Leadership calls for a particular scope of intelligence, as leading a group of people to achieve a certain goal involves planning, innovating, and managing. Most of the time, leaders have this trait, but unlocking your genius and applying it in the right way is something many people miss. Exploring this topic with Dr. Tracey Jones is international best-selling author Michael Gelb. They talk about how geniuses must adjust their visions on a level everyone can understand, why rest is a significant part of success despite intense working days, and how to break away from unrewarding habits. Michael also looks back on the life of a real-life genius Leonardo da Vinci and explains why every aspiring leader must have a dream team of mentors to look up to.
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Listen to the podcast here:
Michael Gelb – Leaders On Leadership
Our guest is Michael Gelb. Michael is the author of seventeen books, including the international bestseller How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. He is a genius, creative, visionary, and he helps work with other people to bring out the genius in them. You are going to love what he has to say about the price of leadership and the role creativity and curiosity play in that.
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Our guest is Michael Gelb. Michael is the author of seventeen books, including the international bestseller How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. His books have been translated into 25 languages and have sold more than 1 million copies. Michael is a Senior Fellow at The Center for Humanistic Management, the Gabelli School of Business, and a member of the Leading People and Organizations Advisory Board. He serves as an Executive Coach and a Consultant for high performers. I've watched some of his YouTube. He speaks to all different ages. Michael, we are honored to have you on the show.
It's great to be with you. Thank you.
I can't wait to hear what you're going to say about this. You know this is leaders on leadership. We're pulling back to the tougher side of leadership where you separate the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats. My father wrote this little gem called The Price of Leadership. He was a tremendous leader. He was pragmatic and real about leadership is joyous and jubilant, but it's also tough, sad, and lonely. One of the things he talks about in The Price of Leadership is loneliness. We've all heard that it's lonely at the top. Can you share with me, either from your studies of studying Leonardo da Vinci or you growing your business and sharing with other leaders? What does loneliness mean to you? What advice would you have for leaders reading that are in that lonely space?
Let's start with Leonardo da Vinci because I often refer to him as perhaps the loneliest person who ever lived and the reason is, he was far ahead of his time in many different ways. He did have mathematicians he could talk to about mathematics. He had painters he could talk to about painting. He had other anatomists that he could talk to about anatomy. He had other inventors that he could talk to about invention. I don't know that there was anybody he could talk to about how all of that fits together and the things that he saw. Well before Copernicus, Leonardo wrote in his notebook, “Il sole non si muove.” The sun does not move, at a time when people thought that the sun moved around the earth. He figured it out.
My favorite element of Leonardo, all his great inventions, he invented the parachute before anybody could fly. Hundreds of years later, a British skydiver built Leonardo's parachute based on the instructions Leonardo gave in his notebooks from 500 years ago. He went 10,000 feet up on a hot air balloon. He had a modern parachute on for backup, but he didn't need it because Leonardo's parachute worked. If you think about it, what was Leonardo doing? He wasn't trying to achieve an objective. Anybody in a leadership position is always trying to achieve multiple objectives and helping other people define and achieve objectives and coordinating that achievement into a big picture. Also, then thinking about what happens not when we meet obstacles, but what happens when we succeed. How do we deal with success? A lot of people are good at overcoming challenges and difficulties. Many leaders discover, “What do I do? I'm successful?” They have an existential crisis because they didn't think, “We're flying. How do we get back down?”
Remember when President Kennedy made this great leadership objective about, “We're going to get a man to the moon by the end of the decade.” If you talk to people at NASA at that time that this was stated at the highest level, it wasn't stated unequivocally. It wasn't, “NASA, let's try to get a man on the moon. Let's see what we can do. Give it your best shot.” No. It was, “It is done.” “Bring him back safely,” was an important part of that instruction. It's a mantle of a vision, a response. It's where loneliness, all these elements that your father preciously and articulately shared with the world many years ago.
I remember he was a legend when I was coming up. I would be around and I spoke to groups who had him previously. In a lovely way, we get to be in the wake of the wonderful, tremendous insights that he shared with the world. That's another element. The first principle for thinking like Leonardo in Italian, it's curiosità and it means never-ending curiosity. It does generate loneliness. Especially in success, people are satisfied. They're not continuing to ask questions. Leaders are always asking, “What haven’t we thought of yet? How can we do this better? How can we do this more intelligently? How can we engage more people? How can we create greater benefit for the communities that we serve? How can we uplift all of our stakeholders, not just our shareholders?”
