Inform Yourself

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

The Genius Project: First Evolution, Know Thyself - How We Think

The aspect of yourself that you will need to develop better self-awareness on is how you think and make decisions, because this is what controls your natural talents. There is a lot we don’t know about how the human mind works. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, as much as 90% of what we know about how our minds work has only been learned in the past 13 years. Imagine a major city library filled with all the knowledge the human race possesses on how the brain works. Now imagine 90% of those shelves empty and you get a picture of just how new our level of understanding for the human brain (and mind) really is. The leaps we’ve made in our understanding of the brain are quite remarkable, and while there is still much more to learn, what we do know is amazing enough.

Your mind is arguably the most miraculous creations in the entire universe. It controls every aspect of your life, conscious or subconscious. It never sleeps or stops gathering information. It can literally slow time or your perception of it at least, by increasing your processing speed five-fold in emergencies. It is a remarkably effective CEO of a trillion-cell organization. It is veracious, taking in more than 11,000,000 bits of information every second of our lives, and it has more processing capability than the most advanced computer ever built.

He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior. ~ Confucius

We are born with one hundred billion brain cells called neurons (100,000,000,000 cells or 1011). That’s more than any other creature on the planet. As we grow each of these neurons reaches out and connects to other neurons to create what are called neural networks. By the time we are three years old each of our one hundred billion neurons has created a connection to approximately fifteen thousand other neurons, each of those having the same number of connections with other neurons. Just imagine the incredible complexity of a network of living cells that large. That’s one million billion connections, and a whole lot of processing power. It is these networks that give us our ability to think, feel, remember, and be who we are.

Our neurons communicate with each other through electrical and chemical signals and each time a given network of neurons is used the more robust it becomes, at least at an early stage. Every time we have a recurring thought or process information in a similar way, we use a similar network of neurons and that network becomes reinforced. If one neural network becomes overwhelmed, it can actually even recruit other neurons to help support the load. These neural networks become mental filters that control which of those 11,000,000 bits of information streaming into our brains get noticed, and which don’t. Our neural networks are much like an Internet connection.

By the time we reach our early teens nearly half of those connections are gone. Through the repetitive use of certain networks and continual none-use of others, these networks become either very robust and fast or more anemic and slow. Throughout our early years this continual process of creating and pruning neural networks forms permanent networks that will last our lifetime, unchanged for the most part. It is these neural networks that determine our natural talents for thinking and making decisions. Because of the permanence of these neural networks, the natural talents they create are similarly fixed. We cannot forcibly develop new neural networks through conscious effort in a weekend training program, thus we cannot develop new natural talents with any greater effectiveness.

This is what makes self-awareness such a vital aspect of success. Since our natural talents are fixed, it is crucial that we understand what they are because this is what we have to work with. This also explains why much of the training and development efforts companies undertake fail to deliver the full return hoped for because much of it is focused on creating new natural talents; talents which require a neural network to support them. Sure, training, new knowledge, experience, intelligence, all of these can help improve my ability in a given talent, but if that talent is not supported by a high-speed, high-bandwidth connection, than I will never reach genius levels of performance. At best I might develop a moderate or even sufficient degree of ability, but no amount of conscious effort will magically turn my dial-up connection into a cable router.

Geniuses, though, don’t mind this fact. They don’t sit around wishing that they could become something they are not. The revel in the fact that they have the special mix of talents they have because they embrace their uniqueness. We are all uniquely imperfect people and this will never change nor should you want it to be any different. How mind numbingly boring would it be if we were all the same. Our uniqueness should be cherished and embraced. Success is not about ceasing to be uniquely imperfect or flawed. Success is not about striving to become perfect. It is about finding your uniquely perfect match between your perfections and imperfections and your objectives and roles in life.