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?

One thing he found common among the geniuses he interviewed was their concept of rarity. There is a large body of work out there supporting the argument that the more specialized you become, the more your chances of success increase. Specialization isn’t a new idea. Over two thousand and five hundred years ago Confucius saw the folly in trying to be too many things when he said, “The person who chases two rabbits catches neither.” Specializing in a niche area is one key to being very successful.

We’ve all heard the old mantra, “you can’t be all things to all people.” My work has proven to me that there is a direct but inverse correlation between the levels of performance one achieves and the scope or degree of specialization they have. Lower to middle levels of performance tend to correlate with broader scopes of practice whereas the higher levels correlate with higher degrees of specialization. In other words, the more you try to be, the less you will achieve.

The geniuses we've worked with are anything but generalists. They all specialize in a very fine area of expertise. Think about some of the professionals you know for a moment, like doctors, lawyers, scientists or coaches. In the medical community we see a clear association between “the best” and the degree of specialization. Medical professionals have created some of the most specialized levels of practice in any industry. The orthopedic community, a specialization in and of itself already, has developed specialists (experts) in the hand, sports medicine, spine, upper extremities and lower extremities, even those who specialize in just elbows. In law, already a specialization, you see a field that has fractured into narrower and narrower levels of specialization with tax lawyers, trial lawyers, defense attorneys, certain kinds of medical malpractice attorneys who focus on only certain kinds of medicine (to keep up with the hyper-specialization in the medical community perhaps). Look at Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking, both genius physicists, but a specialized kind of physics - theoretical physics (as if physics wasn’t already specialized enough).

Randy Haykin is a great example of a guy who understands the role that rarity plays in being successful. “I’ve always believed in thinking outside the box, thinking in ways that others simply are not, and playing where few others are playing. I like taking the rare perspective on things,” says Randy. As founding Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Yahoo! Inc. in the early 1990’s, Randy brought this appreciation for rarity with him from Apple. Randy summarizes his approach by saying, “I wanted us to be the biggest fattest fish we could be - in the smallest pond we could find.”

Anthony Robbins captures the same kind of thoughts on rarity when he talks about success. “One of the reasons I think a lot of people fail to achieve what they truly want is that they never direct their focus; they never decide to master anything in particular. In fact, I think most people fail in life simply because they major in minor things,” says Robbins. The person who tries to do everything, be everything, usually accomplishes nothing.

The more specialized you get, the more niche a market you create or serve, the greater the likelihood that you will reach the 5th level of performance will be. Why? It’s simple really. Aside from the fact that in almost every single category of life or business, specialists significantly out earn generalists at every turn, the bigger problem is that trying to be all things to all people fails to focus all of your genius in one targeted area. Like the light of the sun focused through a magnifying glass, the more diffuse the focus, the less power it has. The more focused that beam of light is, however, the stronger it is.

If, as a child, you’ve ever lit a leaf on fire on a hot summer day you understand what we're talking about. Spreading yourself too thin is basically futile. It doesn’t work, at least not very well. He who is a jack-of-all-trades is a master of none, and 5th level performance requires mastery. If we remember that the key to becoming truly authentic is to reduce your success’ dependence on non-talents, then by reducing the variables in that success you make this task easier. If you are attempting to be a genius at lots of different things, you will surely have a hard time of it. You might become adequate at many things, but not an expert at any of them. Even those who have talents in all areas or classes of talent, the rarest of patterns by the way, have non-talents. Everyone has talents and everyone has non-talents.