What’s Your Native Genius?
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My bed is covered with probably-way-too-many-pillows, and so every night we take the pillows off, stack them in a corner somewhere, and then in the morning put them back on. This week when I was putting them back and taking pillows from the stack that my husband had made the night before, I realized that we both had a different process for such a simple thing. If you do this at home, think about it for a minute (I promise I have a point to all this). How do you stack the pillows?
The way I see it, there are three options:
Throw them in a chaotic pile and hop in bed.
Stack them in the order you took them off, so the smallest pillows will be on the bottom and the biggest on the top.
Stack them with the biggest on the bottom and the smallest on the top so it's in an organized pyramid.
As I was putting them back on the bed in the morning I realized that my husband chooses option 3, while I choose option 2. For me, when I stack them I am not thinking about how they look right now, I am thinking about what will make my life easier in the morning. I want the pillow on top to be the pillow that I need to put back on the bed first. I'm not optimizing for today, I'm optimizing for efficiency tomorrow. I'm thinking strategically.
This is my native genius.
I do it with pillows and I do it at work. I don’t think about this at all, it just happens. In fact, I didn’t even realize I was doing this with the pillows until I compared it to how someone else did it. When you have a native genius, which is a term coined by Liz Wiseman in her book Multipliers, it is something that comes so naturally to you that you don't have to make any conscious effort to do it.
With the people in our lives that we work or live with, it can be all too easy to miss someone's natural talent because it is not something that comes naturally to you. We see it as a flaw rather than the genius that it is. My husband optimizes for the moment. I optimize for the future. We will always be at odds with this which means it can be something that causes conflict, or we can choose to recognize the value the other brings.
So what's your native genius? What is something you do "not only exceptionally well, but absolutely naturally… easily (without extra effort) and freely (without condition)." (The Wiseman Group). If you want to thrive in work and life you need to find something that gives you space to use your native genius. Find people that don't try to shove it down and minimize it, but people that amplify it. Find people that will do this for you, and make your best effort to do it for others. What annoys you the most about someone might actually be their greatest gift to the world.
