The 46 Rules of Genius Read online

   A goal of design is to drive out disorder by maximizing both simplicity and complexity. In most designed products, what we respond to best is a rich, layered experience (complexity) combined with ease of use, ease of understanding, or ease of purchase (simplicity).

   Most people have a built-in bias toward addition instead of subtraction. For some reason, the concept of “more” comes naturally to us. Yet the innovator knows that the value of any design doesn’t lie in how much is piled on, but how much is discarded. More is more, but less is better.

   Here are seven ways to simplify your work:

  1. Test elements by removing them one by one. A design should have no unnecessary parts or gratuitous elements. See if subtracting an element will hurt the overall design. If it doesn’t, remove it.

  2. Discard needless features. More is not always better. Build your design around one or two main features and keep the others secondary.

  3. Kill vampire elements. Make sure none of the elements is contradicting a more important one, or drawing attention from the main idea.

  4. Place elements in a logical sequence. Try numbering the elements to give them a sense of order. Put them into a line, a series, or a time-based sequence.

  5. Group items into buckets. If the purpose of the design calls for a large number of elements, group them by use, meaning, size, or other organizing principle.

  6. Hide complexity behind a simple interface. Help people navigate complexity by giving them intuitive controls. For example, the electrical grid is complicated, but a light switch makes it easy to use.

  7. Align elements behind a single purpose. When all the elements support a simple purpose, the whole design will appear simple.

  Works of genius are rarely complicated on the surface. You can describe their greatness in a single sentence, and even embellish them slightly without destroying their simplicity. Such is the power of subtraction. As you learn to simplify, you’ll discover that the best design tool is a long eraser with a pencil at one end.

  Part 3

  HOW CAN I LEARN?

  The illiterate of the

  21st century will

  not be those who

  cannot read and write,

  but those who cannot learn,

  unlearn, and relearn.

  —Alvin Toffler

  Rule 25

  LEARN HOW TO LEARN

  Learning to learn is a metaskill—a skill applied to itself. It multiplies your knowledge and accelerates your progress. When you learn to be your own teacher, you can acquire any skill you put your mind to. You can quickly build a new skill on the roof of the last one. You can move laterally from one skill to the next by bringing deeply understood principles to related disciplines. The ability to direct your learning is personal growth squared.

   Teaching yourself is called autodidacticism. It requires that you develop your own theory of learning, a personal framework for acquiring new knowledge. While every person’s framework is different, here are ten principles you can use to construct it:

   Learn by doing. We learn better and faster when we use our hands, our senses, and our whole bodies in addition to our brains.

   Find worthy work. Not all work is educational, important, or fun. Look for work you believe in. It’s too hard to work with one hand holding your nose!

   Harness habits. The brain forms habits when routines are transferred from the rational level to the automatic level. They allow you to perform familiar tasks with little conscious effort, freeing up mental resources for new challenges.

   Focus on your goals. It’s easy to become distracted by shiny objects in your periphery. A genius learns to concentrate on a single task for an extended period of time.

   Cultivate your memory. While general knowledge is available online, your store of craft-specific knowledge needs to be ready at a moment’s notice. Memorize it.

   Increase your sensitivity. A key trait of genius is the ability to make subtle distinctions among outcomes. Consciously identify the nuances that separate the truly great from the merely good.

   Stretch your boundaries. To keep growing, always aim slightly beyond your current abilities.

   Customize your metaskills. Intuition, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, imagination, and other high-level skills can make a big difference in how you learn. Focus on the metaskills that will drive your professional success.

   Feed your desire. When you want something so badly that you never give up, success eventually surrenders to you. Keep the fires of passion burning with books, articles, talks, and conferences.

   Scare yourself. Take on projects and responsibilities that lie outside your comfort zone. Look for workarounds to mitigate your fears. As any genius will tell you, fears faced are fears erased.

  Rule 26

  START WITH CURIOSITY, NOT BELIEF

  Ideology is toxic to learning. As soon as you begin to believe something, the spirit of inquiry dies. If you believe that climate change is unrelated to human activity, there’s no reason to change your behavior. If you believe that new technology is always beneficial, there’s no reason to question it. If you believe your company is the best in its industry, there’s no reason to improve it. Belief is the surest way to stop imagination, innovation, and progress.

   There’s an old adage: “Seeing is believing.” The assumption is that we find it difficult to accept anything as truth until we see the evidence for it. Yet it’s far more likely that, for most of us, believing is seeing. Once we believe something, we’re all too ready to see it as truth. Pyschologists call this phenomenon confirmation bias—a tendency to block out inconvenient facts that happen to contradict our belief system.

   A key characteristic of the genius is a strong disbelief system. Instead of starting from belief, the genius starts from a position of curiosity, wonder, skepticism, or iconoclasm. The journey leads from the unknown to the known, and, with luck and perseverance, you’ll discover new information along the way.