The more comprehensive, systemic, visionary, compassionate, and humanistic your question, the lonelier you will be. You can have a false sense of community if you say, “How can I squeeze as much out of the system as I possibly can?” Unfortunately, there's a lot of people who will go along with that and collude with that and you can feel that you are being suicidally sanctioned to do this because that's with everybody else. I don't consider that real leadership. I don't consider extracting wealth from the system for your own aggrandizement or the aggrandizement of a select group of people to be leadership. When I talk about leadership, this is where the visionary part and the loneliness part and you asked me about some other parts too, I can't separate them.
They do thread into it. I love that you called him the loneliest man in the world. A leader is nothing without their followers. As you hit it, you may see things before other people see them. You also hit on the point about extracting wealth for your personal benefit. I call that SOB, Self-Orienting Behaviors. You're an SOB and they're like, “What?” I'm like, “Self-Orienting Behavior.”
That's a sophisticated, non-judgmental psychological term with a nice shot of judgment. It’s cleverly done. I like that.
Truth and love.
I'm going to borrow that.
You're welcome. That is good. You hit on it. He had this curiosity, not for himself or to build something for himself, but to know the unknown and that's such a beautiful thing. My dad's whole focus was being a successful speaker is great, but to encourage that love of learning up until your last breath. It's tough. I think of Monty Python where they were like, “My brain hurts.” You got to think and it's like, “It's tough, but you got to exercise the mental muscle.” I love the loneliness, but you don't want to be too aloof if nobody is following you. Who did he have as his staunchest advocates? You can't go lone wolf your whole life, not even Jesus could do that, and no matter how brilliant you are. Bill Murray was like, “You're a balloon and we're the ropes hanging off.” Who did he have with him to advocate for him and keep him going and infused?
Unlocking Your Genius: Leadership will never be about extracting wealth from the system for your own aggrandizement or the advertisement of a select group of people.
He figured out something. Fortunately, I also figured out early in my career, inspired by Leonardo, that you have to have a patron.
I call them advocates, but I love that patron. We did one on Joan of Arc. You've got to have a patron. I love that.
The Medici sponsored him in his early days. When he was 30, he wrote what is probably the most famous employment application letter of all time. It's in the beginning of my book on Da Vinci. He'd been working for the Medici company based in Florence. He wanted to get a job with the Sforza group based in Milan. He writes this phenomenal letter to Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, the CEO of the Sforza group and he lays out for him all of the ways that he can conserve the Sforza group. It's quite remarkable. He then went for his job interview. He's Leonardo da Vinci, so he makes by hand a musical instrument out of silver. He plays a spontaneous composition for the Duke, sings for him, and then gives the instrument to the Duke as a present. The Duke said, “Let's find something for this young Leo.”
For the next seventeen years, he was under the patronage of the Duke of Milan, but then the French invaded and the Duke had to flee Milan. Leonardo lost his patron. He went down to Rome and the Vatican was effectively his client for a while but then his ally in the Vatican passed away. For a while, he was in the middle of Italy, under the sponsorship of Cesare Borgia. He then found himself back in Florence, another period in Milan, and then he spent the last three years of his life in France, under the patronage of François I, the first the King of France. Leonardo’s official job was a philosopher to the King. In my work as a consultant and executive coach, people put me on retainer, philosopher, and executive leadership coach to the king, aka the CEO.
For the leaders out there, even if you see it all, you have to have an enabling context. You have to have the resources and the means. Otherwise, it's in you, but you got to have somebody monetarily or to go in and an advocate for you or champion you. That's important for leaders. If you're in an organization where, as a leader, you see these things but you're not getting met with support, then you need to go. We've all had great leaders who we love more than anything and then they pass away or they get transferred out. This is part of the leadership journey. You may have the person that has your back like nobody else, but they may not always be there.
This is one of the things. I've worked with people who were identified as fast track, high potentials in a company. I work with them. I did leadership development training and coaching for them. They've risen up and become EVPs, CEOs. They're retired and I'm taking the next generation up through this same process. One of the things that is critical for that long-term success is identifying your allies, identifying mentors. Identify the people who get you, who want to support you and help you, and that creates a through-line for the success of your career.
