Have you ever felt like you had a special kind of skill, or a calling, or some bigger reason for existing on the planet? Have you felt like there is more to life than just working a regular nine to five job? Or being a struggling activist working for a pitifully low salary in a sweet but ineffectual non-profit?

Do you get that weird feeling that “there’s gotta to be more to life that this?”

I’ve had this feeling forever. I think you probably have it to.

I believe this feeling is a calling that is telling you that you are not operating from your creative genius zone, and that you really need to be.

Let’s start at the beginning

I mean literally.  Let’s start at the beginning of the universe.

The universe is expanding. It’s growing more complex. It’s been doing it since The Big Bang. That’s a basic fact of physics.

This phenomenon shows itself on our planet in the growing complexity of biological life. Until recently there has been an ever-expanding number of species, ecological niches, and complexity in food chains. Over millions of years, the planet’s life forms have been growing in intelligence. At some point they started to utilize tools. The evolution of tools has grown into what we know today as technology.

This story is told beautifully by Kevin Kelly in his truly awesome book, What Technology Wants. Kelly explains the relationship between biological evolution and technological evolution, hypothesising that there are more or less the same process.

Humans in particular have been getting better at using tools for quite some time. But it’s not just humans that use technology. Birds, chimpanzees, ants, octopus, and nearly all animals use a tool as their own technology.

This is a one-way flow of evolution. We can’t go backwards. We can’t sit still.

I see this flow of evolution as a universal law that also governs our own intellectual, creative, and spiritual growth.  That means that for us to fully bloom in our time on the earth, we need to go full-tilt forward with the flow of it. When the world changes, we need to step up to the plate and change with it. This means not taking the easy road or reading the Ikea manual on life. It means making daily choices to dig deeper into our creativity, push harder in our technical pursuits and lean in to our emotional and spiritual development. It means asking the hard questions and taking big leaps.

The only way to discover our own enlightenment is to move into our flow of creativity, innovation and technology, not against it. We find our genius zone from within our unique creativity. That’s also where we are going to experience our greatest love and personal fulfillment.

It’s (probably) where the money is too.

But lolz, that’s not actually what I wanted to write about.  I wanted to write about how to get into your virtuous cycle of creativity.

The genius zone

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