Awaken your genius

The Genius You Buried

Thelonious Monk said something that should rearrange how you think about talent. "A genius is the one most like himself." Not the smartest person in the room. Not the highest IQ. Not the early reader, the math prodigy, the kid who tested into the gifted program. Just the person who has stopped imitating other people long enough to find out what only they could say.

That is the bet Ozan Varol places at the start of *Awaken Your Genius*, and it sounds soft until you sit with it. The Latin word *genius* originally meant the attendant spirit present at birth in every person. Each of us, Varol argues, is Aladdin walking around with a genie corked inside, and most of us spend our lives polishing the lamp without ever rubbing it. We pick up other people's tastes, other people's careers, other people's politics, other people's opinions about our own lives, and after enough years we become a kind of supporting actor in the movie that has our name on the poster.

Varol came to this question through an unusual door. He grew up in Istanbul, taught himself English from Carl Sagan's *Cosmos* on a Betamax tape, talked his way onto the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers mission at seventeen, finished first in his American law school class, made it to tenure as a law professor, and then walked away from all of it to write books. Each move looked reckless from the outside. From the inside, each one was the same act repeated: refusing to keep wearing a skin that had stopped fitting.

The book is built as a five-act arc. First a death, where you unlearn what was poured into you. Then a birth, where you find the qualities that are unmistakably yours. Then an inner journey, where you learn to actually think. Then an outer journey, where you learn to spot the noise the rest of the world is broadcasting at you. Finally a transformation, where you discover that your safety net was a straitjacket all along. None of it is comfortable. None of it asks you to think differently for the sake of being different — which, Varol points out, is just conformity wearing a leather jacket. The work is harder than that. It is the work of going home to yourself.