Genius Project

My friend, Tim McGinty, told me about a fascinating study called the Genius Project.

The Genius Project conducted by Jay Niblick of Innermetrix International had the objective to understand why some people seem to frequently succeed and with much less effort than others who are equally intelligent and put forth much more effort in a similar environment.

The project spanned seven years and studied over 300,000 people from 23 countries. Each person was given a scientifically validated instrument to measure ability in a wide variety of attributes relevant to individual performance. The attributes were naturally occurring talents that people possess based upon how they think and make decisions. The study was designed to compare the level of these natural talents in the most successful people against the levels in non-successful people.

The study looked at Natural Talents, or endowed aptitudes, and Acquired Talents, or the knowledge and experience gained through life.

In the end the study found that no single natural talent was more responsibile than any other for success. However, two acquired talents were present in all of the successful people, and absent in those who struggle with feelings of frustration, lack of fulfillment, and dissatisfaction with their personal performance and success. These two acquired talents are self-awareness and authenticity.

Self-awareness enables people to understand both their natural and acquired talents. Authenticity, in its simplest form, is “being true to you”.

The high performers, those who performed at the “genius” level were discovered to have both an extremely high level of  both self-awareness and suthenticity.

The findings indicate that people can dramatically increase their performance through developing self awareness and aligning what they do with their natural talents.