You’re Not a Genius

Your most self-destructive impulse: believing that thing it took you two seconds to come up with was a genius idea. That you’re some creative mastermind who can brainstorm gold. Get over it. The first thing that pops into your head is not revolutionary. It wasn’t, it couldn’t be. So we hold ourselves back when we fall in love with the narrative that we will walk into a room full of people who have done this longer than we have and dazzle them with our ideas. Or not even ideas, but dazzle them while spitballing.

I wish it was cool like that, but it never seems to be.

No. Contributions come from taking the time to develop a deep understanding of everything at play and more often than not, coming up with gradual improvements and suggestions. They come from the rigor and discipline of really knowing something. Half your ideas get thrown away. More than half deserve to be thrown away. Maybe there is some vaunted genius out there whose every thought is mind-blowing but that person is not you.

This bitter little pill does not change another hard reality, however: most people accepted ‘the way things have always been done’ with equal flippancy. Whatever is wrong or broken about the field you’re working in probably will be incredibly and instantly obvious. That is, you are not a genius but most people and practices are really dumb. When you can wrap your head around that paradox, you’ll have the whole package.

The key to doing it is this: trust your instincts as you survey what’s wrong, ignore them as soon as what they tell you starts to make you feel superior. Make your evaluations but shut your mouth. Why replace flippantly accepted ideas with new flippantly created ideas? Think about your idea for more than two seconds. Don’t fall in love with the image of you as the artist or the wunderkind or the hired gun or intuitive expert. These are chimeras.

What you can be is the person who gets things done, the person whose ideas are better. And changes people’s minds, slowly, over time.

Written by Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Trust Me, I’m Lying, The Obstacle Is The Way, Ego Is The Enemy, and other books about marketing, culture, and the human condition. His work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared everywhere from the Columbia Journalism Review to Fast Company. His company, Brass Check, has advised companies such as Google, TASER, and Complex, as well as Grammy Award winning musicians and some of the biggest authors in the world. He lives in Austin, Texas.