   The rule is simple: If you’re looking for real knowledge, keep ideology at bay. Pretend you’re an alien with no preconceptions about life on Earth. Lean on belief only when necessary. And even then, think of belief as a placeholder for knowledge—not knowledge itself.

  Rule 27

  DO YOUR OWN PROJECTS

  Something happens when you work on challenges of your own choosing. Your mind becomes magnetized. It starts to attract little bits of information that can help you solve your problem or complete your project. While a magnetized mind can occur with any kind of challenge, the effect is strongest when the challenge rises from your own passion or your own sense of purpose.

   When you do your own projects, you give full play to four capabilities: 1) An abiding passion for discovery and innovation, 2) an ability to shape a large body of knowledge into a coherent system, 3) the skill to translate this system of knowledge into action, and 4) a capacity for deep concentration over an extended period of time.

   These are the traits of a genius. Everyone experiences some success in these areas during his or her life. What the genius does is to turn these traits into lifelong habits, which are then expressed as talent. Talent isn’t something we have—it’s something we do. We develop our skills in the course of working on the kinds of projects, problems, and challenges that address our deepest interests.

   While you can’t always bend your workplace to your will, you can look for small opportunities on the outside, or after hours, to practice your craft. These experiences, far more than the daily grind of given assignments, will help you reach your creative potential.

  Rule 28

  KEEP A HERO FILE

  Students in creative disciplines sometimes worry that they might lose their personal style if they allow themselves to be influenced by teachers, practitioners, or other students. They reason that imitation is the enemy of innovation. They believe that if the unique talent they need isn’t there already, it never will be.
r />    There’s a kernel of truth to this. But only a kernel. Because the way we actually learn is by standing on the shoulders of others. We acquire skills by watching more advanced practitioners do their work, eventually growing strong enough to support the weight of newer practitioners.

   To develop a strong personal style, open yourself to the widest possible range of influences. Look closely at the work of practitioners, groups, and cultures you admire. Appreciate with felonious intent. When you see something you wish you had done, copy it, photograph it, tear it out, take notes on it; put it in a file, pin it to a board, tape it into a book, or keep it on a shelf. Your natural likes and dislikes will act as a filter, so that the examples you collect will begin to resemble your future style.

   Every time you start a new project, revisit your hero file and use the examples as benchmarks for quality. Don’t quit working until you’ve achieved something as good as one of the items you admire.

   Of course, standing on the shoulders of giants is one thing. Clinging to their pant legs is another. Make sure you steal the principles that underlie their work and not the work itself. Outright copying teaches very little. Learning to extract and apply principles is the path to genius.

  Rule 29

  INVEST IN YOUR ORIGINALITY

  The ability to produce original work is a rare and valuable asset. It lies at the heart of innovation, strategic differentiation, and societal progress. It imparts a quality of “never-before-ness” that can command attention, fill voids, and create wealth. By definition, you can’t be original by copying an original. You have to start from a different place.

   Originality doesn’t come from factual knowledge, nor does it come from the suppression of factual knowledge. Instead, it comes from the exposure of factual knowledge to the animating force of imagination. Imagination is the ability to conjure mental images, sensations, or concepts without perceiving them through the senses. Everyone is born with this ability, but the genius is a person who cultivates it, applies it, and invests in it. Imagination is a learnable skill.

   Depending on the quality of your knowledge and the level of your imagination, originality can fall into four quadrants: 1) ideas adapted from the same domain, 2) ideas adapted from a different domain, 3) ideas that are new to yourself, and 4) ideas that are new to the world.

   If you have a little knowledge and a little imagination, you might be able to borrow an idea from a competitor and adapt it for your own purposes. While not truly original, it can nevertheless contain enough freshness to get the job done. You can take comfort in Voltaire’s claim that “originality is nothing more than judicious plagiarism.”

   But let’s say you have a bit of experience, and your subject knowledge is fairly broad. By applying a small amount of imagination to your larger knowledge base, you might be able to adapt an idea from a different domain—another industry, discipline, or culture. In this case your originality would be of a higher order, less like plagiarism and more like appropriation.

   Or maybe you have much less knowledge, but a well-developed imagination. You might be able to invent an idea you’ve never encountered before. Although others may have invented the same idea without your knowing it, the ability to imagine “new to you” ideas is the first step toward being an original thinker.

   As you accrue more knowledge and you exercise your imagination with deliberate practice, “new to you” can become “new to the world.” At this point you’ve seen enough to know what has and hasn’t been done, and inventive enough to fill the gap with a surprising idea.

   Originality is more than judicious plagiarism. It’s the ability to dream, to disassociate your thoughts from the linear and logical and end up someplace new. And like many skills that were once thought to be inborn, it must be learned.

  Rule 30

  LEARN STRATEGICALLY

  You can learn anything, but you can’t learn everything. Be careful what you take into your brain-attic, since there’s only so much room up there. Pick your subjects with a sense of purpose.

