages. TEDxers, as we call ourselves, are forging genius variations on the group experience around the globe. Chris Anderson, the curator of the TED conferences and TED.com, attributes the success of the TED model to “a philosophical belief in the importance of openness.” He believes there is a whole world of people who are excited by learning and being a part of the creation and spreading of new ideas and original thinking. As he puts it, “We trust the community and the belief in the power of ideas.”