I've seen people meet with tremendous misfortune, setbacks, and grave difficulties. That's another place where loneliness comes in and difficulty. I had a client. I worked with him. He was a division director in C&P Telephone Company in Washington, DC area. He rose up to become the CEO. They had 8,000 people in his organization. Working together, we focused on the next leap of his career. We mapped out what would be the ideal thing for him to do. Amazingly, he got to do the next thing, which was the ideal thing for him to do. He became president of National Public Radio. He then went on to become the United States Ambassador of South Africa. He didn't retire. He moved and started a foundation in New Mexico. I'm still friends with him. He’s a fabulous guy.
What's great is if you look at his career, it looks like it was this continuous meteoric rise. If you read the resume, it reads, “President of this. CEO, President of that. Ambassador of this. Head of this foundation. Author of this book.” It looks like a storybook, except he'll tell you there was suffering. There was grave disappointment. There was heartbreak. There was betrayal. There was drama. It's never going to happen without that.
It’s not and it doesn't bring out the greatness in you, that adversity. I've never met a great leader with an easy past, “What war stories do you have? You haven't even gone to battle yet.” You're specifying for leaders that it does take time. The older I get, there are certain entities and people that will bring out the best in me. There are ones, “This is not going to work.” Rather than continually fight, it's good to be self-aware and be fluid enough that you want to find those people that are going to challenge and champion you. If you're lonely for extended amounts of time, something is not right. Either you got to clean house and start from a new or you're in the wrong environment or something. Wouldn’t you agree?
It's a tricky thing because on the one hand, if you're a genius, by nature, you may be lonely. Especially if you're a big picture genius, people may not understand you because you're far ahead of them. I try to help my genius clients or my aspiring genius clients. There’s a critical missing link for a lot of people. It's one thing to generate great, creative ideas. It's one thing to come up with the light bulb or the phonograph or the movies, all of which Thomas Edison did, by the way. It's another thing to get people to buy into your vision.
That's leadership. You can be a leader and have all those great ideas leading out of your mind, but leadership is, “Does everybody else catch a vision?”
How do we get people to buy-in? I've written two books about that because that's how important it is. I've written a lot of books about how to be creative and get genius ideas, but if you can't get people to buy into those ideas, then you may die alone and penniless. That's not that much fun. It sounds romantic when we write the novel about your life, but I'd rather you die fulfilled, wealthy, endowing all sorts of foundations and charities with a happy family and a beautiful life fulfilled. That's my intention for everybody I touch.
One of the nicest things that you refer to my father as living in his wake. That's one of the coolest things I've ever heard that phrase. We'll leave that legacy where people keep shoring up and picking different pieces of it. You talked about your friend and talked about that there was a lot behind the scenes. The next price my father talks about his weariness. No matter how passionate and visionary we are, we're mere mortals. There's always going to be some people that are doing more than their share and ones that aren’t. Can you share how you or what you saw at Leonardo da Vinci where he put that grit in and stay with his nose to the grindstone? Genius people think you're an idea person, but not every idea that you're going to have is going to work.
I'm glad we're talking about this because it’s important. For more than ten years, I co-taught at the University of Virginia Darden Graduate School of Business with a brilliant professor, Jim Clawson. Jim wrote a book called Level Three Leadership. Our course, it was called Leading Innovation. The first line of Jim's book is, “Leadership is about managing energy. First, in yourself and then in others.” How do you manage your energy? The best way to manage your energy is to have a higher purpose.
Unlocking Your Genius: Identify your allies, mentors, and the people who want to support and help you.
If you're doing something beyond being an SOB, if you have a higher purpose to make a difference in the world to uplift other people's lives, that gives you tremendous energy. If the people in your organization feel that they're there for more than a paycheck, part of a team, enriching the lives of their customers, doing something that they care about and believe in, meeting a genuine human need, that generates tremendous energy. Even then, you can get weary. It's a long road. You get a pandemic show up. Things happen that you don't expect.