   For example, if your goal is to bring a cinematic quality to video games, you should stuff your brain with the history of film, graphic novels, and representational art. You should pay attention to dance, sports, and music. You should master the digital tools of your trade, and take a strong interest in emerging technology. While you can certainly take up dog training on the side, starting a whole second career in dental hygiene would probably slow your progress.

   It’s a competitive world, and the best way to outrun your competitors is to outlearn them. This doesn’t mean burning the midnight oil week after week, month after month, head buried in books or eyes glued to various screens. It’s not about the quantity of your knowledge. It’s about strategic alignment. Does your learning line up with your goals? Will it lead to fresh insights or deeper understanding? There’s plenty of time to learn everything you need to know, as long as you learn strategically and not randomly.

   Over the long haul, how you learn is more important than what you learn. When you know how to learn, you start to use the most powerful metaskill of all. It’s the self-awareness that comes from observing what you think while you’re thinking it. “Metacognition” tells you when and how to use a particular strategy to get the most useful knowledge, right when you need it. It saves time and energy, which you can then apply to more learning, which in turn saves more time and energy. Great for you, great for your dog.

  Rule 31

  SHORE UP YOUR WEAKNESSES

  There are two contradictory schools of thought on developing skills. The first is to build on your strengths and forget about your weaknesses. The second is to strengthen your weaknesses until your report card is all As. Unfortunately, both schools of thought fail to nurture your inner genius.

   The truth is, brilliant people often start with a lopsided skill set. They fall in love with a subject or activity for which they have a special knack, then keep adding to their skills while letting other subjects or activities slide. This creates a canceling effect: they get good at what they love, but their lack of ability in other areas limits their success. Think of the engineer without the right people skills, or the entrepreneur who can’t balance a checkbook.

   The remedy for lopsided brilliance is to simply shore up your deficiencies and not try to eliminate them. You don’t need the skills of an orator to be a thought leader—just original ideas and the courage to deliver them from a podium. You don’t need the drawing skills of a Leonardo da Vinci to be a great painter—just a grasp of aesthetics and a vision for the next big thing in art. The idea is to neutralize your weaknesses so your strengths can operate unfettered.

   The concerns of a genius fall into three main areas: 1) originality (applied imagination), 2) craft (mastery of tools), and 3) efficiency (getting things done). If you’re like many creative people, you’re strong in only two of these areas. All you need to do is neutralize your weakness in the third. For example, if you’re strong in originality and craft, prioritize speed. If you’re strong in craft and efficiency, prioritize originality. If you’re strong in efficiency and originality, prioritize craft. By shoring up your weakest area, your genius is free to soar.

  Rule 32

  SPEND LONG HOURS IN THE JOY ZONE

  When your work contains an element of joy, you learn faster. This is called ludic learning, or learning by playing. What makes it so effective is the space it allows for positive emotions. Emotions drive attention, and attention drives learning. Physiologically, creative play releases endorphins, tiny molecules that put you in a good mood. When you’re happy, you’re more creative. When you’re unhappy, you lose access to your intuition. Happiness and creativity are mutually supportive.

   How do you know when you’re in the joy zone? When you lose track of time and all you can think about is the work itself. This doesn’t mean that your task suddenly seems easy, or that you’re aware of having fun, but that you’re completely absorbed
in your challenge. You’re working in the Goldilocks channel: not too easy, not too hard—just right. People in this state can learn new skills up to ten times as fast as those who are anxious (with a too-difficult task) and those who are bored (with a too-easy task). Long hours become short hours when your work is playful.

   It’s generally acknowledged that creativity seems to happen “out of time,” as if the clock doesn’t matter. What’s less acknowledged is that creativity actually requires this condition to flourish. Creativity simply takes as long as it takes. The more you try to rush it, the less you achieve. The less you try to rush it, the more you achieve. You can’t reasonably expect to have an epiphany by 11:45 or an innovation a week from Tuesday. But if you forget about the clock, you may well have an innovation a week from Tuesday, if not sooner.

   Creative learning assumes freedom—the freedom to find the right balance between your personal ability and your challenges. You have to identify your strengths, discover the right medium in which to express them, and allow yourself the necessary time to experiment and push the limits of your understanding. Ludic learning is often the doorway to genius.

  Rule 33

  MAKE EDUCATIONAL MISTAKES

  In the realm of creativity, mistakes aren’t mistakes. They’re clues. Each one reveals a part of the mystery you’re trying to solve.

   The fact is, if you already knew how to proceed with a project, you wouldn’t need creativity. You could just follow the recipe, read the manual, or tick the boxes. Creativity is the discipline you use when you don’t know the answers, when you’re traveling to parts unknown. On this type of journey, missteps are actually steps. Every mistake brings you closer to the solution.