If you were like me, you were probably taught that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and that it takes one year – a bit over 365 days – for the Earth to complete one such cycle.

And you probably also learned that we didn’t always believe that.

You might have learned about Ptolemy, who believed that the celestial bodies revolved around the Earth. It seems impossible to believe now, but that was the established wisdom for thousands of years. People were executed for disputing this scientific “fact”.

When Copernicus came up with his idea of the Earth revolving around the Sun, it didn’t make sense. The scientists of the day disputed his claims and showed through “science” that he was ‘wrong’, by demonstrating that his theories couldn’t explain what was happening any better than the established wisdom. In fact, Copernicus’ model offered worse predictions than Ptolemy’s model.

But with contributions from Galileo and Kepler united under Newton, our world experienced a paradigm shift (in the original/ Thomas Kuhn sense of the term). And suddenly our textbooks were rewritten. And so “The Sun revolves around the Earth. The Sun has always revolved around the Earth.” became, “The Earth revolves around the Sun. The Earth has always revolved around the Sun.”

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we of course know that we know the truth.

And yet, do we? Perhaps one abusing ‘Relativity’ might posit that it all depends upon where you are stationed – that from the perspective of the Earth, the Sun does revolve around it and vice versa. And maybe they are both wrong.

Such is the nature of “science”: The perpetual quest to prove oneself wrong.

The special challenge falls on those individuals who lead periods of revolution. Scientific, cultural, social, linguistic. Whether they are the revolutionary leaders of climate change or economics or politics or even intelligence.

You see it in someone like Howard Gardner in positing Multiple Intelligences back in 1983. Or Edward de Bono’s “Lateral Thinking”. Or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow. From ‘ridiculous’ to ’self-evident’ in but a short few years.

If we are going to support and facilitate the development of more of these game-changing Great Minds – people with “capital C” Creativity – what sort of systems, policies, procedures, experiences and opportunities might we want to create?

In the past two weeks, I watched my four-month-old son learn to blow raspberries. Inspired by reading that this would be good for his language development (seriously!), and knowing that his mother can’t blow raspberries, I made the sacrifice and regularly blew raspberries at him. He was surprised at the start, then he started laughing. Then he started trying it out for himself. It took a while, and he ‘fell over’ a bunch of times. Even now, his raspberries are particularly sloppy. But he watched me and he did it – today, he can reliably exit a room and blow me a raspberry!

Interesting skills are usually the most difficult to transfer. We can learn Newton’s Laws, but it’s another story entirely to learn to think as Newton thought. Those tacit and almost invisible skills that sometimes leave behind traces of brilliance are the ones where we lack the language to teach the skills. Often we lack the explicit knowledge as to what is being done at all. Yet an infant can learn without language. They just look out at the world with eyes wide open and a willingness to explore, experiment and experience.

Ultimately, most of what we learn is false. It’s our best guess, but at best it’s almost certainly wrong or flawed. We want to get to those moments of joy and pure experience when we can create genius.

I wonder what would happen if  we would just choose to put our desire to control to the side, and accept the ambiguity, the obstacles and the knowledge that even our best work will probably be wrong. And just keep blowing raspberries.

(originally from TheGeniusProject.com)

Kim created Juice Break many years ago. Before juice bars had really even hit Australia – well before Boost – Juice Break was helping make Brisbanites more healthy by introducing them to the wonders of fresh juices and intensely healthy nutrition. Kim had a great little store and brought together some really cool people.

But Juice Break no longer exists.

It wasn’t that the product wasn’t “right” – as evidenced by the roaring success of Boost and a host of other juice outlets today. And the timing was pretty good too – Juice Break closed as the first of today’s successful juice outlets were opening. They could have been a market leader, ready to reap the turn of the tide and the resultant massive wave.

And Kim was – and is – really cool! A surfer, he’s likeable and fun to hang out with.

There were many reasons that we now know the story of Boost rather than the story of Juice Break. But one of the most important lessons for me is that success often lies just a short twist in the road away. So when you find something that inspires you, something that you feel is worth pursuing, you really gotta go for it.

It can take a long time to make your dreams a reality. Research into genius shows that it takes about a decade before anything really significant can be achieved. So choose something that you love to do… Something that is worth doing even if others don’t know you’re doing it… Something that you enjoy doing for its own sake rather than because you believe it will get you something.

