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?

There is an old cliché in real estate that the three most things in real estate are: location, location, and location. This is also very true in the world of individual performance and success. My use of location in this sense represents where you are standing in the future, what your roles will be, what your job duties are. If all of us have talents, why aren’t we all equally as successful? Granted there are lots of contributing factors as to why one person may be more successful than another, but one major reason we see such diversity in performance is where we live (and I don’t mean our street address). Everyone may indeed have talents, but unfortunately not everyone does as good a job of positioning themselves in a location (i.e., job or role) that is a great match for their talents. Many people occupy locations where their success depends on their non-talents more than their talents. The geniuses among us do a great job of knowing what they are good at and not good at, then finding or creating a locating for themselves (roles, jobs, etc.) that accentuate their strengths and minimize any weaknesses. A good location is one that allows you to depend as much as possible on their talents, and as little as possible on their non-talents. Geniuses occupy locations that allow them to be authentic, that allow them to be more successful.

There are a lot of analogies that demonstrate the significance of location. Imagine you were a dune buggy. Your natural strengths would be for racing in the desert, over rough terrain, in horrible conditions that required very high body clearance, an insane amount of suspension, lots of raw power and huge tires that get good traction in the soft sand. These are your talents as a dune buggy. Now, would it make any sense at all to take that dune buggy and enter it in a NASCAR or Formula One race? It would seem obvious to us that attempting to race a dune buggy in a formula one race wouldn’t make any sense because the differences between the strengths of the dune buggy and the strengths required by the location (i.e., the tight, winding city streets some old European town) are so blatant. Athletes are another good analogy for the importance of location.

Take Peyton Manning or Michael Jordan and switch their location. How well would Peyton Manning, a star NFL Quarterback, perform as a Kicker or offensive lineman? How well did Michael Jordan actually perform as a professional baseball player? When it comes to finding the right location for our natural talents, the non-physical ones, the matter of fit is just as important.

The problem is, our thinking talents are not as obvious or observable as are our physical talents. Failing to find the right location in which to apply your potential, however, has the same kind of negative impact. How much of a genius would Albert Einstein have been as a marriage counselor? Would Oprah make a brilliant administrative assistant? Would the world remember Patton the artist, or Van Gogh the military commander? In the wrong location, all of these geniuses would have never been considered the best at what they do. These examples may seem obvious and silly to you, but due to the legacy of dependence many people suffer from, many still believe it is the company, or others, who are better suited for determining their best location. As Peter Drucker, the elder statesman of management wisdom, says,” even today, remarkably few Americans are prepared to select jobs [location] for themselves.”

You are the best one to determine your best location. You are the only one who can hear those voices in your head and understand your own best path. Unfortunately, our natural talents are much less obvious then our physical talents, therefore many times the best location is not as obvious to us. We don’t realize we are a dune buggy, or that we are the only dune buggy in the race. As a result we attempt to modify the dune buggy with a new suspension, different tires, and other “developmental” efforts to try and make it fit the location better. As silly as this would be for the physical world of a racecar, that’s what people all over the world do when they find themselves in the wrong race. They fail to see the incompatibility between themselves and the race they are competing in and they spend a great majority of their time trying to change themselves to fit their role better – all the meanwhile the race goes on while they are stuck in the pits trying to modify their racecar. Understanding your natural talents better, and then understanding which roles you fill and how you fill them is the key to reaching the 5th level of performance. Geniuses do a great job of finding roles and setting goals where their talents are optimally aligned with the demands of the environment. In a way, Geniuses are expert real estate agents.