How do you recover quickly? How do you regenerate your energy? Leonardo talks about this. In my studies of geniuses throughout history, they understand the importance of recovery, resilience, recharging, resting. Thomas Edison used to take two naps a day on his desk in his office. He would lie down on the wooden desk. He used to put Watts’ Dictionary of Chemistry as a pillow. All of his coworkers say that every time he woke up, he seemed to know even more about chemistry.
People say, “How did you write this book, How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci? You're making this up.” No. I read Leonardo's notebooks. I had a question in mind, what's the advice he's giving to his students? I then translate it into contemporary terms. Leonardo says to his students, “It is good, in the midst of the intensity of your work, that you should take a little relaxation.” He suggests things like walk in nature. He says, “Come back to your work and you will see it with fresh eyes.” That’s understanding this rhythm between total intensity and letting go and resting and relaxing.
I taught my clients meditation before it was fashionable. I started teaching meditation to senior executives at a retreat in Le Mirador in Vevey, Switzerland in 1979. Nobody had ever heard of it or knew anything about it. There was not all the scientific research about it. I said, “Do it. If you feel better and you have more energy, you'll keep doing it. If you don't, don't do it again.” Fortunately, a lot of them have been doing it since then. The great thing is we have this incredible cornucopia of methodologies, all of which have scientific validation. I don't care if you want to do mindfulness, yoga, pranayama. I personally teach Tai Chi and Qi Gong from Chinese lineages, thousands of years old. Have some practice that's an efficient way to recharge your mind and body.
Walking in nature. This is not stuff I put in my books or write about. We live near the Rockefeller State Preserve. I walk in nature every day for an hour. I shut off the phone. I shut off the device. I listen to the sound of the birds. We usually choose a theme, like a composer and we wake up in the morning and we put it on. We're putting on Bach. We have Bach playing in our house. I do my Tai Chi, Qi Gong practice. Every day I invest anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour. I got to do it.
That goes back to that concept of the Sabbath thing. People say, “I can't do it. I don't have time.” I'm like, “You do.” You prioritize. Rest and restoration, you schedule that too. You got to jealously guard that. I find that the more I take time for that, the more productive I am in my productive times and this point of shutting off and recharging. You can't hear the genius if it's noisy and you're too tired.
Think about where are you and where's everybody when they get their best ideas. It's not at work. It's in the shower.
On the treadmill, walking.
Keep a notebook with you at the place where you are when you get your best ideas and record your ideas. The more you record them, the more ideas you get. If we look at disasters, the so-called human-caused disasters, things like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the Challenger, and the other space crashes, they're caused by one of two things, fatigue. People did not have enough rest and recharging and they were fatigued. They've made mistakes or people did not feel free to speak up. There was not an environment of psychological safety. Those are your two causes of what's going to cost your company the most money and what's going to result in you making the biggest mistake in your life. Instead, make sure everybody is well-rested and ask everybody for their ideas regularly, and listen. It’s not that complicated.
I know everybody reading is a critical thinker and expressive. Some of the times where I get the most drained is not because I'm doing the most work, but I feel like I hit my head and going, “If we don't pay attention to this.” I was in the military. I know how to shut up and color and salute smartly. I read an insight about The Challenger. When you know it's going towards the end, that's a real draining atmosphere for a leader or a genius to be in when they're not validated and listened to. It’s terribly frustrating. It makes you sick.
It sucks the life. I was blessed to be invited to speak at the Global Drucker forum in Vienna. I was on a panel with Amy Edmondson who wrote the book on psychological safety. She told this story. I forgot which disaster it was, but she showed the video where they were doing the interview with this poor fellow who is in the meeting who saw the technical flaw that ultimately wind up killing our pilots. This horrible tragedy. He was in the meeting and he said, “I couldn't speak up.” That commanding officer is a good one. As General Stanley McChrystal tells us in teams of teams, “We’ll ensure that there’s shared consciousness and that there's empathy that we understand that we're communicating across functions so we know what everybody needs.” Part of the challenge of the leader is to understand and balance the needs of all the different stakeholders. You don't know those needs unless you are empathic, unless you're curious and humble.
The thing for leaders and the geniuses, they say see things that other people may not see. It's that empathic or whatever you want to call it. We always tell people that nobody can make you do anything illegal, immoral, or unethical. Even though you may not be listened to, as leaders, especially the creative ones, speak up and then you make the decision, “I'm not going to stick around.” You've probably been in that situation too, Michael. I've been in a lot of organizations and it wasn't because I left them because I was bad. It's because there was some value congruence for my convictions and what was going on.
