Is Your Genius at Work?: 4 Key Questions to Ask Before Your Next Career Move

The subtitle of this book is "Four key questions to ask before your next career move." Unfortunately I think the subtitle is wrong. Really, this book asks us four key questions about our life. The book revolves around those four questions: 1. What is your genius? 2. Is your genius at work? 3. What is your purpose? 4. Is your genius on purpose? And after the chapters devoted to each question comes some fantastic exercises to help you put the ideas in this book into action. When I read a book I typically view it in four ways: 1. Content 2. Writing 3. Layout 4. Overall feel By each of these criteria this book, this book is a winner. The content is fantastic. The writing style is approachable and includes stories I can relate to and that illustrate the points very well. The layout if the book is outstanding - there are helpful illustrations and plenty of room for notes - an important consideration for a book like this. Above these tangible dimensions, the feeling I get when reading is book is positive. The author cares about his readers and it shows in every part of this book. I recommend this book highly for anyone - not just those in a career assessment or transition situation.

Before I go any further with this review, let me set something straight: the value of this book is not limited to jobseekers. This is stuff that will help you reframe the way you view your life. There are plenty of other books that help you figure out your most basic competencies (books on enneagrams, Now Discover Your Strengths, etc...). I've only done a little bit of messing around in this genre, but from my experience, Genius takes the most direct path to the heart of the discovery process. The book is an easy read but, like another reviewer said, a deep one. If you take it seriously, you'll likely struggle with naming your genius for more time than it takes to read the book. The four questions that the book asks are, What is your genius, Is your genius at work, What is your purpose and Is your genius on purpose. About 2/3 of the book is devoted to working through these questions and the last third is filled with excercises to help you narrow down the search for the name of your genius. The excercises are awesome-nothing trivial or useless here. These are thoughtful and clearly designed to help you think in new directions and they do it well. I've been working through the excercises and they're hard for me. This kinda bums me out because there was a time, not all that long ago, that I was intently focused on self-knowledge, and I felt like I knew myself pretty well. To some degree the excercises make me feel kinda bad that I don't simply have snap answers anymore. On the other hand, it's been good to get to know myself again. I'm still unsure of the name of my genius. The book describes several ways that you might know when you've landed on your genius' name. I experienced none of this when I wrote Exploring Service. Last week I felt like that was a servicable name for use while I kept seeking, but this week I don't think that's the case. I'm continuing to work on some of the excercises and also allowing things to just sit and simmer for a while. I think that's important. What's really different about Genius versus other books like the ones I mentioned earlier is that there aren't any easy quizzes or surveys to take which will spit out the answer. Figuring out the name of your genius takes work and time. It feels like you can't look directly at it...gotta look kinda sideways or pretend you aren't looking and wait for it to pop up. I suspect it's worth the wait. This book has been really well received by other folks I think highly of. Check out reviews by Dave Pollard[1], Steve Pavlina[2] and Dwayne Melancon[3]. Also, Dick Richards is doing something really remarkable for an author of a book like this. He's created an online discussion group, called Genius Workshop[4], where readers of the book can get some personal insight from him and from others who are on the same journey. Very, very helpful. Also, for more good reading, check out Dick's blog[5] where he's also got a sample chapter and some exercises you can work through. (...)

