If you were around this time last year, I was writing a lot about triangulating your ‘genius zone’. It’s not a term I came up with, it’s from Gay Hendricks’ book The Big Leap. (Visualization above by Nancy Choi)

The idea is there are four zones:

• Zone of incompetence
• Zone of competence
• Zone of excellence
• Zone of genius

Hendricks’ view is to spend as much time as possible in your zone of genius — doing activities that leverage your natural gifts and strengths.

In corporate roles, maximizing time in your genius zone is a hard thing to do. It’s simply not in your control.

Yes, you may be hired for your exceptional strengths in certain areas, but almost always, you’ll have a good portion of your time taken up by activities that keep you in the other zones.

For example, when I was a product manager, I was competent at filling out Jira tickets and following up on items, but my real excellence and perhaps even genius came in seeing the big picture of what we were trying to build, communicating across dev teams to get people on the same page, etc.

My next role teaching product managers allowed me to do just that second part, and drop that Jira work I wasn’t all that great at or interested in.

That was a much welcomed shift (albeit unintentional), but ultimately I still ended up with a bunch of other ‘busywork’ on my plate.

It just happens in corporate.

On the outside, though, we have the extraordinary privilege to draw a very tight circle around what we do and don’t do within a client engagement.

And in that case, why would we not draw that circle entirely within the boundaries of our genius zone?

Last year, I offered a prompt to plug into your LLM to craft a genius zone statement so you can use it as a filter against your current and future client work.

Now, a year later, with more advanced models and with your LLM having even more context about you and your business, here’s a simplified version to try out:

PROMPT:

I’m exploring my zone of genius (inspired by the concept from Gay Hendricks’ The Big Leap) and need your help. Based on our interactions over the past year, I’d like you to help me craft a clear and inspiring zone of genius statement. Please ask me follow-up questions as needed (one at a time), so we can refine this together.

Spend 10 minutes or so and see where it takes you.

Is your identified genius zone aligned with the actual work you sell?

If you’d like to share your genius zone statement with me, I’d love to hear it. (I won’t share it.)

💡

-Wes