Until fairly recently most of life was largely predictable. knowable. controllable. Systems, management strategies, “the way we do things around here” could be passed hand to hand through organisations, schools, families.
Clarity, for those of us alive now, is as assuringly accurate as financial projections on a start.up business plan1.
Somewhere along the way we seem to have crashed through some kind of sound barrier, resistance gave way and en-masse we’ve hit a higher frequency. Everything appears to be accelerating to the point where the stable rules have been rendered redundant - even laughable.
Like a car, as we speed up we find that the world outside gets blurred. Without the luxury of advanced warning we have at slow speeds we can only rely on our reflexes to deal with surprises on the road, or a blink moment to catch a sign for a turn-off. Clarity? Only those a few metres ahead.
Please point me to the one person who could have predicted the depth & 
breadth of Facebook2. Not just a category killer, but evolving into a staggering sociological force of nature. Social media is reshaping our private and professional lives profoundly.
Honestly, no-one can guarantee the Next Big Thing. Money, labour, political clout - none offer this certainty. Don’t bother listening to any business school stalwart who may assure you otherwise. Would you have placed a bet on a drop-out3 with no car, house or job being offered a billion dollars for his brainchild - and turning it down. WTF?!
The outer bounds of age been pushed out forcefully by an entire generation. The boomers. Pioneering a new stage of adulthood untested before: the 60 of today is more like 40. Retirement is what we strive to achieve in our 30’s. Job for life a joke.
Science, particularly physics and mathematics have witnessed some particularly odd phenomena over the last few decades. The findings bubbled out into quantum mechanics, string theory, fractals, strange attractors and chaos theory. Reality as we know it, has been collapsing in labs for years.. the rest of us are just catching up now.
If the smartest human beings in the world haven’t a clue where it all leads.. but watch in amazement as laws of time and space are scrambled.. then I guess the rest of us don’t stand much chance. Within that there’s a delicious sense of freedom somehow. We’re all f*cked - no-one has the manual, at least now we know that we don’t know.
So it finally occurred to me that4 the kind of clarity that befits genius isn’t the intellectual ability to analyse or predict the future from extrapolating current data, number crunching, or even visionary epiphanies. Genius isn’t about wrapping your head around the complicated - it’s embracing the complex (yes they are different.very). Clarity these days seems to be more akin to a quiet certainty, somewhere beyond the noise and static. Confidence. Faith?
It took Einstein 5 years to fill in the blanks from the heuristic leaps he made in his Annus Mirabilis. He dared to look like a fool because he didn’t have all the scientific evidence to back his claims; and he was working a pretty crappy job at the time5.
True genius has never found a more welcoming environment. Find your own signal in the noise. Do you need to see the invisible carrier waves coded with your favourite TV program before you’ll watch? Don’t spend your valuable time hunting for visible, plausible evidence to support your vision before you do anything about it.
¿ʇı ǝǝs oʇ ʇı ǝʌǝı1ǝq/see it to believe it?
It may be a little blurry around the edges, you may have no idea how it can be achieved yet. But if you have a vision, get it out in the daylight & share it.
What do you know but can’t prove?
What do YOU know clearly?
- if you’re an entrepreneur, VC or a bank manager you’ll know just what I mean! [↩]
- Rupert Murdock could have saved himself some pocket-change! LOL [↩]
- Ivy League it needs be noted - Harvard’s not a shabby place to leap from [↩]
- I wasted much precious time desperately hunting clarity only to finally realise that’s like grasping water. I’m a little slow sometimes [↩]
- he would’ve had some damn good excuses for not presenting his theories - what holds you back? [↩]
What makes genius?It is you who makes genius of yourself. Everyone of us is genius, but somewhere deep inside…… and so many people can drill that genius from oneself, but the ones who manage-are generally recognized….
The footnote captions set up are sheer indulgence for me. Not part of the reading, yet allowing for ticklish shout outs while reading, if you want to be tickled that is, otherwise ignore them, consciously!
Hamel & Prahalad had some interesting economical models (strategy as a stretch / fit) which i enjoyed challenging (or downright found ‘un right’/disagreed to, which a downright genius would not, or would).
Yet applying the models to personal life made me live by them, although in a slightly modified way of course… one (a downright genius) could not fully agree with ‘the great’ but one should always ’stand on them’ right? or stubborn?
Molo
Brilliant! What an insightful opsomming of the current condition. Thank you.
See it to believe it or Believing it to see it takes a different kind of Genius. That’s almost Hamel & Prahalad meeting Molo Ms. Kaizen.
Thank you so much for your feedback guys :)
so FINALLY the fourth in the series! whew .. I’ve been desperately hunting the elusive certainty in clarity for myself & when I gave up on the idea out of sheer frustration I realised I could finally write about it with some integrity.
A certain case of the more we know the more we know we don’t know here.
Onward to foolish wisdom & not dumbing down your vision just because most people think you’ve lost the plot %-)
Hail to all those who see clearly on the inside!
oooh if you have time for another quickie read: Erik Weihenmayer is the undoubted icon of inspirational clarity for me .. go see why >>
Another important aspect of this kind of work is the ability to change your perception of a given idea or thought form matrix.
My own interpretation of complication and complexity is slightly different to your own. Complication is something that has to first be interpreted and only then understood. Complexity is an instance of reality that you would ideally adapt to. Another perceptive comparison of the two would be that complication has to be adapted into bite size chunks before it can be sufficiently well parsed… complexity on the other hand would be defined as a notion that you align and adapt yourSelf to.
What do I know that I can’t prove ? Many things. ;-)
The topics of belief and noetic knowledge are both fascinating and wonderful. I am still undecided as to how important a specific belief is compared to how it is integrated and enacted into one’s own self. Albeit I may be missing the trees for the forest in thinking that there is really a difference…
I look forward to more of these wild meanderings on the topic of Genius o great and mystical Max.
@Andrew : LOLOLOL re: great and mystical Max :-P ROTFL. Thank you for your deeply considered cerebral outpourings matey.. good to see you here!
The subject of complexity is well, complex - but I loved the clarity from Robert Paterson’s post (well worth the read - just click through the link if you haven’t already)
Max,
Since you are a facebook junky, you should join our group there (Ostendo)… :P
PS: Looooove the picci of the eye…