Meet your Genius

                            

How often have you called someone a genius?

Too big a title huh?

I am not saying that it is wrong, I am just saying it is putting too much weight on fragile human shoulder.

Cambridge dictionary defines genius as very great and rare natural ability or skill, especially in a particular area such as science or art, or a person who has this.

Merriam Webster defines as an attendant spirit of a person or place.

Commonly defined as a person who is exceptionally intelligent or creative.

The definition I find peculiarly interesting is given on Wikipedia,

In Roman religion, the genius is the individual instance of a general divine nature that is present in every individual person, place, or thing. Much like a guardian angel, the genius would follow each man from the hour of his birth until the day he died. 

The genius for each female was a Juno and for male, a Jupiter.

They believed genius to be a mystical creature. This definition separates man from his genius. Remember this.

We are familiar with the way this word rolls off our tongue in common language. 

I am offering a different perspective.

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of best-selling novel 'Eat Pray and Love' , while writing her following novel, had fallen in pit of despair. After days of despair, she finally did something that helped her move forward. She started directing her comments to an empty corner of the room.

"Listen  you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn't entirely brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don't have any more than this. If you want it to be better, you've got to show up and do your part of the deal. But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it. I'm going to keep writing anyway because that's my job. And I would like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job."

What did she do here?

She personified her skill as being a genius spirit who worked on the novel with her to produce it as a marvelous work. By accepting that, she is not entirely responsible for her work , she effectively lifts off the pressure of producing another best-selling work. She just has to do her job of writing and the let the genius worry about the uniqueness that will make it a success.

Ruth Stone, a poet, claimed that poem would come at her from over a landscape like a thunderous train of air and then she knew she had to write it down. She says many times she was not able to catch the poem and it would just pass through her and move along the landscape looking for another poet to channel through.

When you call genius as a spirit that comes to you, when you separate yourself from the genius skill you think you have, you are saving yourself from this internalized torment.

You are letting go of the entitlement. By doing this, you are releasing an internalized pressure of excelling and when you do this, when you say that all your creativity, the success you have had, all of that was like given and put in you at some moment by a mystical creature, a thing, some genius, you are giving that entitlement to something else, you suddenly feel light. Now when you perform bad, its not your fault. Its just that the genius didn't show up while you were working on it, or that your genius is lame, and so your work didn't turn out the best. The pressure of performance is gone and now you are free. Now I understand this might seem like a cowardly way out of it. I am  asking you to put the blame on some mystical creature because you are not strong enough to bear it. But hey in my defense, I am asking you to share the appreciation of your work too, the entitlement too. 

The thing is life is a different experience for everyone. Each of us try to simplify life for ourselves and navigate through it. Life is still hard but we do what we can to make it bearable, right? This idea of genius helps you like that. When the performance pressure disappears, you get to work with all you have and might end up producing your next best work and if you didn't you can go back to reworking on it after reminding  genius to show up this time. When you accept that you are not the genius, you are just the channel , you will be free to experiment. After your first success, you won't have to worry over your next work being as much better. It is like accepting what you are , a human, a human who will make mistakes, a human who produced an epic work once, a human who despite innumerable hours of effort failed to make the cut and not a genius who has to be miraculously best all the time.

You must look up what the musician Tom Waits has to say about his genius.

I strongly recommend watching this ted talk where Elizabeth Gilbert makes a better case on the subject.

Your elusive creative genius

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