Genius 101 (Intro)

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When I was a child, my greatest dream was to be a professional basketball player. I remember I used to watch the Boston Celtics. Bob Cousy was my favorite player. He was an amazing ball handler, and he wasn't that tall, but he seemed to have complete control of the court. He knew where everybody was. He dished the ball just in the perfect moment to one of his teammates. The Celtics were winning championships. And I thought, that's what I want to do. I want to be like Bob Cousy. I want to be a professional basketball player. And then I remember one of the saddest days of my life when I realized that that wasn't going to happen in this lifetime. Nevertheless, I always loved basketball and like most of my friends, continued to fantasize about what it would be like to be an NBA player. We'd play in the playgrounds, and I would drive the ball into the corner. I would fade, and I would imagine that I was Oscar Robertson, Larry Bird a number of years later. I still do this today. I'm telling you, it's like. And he drives down the lane. He fades, he fires. And it's good. Yes, it's a wonderful, fun fantasy dream. When I get together to this day with my friends, one of my favorite activities is to discuss who are the greatest players of all time. And I was in a car service the other day going to the airport, and the driver and I got into a great conversation about who are the greatest players of all time. And you're only allowed. You're starting five. Why would you choose them? What qualities do they have? And people love doing this. It's fun. But we're also informing our prowess as players. Even though I realized I wasn't going to make the NBA, Even though I realized I wouldn't be as good as Bob Cousy or Oscar Robertson or Larry Bird or LeBron James. I probably became a much better basketball player because right from the beginning of my journey through basketball, I was surrounding myself with images of the very greatest players. It's the same thing with genius. But here's the good news. You need a certain amount of basic athletic talent to have a hope of making it in the NBA. But if you just have the complement that we're pretty much all born with, of 100 billion brain cells, then you have access today more than ever, to what I call it the democratization of genius. See, we used to think of a genius as someone like an Oscar Robertson, a Larry Bird, somebody with an amazing gift that's so far beyond anything that you or I might have. And there is that level of genius. There are people like Mozart, five years old, and he's downloading these unbelievable, magnificent compositions. So there clearly are different levels of talent that we're gifted with. But just as we can improve our basketball game by studying the great players of all time, we can access our own genius by studying the greatest geniuses of. Of all time. Now, my joke about this is, someday they're going to call me up and say, can you write the book on genius for dummies? Right? But it's not actually genius for dummies. It's just genius for people with the natural complement of 100 billion brain cells, which is pretty much our endowment. One of my favorite geniuses, one of the great renaissance people of all time, George Washington Carver, said, I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in. So the good news about genius and the democratization of genius is there's a broadcast. You're an antenna. How do you get better reception? There's a lot of static. There's a lot of noise in the environment at the moment. But when you study the great geniuses of history, as I have done, as we're going to do together, what you realize, they invariably use some language similar to what Carver uses, that they felt that they were receiving insight, they were being receptive to some higher mind or higher intelligence. If they were religious, they talked about God speaking to them. If they weren't specifically religious, just so called spiritual, they'd talk about nature or insight arising. And the good news is this is something that's accessible to. To all of us. So one of the wonderful ways to tune your antenna to get better reception is to surround yourself with the greatest minds in history. The word genius comes from the same root as Genesis. Generate, genuine. It means to beget, to create. And we all have. We're all gifted with virtually unlimited creative power. So one of the ways to begin to get access to that is to. Just like you might pattern your ball handling game after Bob Cousy, or you might pattern your ability to find the right positioning on the court after Larry Bird, or just basic fundamentals from Tim Duncan, or, okay, jump shot, we're all looking at Steph Curry. So you find role models and you abstract the quality from those role models, and then you practice accordingly. And what's fascinating is if you interview the great basketball players, they invariably are students of the history of the game. They all pattern their game after a previous superstar. LeBron talks all the time about how much he modeled himself after Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan modeled himself after Connie Hawkins and Dr. J. So everybody grows up with some kind of role model, some kind of sense of what's possible. And one of the secrets, one of the big Ideas for Genius 101 is to consciously choose your own genius dream, dream team and then learn the qualities of each of those geniuses.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.