Genius is not reserved for a special few of us. It is available to all of us.
You don’t have to win a Nobel prize. You don’t have to be “Person of the Year.” You don’t need to be an intellectual, a phenom, or even an innovator in the usual sense of the word. Genius is there in each and every one of us.
But your genius is not a mere copy of some shared template, stamped out identically in each of us. Genius is the force that allows us to create novel forms. And your expression of it is itself a novel form that only exists within you.
Consider the stars. Astronomers measure the spectrum of light radiating from a star, and every star carries a readable signature of its particular composition, temperature, and age. This is known as stellar spectroscopy.
Nearly every star is made of the same basic elements. And yet no two shine in quite the same way. Each of the sextillions of stars in the known universe has its own signature, its own stellar fingerprint.
Humans are the same. As a species, we are unique here on Earth in our capacity to harness genius. No other creature we know of can bring forth novel forms so deliberately, so profoundly.
But each individual human is also a unique expression in and of itself. There is genius simply in the ideas that only you have ever thought, the feelings only you have felt in that particular way, the way you move through the world, and all the endless ways you are uniquely you. No one else has lived, loved, lost, and noticed exactly what you have. No one else ever will. You will never be replicated.
Your genius is not incidental to your existence. It is the light only you can shine. Just as genius is what makes us human, it is perhaps what most makes you you.
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book The Antihero’s Journey: From Burnout to Real Contribution in Polycrisis Times. To read other excerpts, go here.