I respect somebody saying, “I felt like I couldn't say anything.” You better at least say it and then you can say, “I know I'm going to get fired so here's my resignation.” As leaders or geniuses, if you do, you need to keep saying it and say, “It's America. What are they going to do, throw you in jail? It's not other countries where they do that stuff.” It's important. Maybe back in Leonardo's time, it was different where if you went against the sanction wisdom. You said that word, societal sanctions. We're in the realm where that's happening again here. Geniuses need to be free to speak and courageous because it takes great courage to be a genius because everybody else is going to think you're an idiot or you're wrong or you're a fanatic.
Einstein, they did think. He's a patent clerk. He doesn’t, “What is this? This is rubbish. This is nonsense.” What his theorem predicted happened. All of a sudden, “You're the greatest genius. Here’s the Nobel Prize.” We used to live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We were there for ten years, a magical place. We became good friends with Murray Gell-Mann, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for coming up with quarks, the smallest particle. His license plate was QUARKS. He’s a cool guy. We used to have these salons at our home and we’d invite all sorts of clever people. We drink great wine. We'd have fabulous food. We would talk about the nature of creativity, genius, leadership, all of these topics. Once you win the Nobel Prize and you're famous and validated, Murray would tell us what it was like when he was struggling in his mind to come up with it. He did this all in his mind. This is theoretical physics. In his mind, he's figuring out the fundamental particles that make up the particles of atoms. He's working the math in his mind and he's laying it all out.
Unlocking Your Genius: You must be aware of habits that don't serve you and your higher purpose, and eventually free yourself from them.
He's in squabbles with his colleague, Richard Feynman, another genius physicist. So far, they're these two clever guys, but who knows? Murray comes up, he publishes his equations. Two years later, they built the Super Collider, where they suddenly smashed the atoms together and they went, “Murray’s right. You're a genius. We love you. Here's fame. Here's money, etc.” There's some degree of maybe you get recognized and maybe you don't.
Back to the spatial thing, that was different. That was more, “Do I speak up?” versus, “Do I create?” Which are different things. The genius has to say it, regardless of the outcome. It's like, “I got married.” I finally had to go, “I'm not going to think about it. I'm going to do it and then I'm going to work the outcome.” Otherwise, I could imagine everything and go, “I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to say anything. I’m not going to abide by the rules of whatever the covenant is.” You do it because you said you’d do it. When you're that genius and you have that gifting and that coating and those experiences, you can't put a cork in it. It's coming out.
You're loyal to higher principles. One of the principles of genius is loyal. I'll tell you there are three. Truth, beauty, and goodness and they all go together. Murray used to say, “It's quite amazing that in theoretical physics, a theory that is beautiful is more likely to be true.”
You then do have that higher grounding. People are like, “Life is whatever you make it.” You have choices, but there are still absolute truths, theological truths, physical truths, existential. There still is a grounding in this. It's not free for mayhem. I love that. There are quirks. Structure and order is a beautiful thing and uncovering and discovering all of the unknown. We only know a tiny little sliver of the known do we know. It's beautiful. People finally open their minds and it is humble. The Humble Approach, John Templeton, it’s brilliant. I read this book and I'm like, “Are you kidding me?” Economist, a genius. His approach to what is unknown and how the hubris of thinking, “That's stupid. We hardly know anything. I'm going to get lazy. The mind, we haven't even begun.” The greatest creation in all of the universe is right here between our ears and what we can unlock with that is unbelievable.
It didn't come with a manual. That's why I had to write How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci.
My father talked about abandonment. Abandonment has that negative thing. He's talking about, we need to abandon what we want and like to think about and favor what we need and ought to think about. There are a lot of other geniuses out there walking amongst us, but they can't land on something. They can't finish what they started and they can't get that conscientiousness dialed in. Can you share a little bit about that trait of abandonment? When you see the calling and you decide to go all-in, make that decision, as my dad would say, “Make it yours and then die by it.” Can you unpack that for us?
