In the traditional Western view of education and self-improvement, we strive primarily to acquire knowledge. We read books, go to school, and learn new skills to build our internal archives about ourselves and the world. This has long been sold to us as the whole of growth and success. “The way of success is the way of continuous pursuit of knowledge,” Napoleon Hill wrote in Think and Grow Rich, one of the best-selling self-help books ever published — and one of the clearest examples of this bias in action.
Knowledge matters. We might think of it as how we remember and harness the past. But it is only one piece of a fuller picture, and treated as the whole picture, it leaves something essential out.
Many of us also strive to cultivate presence. We practice meditation, yoga, and other mindfulness modalities to gain peace and equanimity, to release ourselves from rumination and suffering. Through presence, we attune to our aliveness, break down the internal barriers that limit us, and expand our ability to sense and navigate the world around us. Presence is how we attune to the now.
In contrast, genius is how we bring a desired future into being. It is the innate creative power within us that allows us to dream up or receive something that exists only in our imagination and then devise the actions, values, beliefs, and innovations that create that future.
Knowledge looks back and harnesses what was. Presence looks at and rests in what is here right now. Genius looks forward. It imagines and begins to create what doesn’t yet exist.
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.
