Discover Revolutionary Thinking in Hidden Genius by Polina Marinova Pompliano

The secret ways of thinking that power the world’s most successful people. Dive into Hidden Genius and explore the transformative mental frameworks that have propelled the world’s most successful individuals to the pinnacle of their fields. This book is not just a read; it’s an intellectual adventure that promises to elevate your thinking and approach to challenges.

Embark on a journey of self-discovery and unlock your potential – continue reading to learn how Hidden Genius can revolutionize your perspective on success.

Genres

Self-Help, Psychology, Nonfiction, Personal Development, Business, Biography, Leadership, Creativity, Innovation, Success

Hidden Genius by Polina Marinova Pompliano delves into the minds of the world’s most successful people, revealing the unique ways they tackle problems, harness creativity, and thrive under pressure. The book eschews common ‘tricks’ and ‘hacks’ for greatness, instead presenting mental frameworks that alter one’s worldview and unlock latent potential.

Review

Polina Marinova Pompliano’s Hidden Genius stands out in the crowded field of success literature. It provides a fresh perspective by focusing on the mental models used by high achievers. Readers praise the book for its actionable insights and engaging storytelling, highlighting new ideas and individuals not commonly featured in other works. The book is commended for its direct approach to delivering information and its ability to resonate with readers seeking practical guidance in their personal and professional lives

Recommendation

Most people harbor creative potential that they never fully tap. But the world’s most successful people have learned how – and their secrets can help you, too. Writer Polina Marinova Pompliano – founder of the influential newsletter The Profile – has made it her mission to learn how to unlock creativity, innovation and intellectual capacity. Drawing advice and anecdotes from the stories and habits of an eclectic ensemble of athletes, business leaders, Nobel laureates, and more, Pompliano reveals strategies and approaches anyone can apply to unleash their own “hidden genius.”

Take-Aways

• To unleash your full creative potential, you need to understand creativity.
• Expand your capabilities by building your mental toughness.
• Tapping into your creativity requires forging strong, trusting relationships.
• Use storytelling to inspire and motivate others – and yourself.
• Boost your leadership power by using a bottom-up, systems-based approach.
• Develop technical skills for managing risk.
• Become a clearer, more objective thinker.
• Enlarge your impact – and protect your mental health – by building an engaged community.
• Consume a healthy content diet.
• Discover your untapped potential.

Summary

To unleash your full creative potential, you need to understand creativity.

For Renaissance artist and polymath Leonardo da Vinci, creativity meant making connections between seemingly disparate ideas – what he called “connecting the unconnected.” When da Vinci saw a stone fall into a well at the same time that he heard a church bell ring, he joined the dots and developed the idea that sound, like water, travels in waves.

Discover the logic that underlies creativity in your field. For example, if you’re a writer, you need to understand the rules of drama before you can break them. Integrate rote activities into your routines. For instance, take a leaf from screenwriter Shonda Rhimes’s book by taking a long walk or drive to mull over your idea, letting it incubate. Allow your mind to wander while your body engages in a simple task.

“Creativity is less a fleeting moment of inspiration and more a muscle that can be trained through consistent exercise.”

Accept failure as a fact of life. Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull boasts a creative and logical mind, as well as advanced education in computer technology. But he credits his success to his willingness to fail, which allows him to learn and discover radically original ideas. Catmull also takes a contrarian view of elevator pitches: He advises people to “Aim to fail the elevator test.” If an idea can be summed up in 30 seconds or less, Catmull says, then it’s probably rehashing old ideas rather than breaking new ground.

Expand your capabilities by building your mental toughness.

Prepare your mind to endure and persevere when you’re feeling uncomfortable, so you can embrace the risks necessary for success. Start by exposing yourself to voluntary hardship. Try something difficult, and when your mind tells you you’re exhausted and you should quit, remind yourself you’re probably only 40% done; you still have 60% in reserve. Push through to the end of the task without being too self-critical. Do one thing that’s uncomfortable each day – for example, if it’s raining outside, go for a run anyway.

“Choosing the path of most resistance builds authentic confidence.”

Another tactic to strengthen your endurance is to befriend pain. Pain isn’t your enemy, so learn what it has to teach. If you’re running a race and your foot hurts, take endurance athlete Amelia Boone’s advice and talk to your foot as though it were a friend. Moreover, instead of passively listening to negative self-talk, strive for self-accountability, and actively tell yourself what you need to hear to continue.