Is Your Genius at Work? by Dick Richards is a fantastic book about discovering your genius and your purpose and identifying a career that fits well with both. This book was recently provided to me by the publisher, and it's one of the few unsolicited books I received that I can enthusiastically recommend to others. Why do I say this? Because I personally derived a valuable result from reading this book - the identification of my own core genius. [...] Genius makes the bold statement that every person has one and only one core genius, and that genius is unique. Think of your genius as your greatest strength. Long before reading this book I had developed a strong awareness of my key strengths and weaknesses, but I hadn't given serious consideration to the idea that I might have only one "genius" from which all my key strengths could be derived. As I went through the exercises in the book, I easily identified many of my own strengths. I'm able to learn very quickly. I'm good at understanding complicated concepts. I can communicate well with both humans and computers. I've developed great synergy between my logic and intuition. And so on. But when I listed them all out, I didn't see any single root genius from which all these strengths could be derived. It was as if they were all relatively prime, with no single common denominator. But Genius pushes us to think outside the box when looking for our core genius. For example, what's the lowest common denominator between the numbers 9, 15, 21, and 30? It's 3, right? How about 15, 25, 65, and 90? The LCD there is 5. Now what about 2, 10, 13, 29, and 300? The book says it's the letter t, since all these numbers begin with a t. Very sneaky. It's exercises like these that cause you to keep looking at the question of genius from different angles until you eventually find an angle where the common denominator becomes clear. I spent about an hour working with the book's exercises and eventually succeeded in identifying my core genius, from which all my other strengths could be derived. As stated in the book's suggested terms, my genius is "Optimizing Results." That's something I'm uniquely good at. From that core genius I can derive my interest in personal development, productivity, self-discipline, technology, entrepreneurship, reading, writing, blogging, speaking, podcasting, exercising, exploring belief systems, generating passive income, conducting wacky growth experiments, polyphasic sleep, veganism, living consciously, etc. I often see life itself as an optimization challenge. This is one reason I enjoy the ready-fire-aim approach to goal achievement. I like to just dive in and experiment, since my first attempts (often failures) provide me with a base from which I can begin optimizing. It doesn't matter what my starting position is - I will always find a way to improve from there. For example, every month I review the stats and feedback from this web site, tweaking things

The following review is from my How to Save the World weblog and can be found in its original form including graphic at: http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/11/22.html#a1348 Dick Richards' new book Is Your Genius at Work? is designed for people contemplating a career change. Its focus is on helping people find their genius -- the one thing they are especially and uniquely good at, and then finding application for that genius in the work world. Its audience is anyone who believes they are currently doing they than they could or should, both for their own fulfillment and to make a contribution to the betterment of the world. It's especially valuable for those who are in need of an ego-boost -- those who don't believe they have genius, and don't believe they are especially good at anything. There is no rocket science to Richards' process. It is essentially a workbook, in the vein of Bolles' What Colour Is Your Parachute? but less focused on researching jobs at the intersection of What you love, What you're good at, and What's needed, and more on identifying and naming What you're good at, and Why you're here. Like Parachute, Genius is full of exercises, and I worked through them to see whether they provided insights different from Parachute's. Richards seems to take it on faith that What you're good at is congruent with What you love. I think that's debatable, but perhaps it doesn't matter -- since the exercises get you to identify both, and then find 'common denominators', the result is one genius, one talent, that lies at the intersection between them (spaces 2 & 3 in my diagram above). I particularly liked the 'sales pitch' at the start of the book for working through it. Many people give up too easily on self-discovery exercises like this because they're not sufficiently convinced that the outcome is worth the effort. The arguments Richards makes for discovering and applying your genius are: (a) stronger sense of identity, (b) clearer sense of direction, (c) increased self-confidence, (d) language to communicate the value you can add, and (e) greater satisfaction and productivity in your work. The four stage process outlined in the book is (1) discover (recognize) your genius, (2) ask yourself whether your current job/career makes good use of it, (3) discover your purpose, and (4) ask yourself whether your genius is being (or can be) applied to fulfill your purpose. Your purpose is your self-acknowledged reason for living, what you feel you were born to do. Richards posits several 'restrictions' or 'conditions' to force you to narrow your (many) talents and passions to your one true genius: 1. You have a genius. 2. You have only one genius. 3. Your genius has been with you your whole life. 4. Your genius is natural and spontaneous. 5. Your genius is a positive, rather than destructive, energy. 6. Your genius is what it is, not what you would wish it to be. 7. Your genius' name consists of one gerund (word ending in