How To Be A Genius
	So Why Aren’t We Already Geniuses? <  Previous Contents Next  >

In other words, if we all have all these capacities that I've been talking about, what on earth is holding us back? Well, there's a whole lot of things that are holding us back, and I'm going to go into some of them right here.

The first and most important obstacles concern attitude. And one of the most debilitating attitudes is, in fact, the general belief that I have just talked about: that what is average is also normal, and that there's no way to go beyond that.

Another huge obstacle is in the way people relate to one another. There are people who play God with others, and especially with children. In the Bible, God defines Himself by saying: I am who I am.

So when we presume to tell another human being who they are by saying things like you are stupid, you are incompetent, you are messy, or, what a daydreamer you are,  what we are doing is nothing less than playing God with them. We are creating them in our own image, or rather, our image of who we think they are. Now, this is actually a form of abuse, and what's so terrible about it, is that it's often mixed with genuine affection. A loving mother might say, “My dear little sweetheart, why do you always have to be so clumsy?”

Playing God is a huge temptation - that's why so many people do it, and I'm quite sure that we have all been subject to this type of abuse many times, - by our parents, by our teachers, by our peers. And we have also most likely engaged in it ourselves. And we may even continue to do so until we become aware of it, and make a special continuous effort to stop it.

Now one reason that playing God is so gratifying and so tempting is that when we do this, we are projecting - that is, when we say to somebody “You are a mess”, what we are really afraid of is that we are a mess.

And when we put this onto somebody else, then it feels like it's not us - it's them. So we feel very relieved. The only problem here, of course, is that it's totally illogical. It's not by accusing somebody else of bad things that we're going to prove that we are good. But for some strange reason, this is what seems to go on in many of our heads.

I would like you to stop for just a minute, and imagine what your life would have been like if the adults in your life had encouraged you, and said, for example,  “That's OK if you don't understand this math lesson - I'm sure you'll get it next time”. Or if you had been able to answer “What if I did spill my milk again? I'm only three years old. My muscles aren't fully coordinated yet. It has nothing to do with being clumsy!”

But they didn't always talk to you that way, and maybe you did conclude that you were too stupid to learn math. And when you were three years old, you didn't know about muscle coordination.

So how could you realize that you weren't really clumsy when they were telling you that you were clumsy? And so we adopted these beliefs - that we were stupid, or that we were clumsy, etc., etc.

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to change those beliefs. On the one hand, many of them were instilled into us in early childhood, when we were most vulnerable and impressionable, and they have become a part of our basic structure, our basic way of thinking.

As children we were dominated by authority figures. And to a certain extent today, either the memory of those figures or other authority figures in our present have an influence over us. As I said before, often these you are statements were given to us by people who genuinely loved us, and we may feel that if we change our beliefs about ourselves, we will lose the love of the person who identified us in that way. We might also be afraid, subconsciously, of being punished by them if we go against their ideas about us and declare that we are different from what they decreed.

And of course, as children, it gave us a certain feeling of security to have people above us who knew everything and were in control of everything. We might not really want to discover that they didn't know everything and they weren't in control of everything, because then we would feel insecure. And even as adults, when we think we've taken charge of our own lives, still some of these feelings can persist in a subconscious way.

And then there's our relationship with our peers. With them we may feel a sense of security if we are like them. There's safety in numbers, right? We may subconsciously wonder what would happen to us if we moved away from the herd and developed excellence to a point where we were no longer average. We might be considered a bit strange by people who think that normal and average are the same thing.

We may feel rejected in different ways by our peers if we go too far away from the so-called normal. We may be afraid that we will lose their friendship. They might be jealous of us if we can do something better than they can. Maybe they'll think that we are disloyal by changing and being different from what we used to be. Maybe they'll think we're selfish, or proud. In fact, maybe we have that kind of feeling towards other people who break away from the crowd.

In terms of our relationship to our own self, it's very anxiety-provoking not to know who we are. So when people told us who we were, even if it was quite negative, it somehow made us feel more secure. And then there's the fear of change. That's something that's present in all of us to one extent or another. Change often involves moving into a new way of thinking - a new paradigm - and that can be scary and upsetting, even when it's more positive.

So in order to develop your capacities and move into the genius category, you're going to have to move out of the average category, and that can be scary. You're no longer in the majority; you're in a minority. You're no longer a child, you're an adult. As an adult, you subscribe to the motto: “to thine own self be true”. As an adult, you are able to resist the tyranny of the majority and think for yourself.

And as an adult, you are able to put into question authority figures, instead of blindly obeying them. (By the way, in politics, this is called democracy, even though a lot of political figures would like to convince us otherwise, and make us believe that they know everything, and all we have to do is give them total confidence to run things their way while we go off and play or watch TV.)

As I said, these attitudes are very difficult to overcome, and that's why the self-help movement is so strong today.

In the next chapter, I will be talking about specific methods, but before that, I would suggest that you think about your own attitudes and ask yourself whether you think you need to change them. One thing you could do is simply to think about your past and remember specific incidents and specific people who influenced you and may have made you think that you were not capable of doing all the things that you now want to do.

What you can do is to bring to mind those incidents and those people and reinterpret them in the light of your adult person and what you know now. The three-year-old child in the previous example couldn't defend himself when people told him he was clumsy because he didn't know about how muscles mature and that in the next year or so, he would have greater control over his movements.

But if you were that child, you know now, and you can go back in your mind and talk to that child and explain to him that he wasn't really clumsy; it was just a passing moment. And that even the adults who called him clumsy at the time didn't necessarily mean that they thought he'd be clumsy for the rest of his life. But that's the way children often interpret things that people say to them.

Remember that time your father bawled you out and you thought you couldn't do anything right? Maybe now, as you look back on that, you might realize that he was having a hard time making ends meet at that time, and his temper was short, not because you were a terrible person, but because he was having difficulties, and just couldn't handle it all. This will take you both off the hook.

Even if doing this method may wake up some painful memories from your past, it's still better than letting those painful memories persist and influence your life today. But if you do have some heavy stuff in your past, and you feel that the going gets too rough, there are many competent therapists out there who can surely help you, so don't hesitate to call on one if you need to.

The other kind of obstacle that may keep you from developing your potential is more concerned with methods. It's a more technical aspect. In school, we are told to learn, but we are rarely taught how to learn. In fact, our brain is an incredible tool.

Some people say we only use ten percent of our brain capacity. Now this is one of those phrases that gets thrown around a lot, and I don't know if it's literally true, but I do believe that very few people know how to really use their brain the way it was meant to be used, that is, the way it was normally meant to be used. Maybe geniuses are just people who figured out those methods more or less spontaneously, in addition to having been raised in a positive environment. In the next chapter, you'll find out about them.