Awaken Your Genius summary

You may know the late Gillian Lynne as the choreographer of Cats and the Phantom of the Opera. By any measure, she was a success.

But when Lynne was little, she was considered a problem child and bad student. Running out of options, her mother took her to a doctor. After some observation, the doctor asked her mother to leave the room with him, but left Lynne behind with the music turned on. Through the glass door, they watched the child leap and twirl to the music.

On Valentine’s Day in 2005, three bored young engineers decided to create a website for singles to post videos and introduce themselves to prospective significant others. The idea didn’t take off, but the effort wasn’t a complete waste of time. Today, you’d know it as YouTube.

YouTube’s first iteration may not have worked, but by taking it apart and retrieving usable building blocks, those engineers were able to build something that did.

Here’s one quick way to do this: DON’T Google.

Don’t oversaturate your mind with other people’s thoughts, opinions, and ideas instead of germinating your own. Instead, keep a Word document open on your computer so you can put ideas down as they come up. Keep your ideas private and honest. Listen to your gut instinct. Connect with others to brainstorm, but make sure you collect a diverse group of thinkers.

In this Information Age, most of us have become consumers of what we assume are facts. But how many of us question them? “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” we parrot to our children, not bothering to do the research that would show us how that theory was proposed by cereal-maker Kellogg.

Skepticism is important, especially today when misinformation can be instantaneously transmitted without fact-checking. Questioning also exposes us to different ideas and viewpoints that are otherwise easily avoided by algorithms that choose what we view. 

“Will it help?”

Three small words, one simple question.