I’m doing my NLP Trainers’ Training at the moment. It’s exciting. It’s interesting. It’s engaging. And with my good friends in Shanghai I’m looking forward to sharing my insights with more people upon my return. Maybe I’ll make some money from it – heck, I’d like that – but even if I don’t, I love being here and doing what I’m doing right now.

I figure that if you’re doing something that you love to do, even if it doesn’t get you where you want to go – even if it’s a total waste of time – if you choose to do something that you love to do for its own sake, you’ll never be really wasting your time.

A friend was telling me about his friend who wants to study law but who fears that she’ll not live long enough to practice. She’s just 20 and doesn’t think she’ll make it to 25. We all have our perculiarities, but to me the reason to study law is to enjoy the process of learning and experiencing the study of law… Not because you’ll become a lawyer.

I’d love to give the appropriate source, but I can just hear Marianne Williamson saying to me: “Do what you love. Do what makes your heart sing. And never do it for the money.”

And now I’m going to enjoy my tempura prawn roll and Berry Crush…

Separation of Powers in Education: A pillar of the Rule of Law is the separation of powers between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. In the same way, I believe that such a separation would benefit education. Let us have one body that defines the desired learning outcomes, another body responsible for assessing performance against those outcomes and a separate domain for those who prepare the learners for the assessments offered. This would necessitate clear and specific definitions of the desired learning outcomes that would – I believe – be facilitated through cognitive competencies.

Cognitive Competencies: What is an MBA worth? What about a law degree? Heck, what does it mean to get an “A” for maths? Much education is focused on measurements devoted to delivering a matriculation score – a measure that has enough superficial validity to permit discrimination between students. Yet they usually don’t mean very much.

Learning outcomes are so ill-defined that we resort to relying upon the tacit knowledge of our educators to transform them into something useful. Fortunately, this has worked adequately. However, with increasing competition, it is about time that we replaced this centuries-old process with a measurement of the mental operations that we want to see developed. Firstly for the sake of the students: Let them focus their energies upon correcting their mistakes rather than spending endless hours not really knowing what they need to work on. But also for our society, so that we can fast-track prodigous learners towards more suitable challenges and more effectively direct the energies of our teachers and our students.

Selective Reinforcement of Spontaneous Behaviour: My concept of ‘genius’ is that individuals exhibit a large range of behaviours, some of which are reinforced; reinforcement leads to the development of clusters of skills that tend to work together to create talents and, especially when developed early, the development of an identity that works to offer a sustainable advantage.

For example, I learnt to perform split-attention tasks and to work quickly when I was doing my homework on my lap inside my tidybox in primary school (since if I did ‘homework’ at school, I didn’t have to do it at home!) – a spontaneous behaviour – and kept doing it because the first few times I received the reward (free time) without punishment (being told not to do it – as I was later, though largely ignored having experienced the reward!). Very small shifts yield massive long-term changes…

Open-Hearted Relationships of Unconditional Love: Intimate relationships take many forms, but one of the most challenging is where two people come together in a spirit of openness and complete acceptance of each other and themselves. These tend to bring out the greatest challenges and fears of each, but in the context of the safety that comes from knowing that the other is committed to staying ‘in the room’ and seeing through whatever ups and downs might happen along the way. Where one of the relationship feels attracted to someone outside of the relationship, that attraction is brought up and discussed, with a view to understanding the nature of that attraction – rather than denying that attraction – and by doing so, allow for the embracement of the whole of the other person and a fuller appreciation of oneself.

I am considering writing further on these, though have been thinking or writing about them since at least 2003. Let me know if you’re interested… I like encouragement

However there’s some great software out there. One of them – Mindjet’s MindManager is sensational! It helps you organise, implement and communicate your ideas and concepts. I’ve just fallen in love with it (and their viewer that comes with a 5-day trial of the full software): Now I want a version for my smartphone…

If you’re looking for a more metaphorical software upgrade, I like the Four Hour Work Week generally, and particularly this post on Tim’s blog about finding your rhythm for peak creativity. His ChangeThis manifesto is pretty cool too. Though if you want a more-easily accessed stimulus for creativity, try sitting for a few hours in the couches of the Grand Cafe on the 54th floor of Jin Mao as I did this afternoon… truly inspiring!

