Based on my presentation in People’s Square, Shanghai, 21 August 2007.

What you focus upon you will tend to bring into your life, whether it’s what you want or what you don’t want. It’s sometimes called The Law of Attraction, The Secret and a bunch of other names, but ultimately it’s pretty simple: Focus on what you want.

The questions that you ask yourself shift your focus and are one of the main ways that we think deliberately about anything. If you ask yourself “why does this always happen to me?” you’ll get a very different answer to “how can I make this better?” So ask yourself the questions that you really want answered.

Let go of your handbrake and go for it. None of us get an ‘certificate of attendance’ for life, so embrace the moment and accept the gift of the precious present.

Really, there are only two types of problem: Either you know what you want and don’t know how to get it, or you don’t know what you want. And a lot of the time, the first problem type is actually the second type in disguise! So what do you really want?

And remember a few attributes of geniuses…

• It takes a decade to really get somewhere
• You have to go beyond knowledge towards making a unique contribution
• Postpone the need for closure and withstand conformance pressures
• Cultivate skills, processes and the motivation
• Focus your energy and effort
• Be motivated by Mastery, Entertainment, Exploration and Happiness, before than external rewards

You are talented and it’s just a little jump to lift yourself up to being a ‘genius’ – and that’s somewhere that I can help…

Daniel Smith

Excellence has to be more than ‘good’ – being good, or even very good. Being very good is so common that it doesn’t even rate a mention these days: anybody can do it.

For me, excellence has something to do with finding your voice. Finding that part of yourself that is unique and developing yourself so that you can share it with the world. There are countless pathways to finding your voice… from NLP to work to psychotherapy to karate to mysticism to religion to intimate relationships and even sex itself.

I find that we are all drawn towards finding our voice. We are pulled towards what we enjoy and pushed away from that which we find painful. Sometimes, our conditioning or external conditions lead us to ignore these messages – that’s why we need to shut up and listen as my friend Jason says – but ultimately the message is still there.

Once we have enough excitement and diversity, enough security and stability, enough power and enough love, most of us are drawn to two higher needs: to expand and to impact. To expand is to learn and grow so that we can become greater; to impact is to leave an impression and a contribution in the world.

Personal excellence can come back values. While reviewing my NLP Master Practitioner materials yesterday, I was reminded of the ‘levels of consciousness’ concept. This model holds that individuals and societies and even the world progresses as it changes its way of thinking.

Daniel Smith

There was a study done on soccer players around 2008.  To briefly summarise, there is a skill in soccer that is about anticipating where the ball is going to go.  The offensive and defensive soccer players were divided into two groups, and it was found anticipating where the ball is going to go was done far better by defensive players than offensive players (even when done in defense and offense, respectively).  Obviously, the defensive players have this as a central part of their role, while it’s more peripheral (and has less damaging results) for offensive players.

A Mark Williams,  Paul Ward,  Julian D Ward,  Nicolas J Smeeton. (2008). Domain Specificity, Task Specificity, and Expert Performance. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 79(3), 428-33.  Available from Proquest.com .

On the surface, this looks counter intuitive – soccer players should be soccer players, right? – but even mentally, there are quite different skills required in defense from offense, even though it’s within the one game.

We can apply this to everyday life, too.  I have a friend who works as an engineer for a major mining company, and at the drop of a hat, he can tell you the exact specifications of any given bolt that can be used in mining machinery.  Another friend worked in air conditioning, and could easily diagnose any problem that happened to an air-conditioner. I’m sure many readers could bring out other stories like this (and feel free to comment with some of them).  By the same token, that engineer would be at a significant disadvantage in, for example, electrical engineering – even though it’s engineering, with similar concepts required.

What this means for us is that we choose to excel at needs to be defined, specific and achievable.  We can’t be afraid to spend several thousand hours perfecting that skill, either…but that’s another post for another time.

Andrew Smith.

The photo that I uploaded here wasn’t terribly different from any photo that I’ve uploaded previously. Yet this time it has sparked a bunch of comments – whereas my ‘average’ photo on Facebook struggles to even get a caption or tagged correctly. And it wasn’t the first comment that ‘did’ it either, but rather it was the stream of comments that compounded together to create momentum.

Momentum like that is difficult to predict, a combination, I think, of there being so much random variation (aka “chance”) involved and there being so many semi-opaque variables that even if you did know all the things that you would need to know to figure out the answer, it would be too much of a pain for you to figure it out anyway.

It is like a trend – there are just so many things that contribute to a trend’s success that it is immensely difficult to predict. Why did JR Rawlings become a billion-dollar miracle while David Eddings’ or Robert Jordan’s endless volumes of high-quality fantasy remain merely popular?

Rather like intimate relationships at times…

Of course, there are externalities involved at times and conspiracy theorists have been making other books out of this for years (a la The Da Vinci Code), yet the gap between the .00001% that makes a fortune and significantly impacts the lives of millions of people, and being “just another” seems so grotesquely small.

It doesn’t seem to be “skill” (eg Ayn Rand).

It doesn’t seem to be “originality” (eg The Secret).

However, it is a form of genius. Perhaps the most important lesson that I can take from this is to pursue what you personally feel passionate about… firstly because that is what is most likely to yield an outcome that is sufficiently unique and able to adequately connect to the hearts of those that you strive to impact that it gives you a chance of “winning”, but more importantly still, because even if you don’t “win”, you will still be doing what you love.

Daniel Smith