My interpretation of that is everybody is looking to do something. Every self-help guide that says, “Ten things to do.” You go on the internet and say, “What do I do to become a great leader? What do I do to be a great achiever?” It's great. It's much easier to have people who have an overabundance of commitment to achievement and help them be more balanced than people who are lazy and don't want to do anything. They never have the money to hire me so I don't have to worry about that. My job is to usually take these super high achievers, these driven people, and help them find more balance and more subtlety and more alignment with truth, beauty, and goodness in everything they do a lot.
Frequently, the key to that breakthrough wisdom is becoming aware of habits that don't serve you and don't serve your higher purpose and freeing yourself from those habits. We think not addictive habits, which are disastrous, but habits of thinking, habits of negative thinking, habits of judging other people. A simple thing to give up is check the news once a day and move on. I don't care where you are on the spectrum. Focus on what you're going to create and how you're going to make a better world. We saved everybody lots of energy. Put that energy to make a better world. Tell me what your solution is to whatever bothers you. Focus on the solution. What are you doing now? How are you helping other people? That's one big thing. Stop checking your phone. Get off social media. One of my favorite philosophers said, “When you stop doing the wrong thing, the right thing does itself.” That's FM Alexander.
I love how you put balance, subtlety, and alignment. Abandonment, people are like, “What do I have to give up? I have to give up on the news and binge-watching Netflix for three days until I get thrombosis.” You give up, you abandon things that are non-value added. We’re like billable minutes in our day like a lawyer, “I'm going to break apart and bill.” How much non-productive or time wasted we have? Some people focus so much on success. That's great to look at. What do you have that’s still pulling you away nonvalue-added stuff? You need to get rid of that. You then get that resiliency, that time, that energy.
I had a coaching client. I did a three-month intensive with him. He’s a brilliant guy who wanted to become a full-time professional coach. He had been an officer in the Air Force and he is a professional pilot. If he's an officer in the Air Force, he's a professional pilot, you know he's a great achiever. That's not an issue. Here’s a guy you would want on your squad in any attempt to accomplish anything. He was looking into making this transition to become a full-time executive coach. He was asking me to coach him in his transition to become a coach.
I had him do this exercise that I invite everybody to do. Look at all the areas of your life, like your relationship. If you're married or have a partner, your children, your parents, your friends, you look at your relationships. Look at your work, your career, your business. Look at your spiritual life, your sense of connection with something greater than yourself. Look at the hobbies you have and the things you want to learn. Look at the places you want to travel to. Look at your health. Ask yourself in each of these areas. Everybody has already written out all their goals. We’re dealing with achievers here so they already have goals and they know to make them specific with a timeline and all that stuff. Try this, ask yourself, “How do I want to feel in each of these areas of my life?”
My friend Jim Clawson, somebody asked him that question. He was a high achiever, PhD, scholar, Professor. Somebody asked him that question and he said it rocked his world. He wrote a book called Powered by Feel. What he found is people who perform at the highest level, they're engaged. They're in what Csikszentmihalyi calls the flow state. In the flow state, time disappears and people feel completely engaged. This is a thing I have in common with your father. I bet he was like this. When am I most of the flow state? In front of 1,000 people. I have to watch the clock. I'm being paid to finish on time. I always finish on time. I stay in touch with the clock time reality. I have to be conscious about that because time has gone. I'm in bliss.
You ask yourself, “I know how I want to feel when I'm doing that. How do I want to feel when I'm spending time with my kids? How do I want to feel with my parents? How do I want to feel with my wife or my husband or my boyfriend or my girlfriend? How do I want to feel about my health? How do I want to feel when I wake up in the morning? How do I want to feel when I go to sleep at night?” If you can articulate, start with a few keywords in each area. How do you want to feel? That's a key to happiness, fulfillment, and high performance from a different, non-driven, inside out and joyous perspective.
You were dealing, in that case, with people that are already executors. I was in the Air Force too. You don't want to be all thrust, no vector. Put those afterburner nozzles so you can go up. There's a lot of people that say, “I'm in pain. I'm in dissonance,” but it's not, “I want to feel different. My family is dysfunctional. My health is shot. I hate work.” They know that this is a bad feeling. What do you do for people that are in that state where until you want it bad enough to care, you can't get to unlocking your genius? This still falls on them to put the plan in motion.
