How to Awaken Your Genius
“Pick a random business book in the nonfiction aisle, and chances are that you’ll find a formula for winning the business game by following the lead of today’s mega successful entrepreneurs,” writes Ozan Varol in his new book Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary.
I can attest that Varol’s newest is not that random business book. And yet so much of it sounds familiar. It’s more like a life guide, speaking to the soul, to the truest parts of ourselves. It’s well-written and packaged for today’s audience — pithy, blended with numbers, anecdotes, and the author’s unique background as a Turkish American rocket scientist/lawyer/professor/author. It even contains bursts of poetry.
Awaken Your Genius begins with a topic that endlessly fascinates, dreams. Early on, Varol describes seeing 0.8 * 0.2 = 0.16 scrawled in chalk on a classroom blackboard. He searches himself to figure out why he’s dreaming of an equation in which the product is less than the two factors. It smacks him: “When we operate at a fraction — at a 0.8 or a 0.2 instead of a full 1.0 — we compromise the output. Most of us go through life functioning at a fraction of everything we do.” An aha moment!
The book goes on to describe how all of us can operate at full capacity — from carefully choosing the media we consume, to following our curiosity, to “looking where and how no one is looking,” to questioning experts and all we’re exposed to, to going with our gut, to being a creator, and much more. He writes on Spanx founder and owner Sara Blakely who didn’t know about business and never wrote a business plan. Because she lacked a business background, she focused on the basics. He quotes her saying: “Make it, sell it, build awareness.” Blakely’s $5,000 investment is now a billion-dollar company.
As Varol writes about seeing what others don’t see, I think about Lin Manuel-Miranda, who imagined and wrote the famed hip-hop musical “Hamilton” after reading Ron Chernow’s tome Alexander Hamilton. Or interior designer and TV host Genevieve Gorder, who immediately re-envisions a space to be most functional and aesthetically pleasing before moving anything. Or the way writers realize their novels.
I believe all of us can see what others cannot in some discipline, perhaps many. Our work is to figure out where our gifts lie and share them with the world. Varol’s book is a solid manual to do that. Let’s take the time to awaken our genius!