Employ self-distancing to help you gain objectivity about your situation. Many high achievers, including the late NBA legend Kobe Bryant and singer-songwriter Beyoncé, create an alter ego. “Black Mamba,” a moniker Bryant took from the movie Kill Bill, embodied agility and aggressiveness. Beyoncé’s alter ego, “Sasha Fierce,” exudes confidence and fearlessness. These personas helped Bryant and Beyoncé reach heights they felt were beyond their normal self-concept.

Tapping into your creativity requires forging strong, trusting relationships.

Healthy relationships are crucial to flourishing. To build them, start with trust, which, like compound interest, grows over time, generating goodwill that simplifies your life. The best way to build trust is to engage in consistent behavior over the long term. Although mistrust can wreak havoc on that process, trust itself doesn’t have to be an on-off switch. Adopt the view of Shopify co-founder Tobi Lütke, who views trust like a battery. Assume every new relationship starts at 50% and every interaction either charges or drains the battery. Aim to be someone whose battery is consistently charged to 80% or more. As psychologist John Gottman proposes, strive to achieve at least five positive interactions for each negative interaction.

“The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives.” (couples therapist Esther Perel)

Learn how to defuse conflicts. FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss does this with three skills: listening, mirroring and labeling. Voss listens carefully to what someone says, mirrors their language by repeating keywords, and labels their emotions to understand where they’re coming from. Taken together, these three behaviors build emotional intelligence.

Use storytelling to inspire and motivate others – and yourself.

Master the art of storytelling to broaden your perspective and expand your influence. Recognize that you are not a reliable narrator of your own life. Memory can be unreliable. To help you discover your blind spots, try writing about a situation that made you anxious. Recall the story and the problem, and remember who upset you and why. Next, write about the same situation but from the perspective of another person in the story. This exercise will help you to be more honest with yourself.

“There are three sides to every story: yours, mine and the truth.” (Hollywood producer Robert Evans)

When you tell your story, home in on “conflict and intent.” Conflict occurs when an obstacle stands in the way of what you want, while intent is the motive compelling a behavior. Conflict and intent are relevant when you pitch to an investor, sell a product or even pursue a romantic relationship. When developing your story, build momentum and create suspense by linking events in a logical chain – X leads to Y, which leads to Z. If you remain curious, you’ll find stories in unexpected places. Brandon Stanton, creator of the blog Humans of New York, asks three questions to connect with his subjects: “What’s your biggest struggle?” “How has your life turned out differently than you expected it to?” and “What do you feel most guilty about?”

Boost your leadership power by using a bottom-up, systems-based approach.

Leaders often picture themselves on top of an organizational pyramid, and from those great heights, they dictate using a top-down approach. But to be an effective leader, consider inverting the pyramid to support the people at the bottom, enabling them to do their best work. Outline a general company direction. Then provide teams with the resources they need to follow through on their own ideas. “Servant leadership” – a concept developed by management guru Robert Greenleaf – fosters collaboration, trust and plenty of innovation. It’s how the employees at Spotify developed Discover Weekly, its highly successful personalized playlist feature, a product that CEO Daniel Ek initially rejected.

“Servant leaders create a climate of trust, which motivates employees to take risks and push the company forward.”

Learn to think in terms of systems. Imagine you make a mistake, for example. With an outcome-based approach, you fix that single mistake. With a systems-based approach, you understand why that mistake arose and how to prevent others like it. To adopt a systems-based mindset, start with your goals and work backward to create a system to reach each one. For example, if your goal is to run a marathon, create a system that includes a training schedule, daily targets and meal prep.

Strive to be invisible as a leader. Understand what your employees need, provide it and then get out of the way. Fashion mogul Brunello Cucinelli follows this approach. To foster a highly creative company, he pays his employees above-market wages, gives everyone a 90-minute lunch break and offers a library filled with creative works in multiple languages.

Develop technical skills for managing risk.

To make better decisions in an uncertain world, bring technical skills to your approach to risk – or, in the words of professional big wave surfer Garrett McNamara, become a “risk technician.” First, reduce your stress by building your competence. Alexey Molchanov – a free diver who can plunge 131 meters on a single breath – manages stress during dives by slowing his breath, framing stressful situations as enjoyable challenges to overcome, and focusing on one task at a time. To prepare for possible catastrophes, astronaut Chris Hadfield would visualize and work through worst-case scenarios.

“Fear is just a symptom of lack of preparation. The best antidote for fear is competence.” (astronaut Chris Hadfield)

Making decisions can be crippling. Remind yourself that inaction brings its own dangers. Toni Schneider, former CEO of Automattic, advises distinguishing between reversible decisions from irreversible ones: You can make reversible decisions quickly, but you should embark on irreversible with slow deliberation. Occasionally, unexpected events will unfold that have an outsize effect on your goals. Investor Morgan Housel calls these “low-probability, high-impact events” – and they can be catastrophic. But most risks aren’t. To get comfortable with risk and learn from failures, take regular, smaller risks rather than occasional big ones.