Powered by Feel: How Individuals, Teams, and Companies Excel
Trauma doesn't mean that you have PTSD because you are in a war. What we're realizing and what we're learning is that a shocking number of people grow up traumatized. There are many sources of trauma. You could call it the Dao. You could call it the Buddha. You can call it Christ. The inner dynamic of going beyond living as a slave of your own tiny ego, abandon that.
Even if you say, “I'm an atheist. I don't believe in God.” You believe in God. You are God. That can work for some people. You got to plant your flag somewhere. You went back to that overarching purpose. My dad used to say that and he's like, “If I'll share what does it for me, but you have to make up your own mind on who you're going to live your life for. If it's yourself, then go all in. If it's not, then you find that.” A lot of the research, even the secular research, you know this because you're in the same world I am in, the greatest thing you can do to pull yourself out of a nosedive or depression or set your vision is to take your eyes off yourself. I don't care if you're hardcore. You think you can run the world. It's a universal law.
Another way of saying that is focusing on yourself is a loser's game. You're going to die. It’s over. You can't take it with you. The winner of the rat race is still a rat.
The fourth price is vision. My dad flunked out of school in the eighth grade and was not a formally educated man, but he was wise because read and absorbed like a sponge and he poured it back out. If you pull it all in, it's like the Dead Sea, you get all stinky and salty and nothing floats. He would say that vision is nothing more than seeing what needs to be done and doing it. I love when you talk about engagement because many people do see what needs to be done, but they're like, “No.” Talk about Leonardo with his vision. In your business, your walk, what does vision mean to you? How do you grow envision or wisdom?
It's by asking the question. This comes back to everything. That's why curiosità is the first principle. The questions we ask every day determine the quality of our lives. Visionaries ask questions about vision. I ask questions. I love food. My wife and I discuss what's for dinner. It's one of our favorite conversations every day. We plan it. Part of my vision is the fabulous buffalo burgers we're going to have for dinner. The questions you ask determine the quality of your life. On that level, that's the appropriate question.
Asking questions, how will I bring more truth, beauty, and goodness into the lives of everyone I touched? I'm pointing that way because that's where New Jersey is. My dad has been having some health issues. I'm interacting with my brothers, with my mom. I talked to my dad. We're all coming together as a family. Some of my questions are, “How do I best care for my mom and my dad?” The person who's sick, everybody looks at that person. The wife or the husband of the person who's sick is maybe suffering even more. It touches the grandchildren. It touches the brothers. It touches everybody.
I was doing a meditation. I was praying for my dad. I realized I have a special love for my dad. I love the guy. The intensity of love for this person and that I was envisioning that love spreading out to all of humanity that we all be healed. You have to take the personal thing. There’s nothing more personal than the illness of a loved one or your own illness so you pray. It's fine. Pray for your own immediate needs and circle. You as a visionary, what if we extend out our love to all and not the members of our little pack? This is the universal teaching. That's a visionary question.
We get clients, in practical terms, who say, “What's the entire purpose of this company?” I'm pointing to New Jersey again because a client is in New Jersey. I have a client who remediates mold and asbestos. It's a great business. It's a service business. If you have mold or you have asbestos, you’re glad you know these people because you won't be sick anymore and your building will be safe, and so on. I've worked with the CEO and the leadership of that company and they've defined a higher purpose, which is taking everything they do to a whole another level. Their purpose is to enrich all the communities that they touch. They give to charity. They pay people for community service days. Everybody comes to work every day with more energy. My job isn't to treat these mold samples. My job is to serve our communities.
One hundred percent of the people that I've interviewed, including you, tied vision back to helping others, serving our fellow citizens. In our small group Bible study, you talked about that verse, it was 2 Timothy, “Love covers a multitude of all sins.” That's it. It is the universal truth. I love that you put that in there. No matter what it does, it goes to the higher good. I love how you said, “Don't even turn off.” I cut the cord. I haven't watched the news since May of 2014. See how smart and happy I am. I'm getting younger and smarter and more peaceful. I'm like, “Oh my gosh.” It's one of those things.
