Mastery and Genius Cycles Part 3
Money, Mission and Meaning
Mark Michael Lewis
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Episode 31 - Mastery and Genius Cycles Part 3

In this episode Mark Michael Lewis of RationalSpirituality.com completes his description of how you can learn to get good and getting good at things. He explores the power of distinctions and describes a six step process you can use to become a master of any part of life – then how you can use it to make a tangible difference in your daily life.

Transcript

Transcript

Welcome to Money Mission and Meaning, Passion at Work, Purpose at Play: I’m your host, Mark Michael Lewis from MarkMichaelLewis.com, author, entrepreneur, and life coach, and you're listening to another edition of Seven Minutes To Success And Satisfaction, a series of short, to the point and practical ideas to help you Create Pleasure and Profit in the Business of life.

Welcome to episode #3.  In episode #2 about genius cycles, we covered steps three and four, and talked about the power of distinctions in shaping our world and giving us the tools to powerfully and practically relate with reality.  If in this episode most discussed the final two steps of the genius cycle, and how we can use it to become expert at anything that we want to get good at.

As I completed step number four, I said that…  once you begin to name patterns you experience as distinctions, then you can begin to integrate and combined patterns from all areas of your life and begin to notice higher level patterns that allow you to make choices that other people don’t even perceive.  And that leads us to the fifth step in the genius cycle:

5) Experiment With The Distinction Through Conscious Choice

Once you have clearly distinguished a pattern and created a mental distinction around it, an interesting thing happens, you become able to make conscious choices designed on the basis of that distinction - you can then begin to experiment to test whether or not the distinction is valid or consistent through time and if it makes a difference in your ability to achieve your values. For example, once you have created the distinction “carb crash,” you can consciously choose to eat a heavy carbohydrate meal, and compare that experience with eating a low carbohydrate meal to see if your experience of “carb crash” is different.

And it is in this conscious ability to choose a specific behavior intended to create a specific result that allows us to test our experience and refine our knowledge such that it becomes increasingly powerful.  This is the power of the scientific method and it is what has allowed western civilization to move from caves to skyscrapers, from cave paintings to the high definition series called planet earth.

Genius cycles, rightly understood, are a way of leveraging the actual human intelligence such that you can bring the power of science, of knowledge, of experimental method to your life, your love, your happiness, your wealth.  It is about bringing the best thinking of human being to your money, your mission, and your meaning.

Because here is one obvious, but mostly hidden and useful ideas you can use to make your life more successful and more satisfying, “you cannot make a choice you do not perceive.”

Again, you cannot make a choice you do not perceive.  Until you can make a clear distinction in your mind between a high return investment with low risk, and a low return investment with a high risk, between deep intimate communications that builds love and trust, and emotional purging that actually drives people apart, you are flying blind.  However, once you can make a distinction, you can then consciously vary your behavior and learn to create the results you want, which brings us to step number six in the genius cycle:

6) Deliberately Act on the Choice

It is this action that completes the genius cycle and sets the stage for further genius cycles.  In fact, without action, the first five steps are, excuse my language, mental masturbation. 

And it's using the first five steps to do step number six, and doing step number six in the context of the first five steps that makes all the difference.

Again, until you actually create the distinctions such that you can make a choice, you are flying blind.  However, until you act on the choice, you are, as my sometimes eccentric grandmother would put it, punching monsters in your sleep. 

Of course, after steps six, we go back to step number one.  Once you act on the choice, it immediately takes you back to the first step In The Genius Cycle, which is to focus your attention on the results that you get from your choice.  It is to test your results.  Unfortunately, our school system teaches us that a test is designed to measure our knowledge.  But that is the least valuable part of a test.  The true purpose of the test is to guide us about what we still need to learn.  A test gives us more information Such That We Know How To Refocus Our Attention To Make New Distinctions such that we can make new choices to test!

The more rigorous really if you follow the six steps of a genius cycle, the faster you will progress towards easily producing results that other people consider to be genius. 

Because this is what it means to act with genius, to be able to make choices that other people do not perceive to get results which to them are indistinguishable from magic, but which to you are just common sense. 

This is what it means to be able to get good at getting good at something, to become a master of any area of life that you focus your attention on and run genius cycles on. 

So to summarize, the six steps of the genius cycle are

1) Focus Your Attention
2) Distinguish Patterns
3) Re-cognize Patterns to make them Distinct
4) Abstract and Name those patterns into Distinctions
5) Use those Distinctions to Perceive and Make New Choices
6) Act on those Choices
1) Focus Your Attention on the results.

As you run genius cycles on the distinctions that you make within genius cycles, if you go deeper and deeper into your understanding, until you know exactly where to tap it in order to get just the results that you want.

And this is where you become a master of your own life, a master of pleasure and profit, a master of success and satisfaction, a master of money, mission, and meaning.

I’m Mark Michael Lewis, host of Money Mission and Meaning, Passion at Work, Purpose at Play, on PersonalLifeMedia.com and this was Seven Minutes To Success And Satisfaction, providing you practical tools to Create Pleasure and Profit in the Business of life.  Make sure to subscribe for this pod cast on iTunes, or to learn about my books are audio programs on relationships in spirituality go to mark Michael Lewis.com

For text and transcripts of this show, or to get archives of previous shows, goto www.MoneyMissionMeaning.com, or check out all the great shows on our network at www.personallifemedia.com.  Talk to you next week.