Over the past eight months, I’ve been working with a live and virtual group exploring the nature and catalyzation of genius. Not the “high IQ” kind of genius that is often associated with both prolific accomplishment and social awkwardness, but the kind of innate, unlearned genius that fits more aptly with this definition…
In putting together our newest online program, Falling in Love with Writing, one of the topics my friend Steve Chandler and I explored together was what I call becoming an “amateur professional”.
In order to make sense of that phrase, let me first distinguish what it is to be an amateur and what it is to be a professional…
Amateurs do what they do, at least in spirit, for the love of the game. The word itself comes from the French, and can be literally translated as “lover of”…
Years ago, I was complaining to my mentor George Pransky about some goal or other I was pursuing to no avail when he said to me, “Have you considered that it might just not be in the cards?
I was sufficiently unsettled by the implication that I might not be in charge of the universe that it led me to some serious soul-searching into the nature of how things happen in the world and how involved (or not involved) we are in their unfolding.
This past month was supposed to be my summer sabbatical in Sri Lanka – a chance to rest, reflect, recharge, renew, and work on my tan. While I did get through six novels (including Philip Kerr’s amazing Berlin Noir trilogy) and an equal number of volumes of business development and spiritual philosophy, life intervened in my grand plans and we wound up having to cancel our family vacation. Instead, I spent the majority of my time off adapting to my wife’s newly broken legs, trying to move house, and recovering from gum surgery…
My friend and colleague Aaron Turner once described our grounding in the inside-out understanding of life as a measure of how much of our experience looked like it was made of the energy of Thought as opposed to being either “the energy of Thought plus external factors” or even external factors alone. For example, if you get a “Final Demand” bill from a credit card company and feel stressed, is that stress:
a. Simply the feeling of whatever you happen to be thinking in that moment?
b. The feeling of your thinking about a very real problem?
c. The feeling of the credit card bill?