Whenever I hear people complain or whine or poo-poo on the world, I'm like, “You have no idea. For every naysayer out there, there are 10,000 people serving the community. Shut up and get out and quit hashtagging and regurgitating and verbal vomit. Get out there and you will see the beauty that is all around you.” Yes, we have some real intrinsic things going on inside of our hearts. We're human beings. We also have this great God seed in us. We have this capability to love and create and explore the unknown and help people. Where does that come from? Get out and use it.
Leonardo da Vinci's motto was, “Amor vincit omnia,” which means love conquers all.
Michael, this has been absolutely fascinating. Anything else that we haven't touched and that you would like to leave our leaders on leadership with some of your thoughts?
If you want to get good at basketball, for example, you might watch films of Michael Jordan. For example, Kobe Bryant did and LeBron James did. Kids grow up watching Kobe or LeBron and next there’ll be Giannis and Kawhi. It's natural to want a role model in whatever it is you want to learn. If you want to be a great basketball player, study Larry Bird, study Magic Johnson, study all the best players. If you want to be creative and visionary, study Leonardo da Vinci. You don't have to limit yourself to Michael Jordan or Leonardo da Vinci. Create a dream team of visionary, inspirational leaders.
You're blessed. You grew up with one as your actual father. He's been that for many people. It's tremendous. I’ll tell you what I do. It's a practical thing. People can do it. If you look at the feed on my YouTube, it's all spiritual teachers, geniuses, some sports, and some comedy. I'm studying with sages from all traditions, from physicists, scientists, poets, singers, from Bach, from Mozart, from the greatest geniuses who've ever lived. That's what I fill my brain and my heart and my soul every night before I go to sleep. It's free. You might have to watch a couple of commercials if you don't buy the subscription. It’s free of all the knowledge of humanity. More than ever before in human history, this is critical, become the curator of your own soul, the curator of the soul of your family, and the people who you touch.
Unlocking Your Genius: Become the curator of your own soul, as well as the soul of your family and the people who you touch.
As my dad would always say, “You'll be the same person five years from now that you are today except for two things, the people you meet and the books you read.” Even if they've gone on to glory, you can still meet them. That's why my dad loves biographies and autobiographies. He said, “I knew Lincoln and those guys better than their own mothers knew them.” As with you, you probably knew Leonardo better than his own mother did because you’ve read so much about him.
Build that dream team. It takes work. I encourage people. If you're like, “I'm not a reader. I'm too old.” It's like anything else, learning and being curious and inquisitive and developing that higher-order thinking is you start here and every day you get better at it. It's more liberating and it's more fun. In the beginning, exposing your ignorance is like, “I wish I would have known that,” but then it's like, “Better late than never. On to the next breakthrough.” One second before I emigrate to heaven, I'll be like, “Yeah.” Everything will be made clear to me. Michael, how can people get in touch with you?
I've got a couple of big things. We're completing the online video seminar on How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. People have been reading the book for years. I can't travel around to do the live seminars for the moment. This video will give people the experience of being in my intensive two-day live seminar. It's going to be launched soon. There's information about it on my website, MichaelGelp.com. I also have a new book called Mastering the Art of Public Speaking.
I saw that too. You are truly a renaissance man like your hero.
We're working on it.
Before I say goodbye, have you seen the series Life-Changing Classics that we put out? They’re the little booklets. There are 32 of them. It's Lincoln, Pat, and we did one of Joan of Arc. We should do one on Leonardo da Vinci. That would be beautiful. We always pick the greats, Acres of Diamonds, As a Man Thinketh, A Message to Garcia, New Common Denominator of Success, some of the old-timey seminal thinkers.
Do you have Thomas Edison in there?
No. I wrote him down too.
I wrote Innovate Like Edison with Thomas Edison's great, great grand niece. He should be in there. I wrote a book about ten other geniuses. I've got Thomas Jefferson. I've got Plato. I've got Brunelleschi. I got Queen Elizabeth I and Gandhi. I got a lot of stuff for you.
We could have even broken that into a series on each one of them because they're those little $2 reads and they're brilliant. People can power through them and tell them about it. Michael, I can't thank you enough for this.
Thank you. It was so much fun.
It was nice. I thank you so much for sharing. I'm glad you got to know my dad. I'm honored that we are continuing the legacy. What an inspiration you've been to me and what you've taught me and to everybody out there reading too. Thank you.
Important Links:
YouTube - Michael Gelb