Climate change is a serious problem, though I did like this contribution from John Doerr at TED for a bit of reality.

After all, it’s the learning that we need, not the sheet of paper!

As I thought about the ‘key learnings’ concept more generally, I heard yesterday that a Creation “Science” Museum had been established in the USA. While I have great respect for religious beliefs, I really have a hard time accepting that blindly accepting an arbitrary and unnecessarily complex explanation for the world is really ‘holy’

After yesterday hearing about the establishment of a Creation “Science” museum in the USA (a way for neo-fundamentalist idealogues to indoctrinate their children with convenient ‘truths’), it was reassuring to come across The Canon, a book that expresses basic science that we should all know. (Dworkin might go too far for my liking, I think he’s misled rather than deluded.)

If we’re going to compete in the real world, we need to know something about it!

There’s a lot of information that intelligent and informed members of the modern world need. Our schools are trying to disseminate some of that information, but with the acceleration in knowledge creation, we need to keep learning… fast! I guess it’s another reason to visit The Genius Project‘s Zone.

What I thought was interesting was the structure that they gave this information. The table is structured with the following headings: Category, Objective ID, Name, Summary, Value and then which of the six themes that the objective supports. I love seeing the parallels between business and personal life, so it really strikes me that this could be a great way for people to structure their objectives.

Goal setting is great, but it’s really easy to mess it up! Goal achievement is usually more hit-and-miss than anything else; often because of a lack of personal alignment. We might want to do something, but to actually make that happen is a different story altogether once you factor in ‘divine redirections’ (aka failures) and new opportunities.
The Balanced Scorecard/ Strategy Maps/ Alignment approach is powerful, though it’s still pretty limited in application to the business world. Covey’s ultra-popular “Roles” approach is nice and neat, though lacks the power; Tony Robbins’ RPM/OPA system is beautifully presented but (like so much of Tony’s stuff) lacks the real robustness (even through his Time of Your Life course – a course that sounds so great yet delivers so little at the real front line) that would allow it to really work. The best (in my view) at personal productivity is David Allen, and while he says “consider this stuff”, he largely abdicates any structure for higher level thinking in favor of the methods that do work very well at a tactical and operational level. I believe that the ‘solution’, at least for me integrates the “Roles” of Covey within a BSC/SM/A framework somewhat like the NASA outline, and, while being mindful of the Outcomes championed by Tony, structures efficiency through the GTD/ David Allen approach. If that really didn’t make any sense, ask me about it and I’ll see what I can do…

I like the notion of identifying the themes that we are trying to fulfill… trans-disciplinary outcomes that we are using a range of vehicles to fulfill.

From an education framework, to me this is an uber-cool way to introduce personal excellence and achievement into science-minded students.

There are a couple of these impactful events of intense stimulation now – Davos, Clinton Global Initiative and a miriad of seminars come to mind – but one of the most accessible could just be TED. They’ve just increased their price by 50% (from $4,000 to $6,000pa) but damn they come out with some awesome stuff!

Check out this video that shows what may be the future for our computer screens for example.

(They even had Tony Robbins along this year – though looking like he really needs some help with a suit that fits!)

Apple seem to be trying to undertake a minor transformation in the way that we use smartphones. To me, they’ve essentially packaged together little more than the state-of-the-art equipment set in a pretty (and probably user-friendly) box. This is a good thing in principle – though it’s really not that much of a revolution.

My Motorola A1000 isn’t a great system. It’s small enough, is 3G, and has space for a TransFlash (now microSD) memory card for a gigabyte or two of memory. It uses the clunky Symbian operating system. And it’s not quite as sexy-looking as the iPhone. But it’s mostly the same. The W950 has 4Gb of ram (same as the iPhone) if you’re really after a walkman with phone functionality. The large touch-screen is probably a little better than my A1000 (or the A920 that I had before), but it’s still just a big touchscreen with the same resolution (320×480) as the Tungsten T3 that I bought four years ago or so. Sure, it has WiFi and Bluetooth… but there’s nothing revolutionary there.