Become a clearer, more objective thinker.

Clarify your thinking to see the world more objectively. Understand why you believe what you believe and what it would take to change your mind. Identify and uproot your unconsidered beliefs. Legendary investor Charlie Munger habitually studies the strongest counterarguments to his position. In what he calls his “iron prescription,” he doesn’t feel entitled to an opinion unless he can state the opposing view better than its supporters. This practice also encourages skepticism and intellectual humility.

“Independent thought is hard and messy and often unpopular, but it’s also liberating.”

To deepen your intellectual humility, adopt a “scout” mindset – a concept developed by scholar Julia Galef. In contrast to a “soldier” mindset, which prioritizes victory at any cost, a scout mindset values accuracy above all else. To increase your intellectual honesty and confront your own prejudices, reflect on times that you changed your mind. Separate what you believe from who you are, and prioritize objectivity over being right. During arguments, avoid labeling others.

A scout mindset promotes independent thought. It understands that beliefs exist in shades of gray and that your confidence in their accuracy change as you learn more. It helps to view beliefs as puzzles. Ask “Is that true?” of any assertion stated as fact. Get excited about searching for newer ideas hidden beneath the weaker parts of older ones.

Enlarge your impact – and protect your mental health – by building an engaged community.

Highly successful people often find their achievements marred by social isolation. This isolation can breed loneliness, or “perceived isolation,” such as feeling alone in a crowded place. While “objective isolation,” such as the solitude you experience when, say, you are alone on a hike can be enriching, perceived isolation can be debilitating.

The antidote to loneliness is to build, join and, above all, participate in a community pursuing a goal larger than yourself. To avoid the fate of the lonely billionaire, don’t merely seek an audience – a group of people interested in what you make. Communities consist of people who share an interest and who also interact on a regular basis. Consider Taylor Swift, a maven of community building. Before publicly releasing her albums 1989 and Reputation, Swift invited a group of super fans, or “Swifties,” to her own home for a private listening session.

“Solitude helps us regulate emotions, while loneliness dulls them.”

Not everyone can undertake such large gestures, but you can build community by considering ways to overserve your loyal fans, generate a sense of goodwill and foster serendipitous moments. For newsletter writer Polina Marinova Pompliano, that meant encouraging her readers to meet up in real life. She emailed subscribers individually, inviting them to events in their own cities. As a result, on a single weekend in December, subscribers met up all over the world, at wine bars, museums and parks. They had opportunities to connect over shared interests, and some formed lasting friendships.

Consume a healthy content diet.

Just as junk food is bad for your body, junk content is bad for your brain, so consume a healthy content diet. Beliefs and thoughts form a kind of “mental software” that requires occasional updates, so seek out quality information. Investigate where your ideas originate and delete any clutter. According to journalist David Brooks’s theory of maximum taste, your mind can reach only the level of the best content you regularly take in. So feed your brain genius-level works that raise your upper limit.

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” (author Haruki Murakami)

Conduct an honest content audit. Evaluate what you read, watch, listen to, and so on, as well as the members of your social circle. Choose what you want your mind to contain. Fill your physical environment with objects that inspire you and expand your thinking. Explore unfashionable ideas, as the most original ones aren’t necessarily the most popular.

Discover your untapped potential.

Everyone has “hidden genius.” To find yours, start by rejecting labels, which shrink your worldview. Instead of passively accepting them, reframe any labels placed on you. Robert Hoge, who was born with a facial tumor and deformed legs, reclaimed the label “ugly” and reframed his appearance as an opportunity to talk about his story. Likewise, modify your views of other people by applying curiosity like a photo filter; that is, learn more about others before you place labels on them.

Learn more about yourself, too. Understanding who you aren’t frees up space for you to focus on becoming the person you want to be. For example, Francis Ngannou grew up in poverty in Cameroon. As a child, Ngannou wanted to escape poverty and move to America to become a world-famous boxer. So he disciplined himself to behave like a winning athlete. Eventually, at 25, he sold everything he owned, made a harrowing journey to France, and began training in mixed martial arts. In 2015, he became the sport’s world heavyweight champion.

“The person you are today does not have to be the person you become tomorrow.”

Once you find where your hidden genius lies, unlock it by betting on yourself. Start something meaningful – a new business, a passion project, a newsletter – and tie that to your name. To stoke your inspiration, identify people who are living your dream life and research how they got there.

About the Author

Polina Marinova Pompliano founded The Profile, a weekly newsletter that features the stories of highly successful people and companies.