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For proof of your own potential genius, just look around you
Sunday, 12 March 2006
Fossil evidence suggests human beings appeared on Earth between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. For most of that time, we essentially lived like animals - hunting and gathering for a living. Of course, we also painted caves and told stories, but day-to-day existence was a struggle.
It was only about 10,000 years ago that agriculture began to appear in the Middle East, making the development of modern societies possible.
So what is the difference between you and a person struggling to scratch out a living from nature 50,000 years ago? Biologically nothing. You are essentially identical.
You just got lucky in the draw of history and were born into the modern world. Imagine instead that your places were swapped and you had to spend your days hunting and gathering, always at risk of injury, violence and disease. If you were transported back to when life was nasty, brutish and short.
Fortunately for you, that will never happen.
How this modern world was built from such humble beginnings must be the greatest story ever told. There we were, a few thousand generations back, dropped naked in the dust with nothing but rocks, animals and trees available to us. And he we are now, flying into space, building the internet, and destroying deadly microbes.
Have a look at the place you live. The cars, the roads, the airplanes the television, the buildings - all of these were built by us out of an unforgiving natural environment.
It's a bit like dropping a group of people on a desert island without any hope of rescue, then finding that their grandchildren managed to get back to civilization by building a helicopter out of the palm trees.
What ingenious creatures we are!
And there's more to it than that. Even things we see as so ordinary that they are mundane - chairs, glasses, spaghetti, light bulbs - all of these are the products of our minds. None was given to us. We had to discover how to make them out of the natural resources around us.
It's an astonishing feat, yet few people ever take the time to think about it.
We're so busy complaining there's nothing on TV - we forget just how amazing it is that we have TV at all. How did we go from banging rocks together a few thousand years ago to where we are today?
There is no one genius to thank for our good fortune. The tale of our ascent is one of ordinary people finding extraordinary ways to use the limited resources they'd been given. Sure, some people made bigger contributions than others, but it is the work of millions that has got us here. And we're still on the way up. In a hundred years, we will almost certainly have built up an even more astonishing array of knowledge and skills.
All of this creativity came from inside us. It is something that I have inside me, and you have inside you. It's the ability to find better ways of doing things, and to discover wonderful new things that have never existed before.
The proof of our genius is all around us - in our computers, our pianos, our languages, and our skyscrapers. It's in our music, our poetry, our paintings, and our stories.
What unbelievably creative creatures we are. It boggles the mind to think of how much we have come up with. Think of all the websites, the books, the songs, the movies, the plays, the dances, and the recipes that are out there. None of these fell out of the sky. The are the result of our own inventiveness and hard work.
If you want proof of your own inner genius, you don't have to think of famous people in far away places. Instead, simply look around you. The evidence of your own potential is abundantly available.
 | Look for the underlying pattern | | We humans are pattern-spotting machines. The world can often seem complex and random, but if you look under the covers, you can sometimes find an underlying pattern for its behaviour. In fact, it's the discovery of such patterns that have driven our development forward in many areas. |  | Don't get too easily discouraged | | Occasionally, you may come across someone who appears as if they were born an expert in something. Perhaps it's sport, meeting people, business or family. Some of us just seem to be stars, while others are common. | | Test yourself out on the real world | | Each of us lives in two different places. The real world in which our bodies are firmly anchored, and a shadow-world of fantasies, rules-of-thumb and strategies that flows in the space between our ears. | | Fill your life up with interesting stuff | | We all feel a bit down sometimes. "To be or not to be, that is the question;" Shakespeare's Hamlet famously said. "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer, The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing, end them." |  | My eight best negotiation tips | | Negotiation is a part of life we all have to deal with. Being able to do so successfully can make a big difference to our outcomes. Here are eight tips that have helped me. | | Is there something you want? Why not ask for it? | | One of the big differences that I've noticed between those who get what they want and those who don't comes down to one simple behavior - whether they're willing to ask for it. |  | Understanding the games people play | | A very interesting book, for anyone who's interested in the psychology of human relationships, is Games People Play by Eric Berne. Dr Berne is a psychiatrist who developed the theory of transactional analysis, which looks at the ways people interact with one another. Specifically, he's interested in the psychological games people play. | | Generally, it's best just to tell people what they want to hear | | Some people live to tell others what they're doing wrong. They see themselves as some sort of ivory-tower dwelling soul, gazing mercifully down on the rest of us and having the generosity to point out our faults when they see it as necessary. I'm sure you meet such people all the time. | | Be adaptable in a changing world | | When I look and listen to the people around me, I get the impression that many of them are terribly afraid of change. You can see it in the way they cling desperately to a job they hate, keep friends who are obviously bad for them, and stay in abusive relationships. | | It's not going to just fall into your lap | | I meet a lot of people who are dissatisfied with their lives. They feel they don't have enough money, enough love or enough recognition. They see others around them getting all the rewards while they're passed by for the good things in life. |
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