Maybe the design teams at Dopod might just need to tweak a few things, and we’ll have a great challenger on style, and I’m sure at a fraction of the price.

But to give Apple their due, they’ve done something that I really admire. They’ve focused. They haven’t produced a whole swag of versions, just two (only different in memory quantity). And while they haven’t done anything too revolutionary, they’re taken everything that’s available and (from first glance) put it together in a single, simple, satisifying parcel. Great work to the fast follower!

I’ve just discovered some interesting ‘trends’ that may or may not come to pass that really challenge me to think while simultaneously shaking my head:

• Gravanity - Beyond YouTube, from personalised stamps (that Australia Post actually offers) to average people paying to have their names on the seats in a cinema, there are opportunities for ordinary folk to have their 15 minutes of fame. Or how about Troika’s efforts in letting people project their SMS messages onto objects?
• I wonder whether every house really is for sale… every house is for sale
• While they didn’t let me in there last month, I’m pretty impressed with WC1‘s £1m job of outfitting a bathroom opposite Selfridges
• Transumers: consumers who are driven by experiences rather than wanting to own things… preferring to live a more transient lifestyle. And if you take what luxury consumers are doing as an indicator of what the rest of us will be doing in the future, consider this: Spending on luxury experiences and home services nearly doubled between 2004 and 2005!
• Inspiriences: When we want to make our home environments extraordinary… from the home cinema to the home resort. Not being satisfied with a great place and metaphorical castle, people are wanting to make their homes into a ‘real castle!’ While we have home coffee makers, I don’t understand why we can’t get XXXX on tap in our own home bar – they can get Heineken thanks to Krups…
• Along similar lines are garden offices. While perhaps out of the reach of our friends in Shanghai and London, it could be interesting for many people… especially the increasing number of teleworkers in the ‘burbs.
• What about buying great glasses online? A friend in Shanghai just paid RMB3000 (AU$500 – they’re nice!) for her latest glasses, but maybe there should be cheaper ways. The same kinda thing is available for contact lenses too. For either, I don’t think Steff would like this idea taking off though…
• Renting gardens??? I don’t know if Ross came up with the idea or borrowed it from the Dutch version, but it’s a really cool idea!
• Create vinyl decals for the side of your car? Not just to make the car use a tax deduction, but to personalise the little beast…
• Vending machines in the ladies’ rooms… but for a straightening iron! They’re only in the UK so far, but are set to spread…
• Maybe cone-shaped pizza is your thing. Looks more appealing than most of the stuff available in 7-11′s and takeaway stores… actually, it could be a real alternative to Subway even. Maybe it might teach the Chinese that Pizza Hut has a great business system for making mediocre pizza – even after taking Carol to the Nanjing Road store on Wednesday night, I still can’t believe that people queue for overpriced poorly made ‘pizza’ in Shanghai… so much for being culturally sophisticated! But, best of all, this stuff is actually from Italy!
• How about going to sea to discover the world – and getting academic credit! Thanks to “The Scholar Ship” now you can.
• Ticketmaster handled tickets for my brother’s graduation ceremony, but what about running your own events? What if you could have a professional ticketing service for your next event? Sounds cool to me, thanks to brownpapertickest.com
• With China’s newfound wealth, will we see something like Floridasation for Australia? Maybe they’ll stick with Chongming, though somehow I doubt it…
• It’s not enough to have stuff and do things: Now we want to show off how great we are… and maybe we want to be really good at showing off how wonderful we are by taking advantage of status skills. From making your own wine or coffee, to tying your tie properly or maybe just being more ‘elegant’… combined with the massclusivity and uber premium trends, I’m guessing we’ll be seeing a lot more etiquette and connoisseurship classes for those who want to be seen as “It” rather than getting caught wearing a Nouveau Riche t-shirt!

For me, I’m looking forward to seeing the movement away from consumerism towards experiences combine with the status skills movement, yielding great rewards for those of us who can teach people to be brilliant… the time when ‘status’ will go to those who can actually do cool things are are actually cool people to hang around, rather than those who buy expensive stuff (mostly unused garbage?) that destroys our environment through its wastefulness. What about deriving status (and heaven forbid satisfaction!) from your creativity like artistic, academic and indeed most truly high performing communities? Of course, that would be a opportunity for genius training…