How I Set Myself Up for Success: Expectations & Routines
With my work, I have a lot of projects spinning at the same time. As soon as I learn of a project, I take a look at the deadline (or make a deadline if there isn’t one assigned) and then work backward from there to break the job down into smaller pieces. I make even the most herculean tasks seem manageable and feasible. Launching a new study, writing a new book, giving a new speech, whatever it is I break it down into baby steps. I simplify the job into doable bite-sized tasks—things that don’t scare me or stress me out.
How I Set Myself Up for Success: “Flowing” My Bliss
But beyond following my bliss, I like to think of “flowing” it: making sure it is flowing from what I do and guiding my every move. And the best way to do that is to calm and center in order to begin.
In my writing on intelligence, I talk about centering as a way of stimulating brainpower. Centering is where you stop what you are doing and focus your attention on the now. Doing a brief counting meditation or box breathing are two ways that I center. Even just closing my eyes and focusing on planting my feet flatly on the ground while I am sitting in my chair or standing up can help me center my mind. The point is to leave behind the worries and stresses of the past moment and clear the mind for a new thread of thoughts.
How I Set Myself Up for Success: Light & Plants
One of my favorite authors is Karl Ove Knausgård who wrote My Struggle. I was just explaining his work to a friend the other day—the mundaneness, the uneventfulness, the beauty of the simplicity of each unassuming moment in a person’s life. He writes his own story, his struggle as a boy growing up in Norway and later a husband and a father moving around the world, which strangely mirrors the emotional reality of so many who grew up in a different body with a different outlook in different circumstances.
The power of his writing is in articulating the most fundamental fact that life is a struggle for all of us, and the struggle happens on the daily and on the reg. Reading his words provokes us to ask ourselves: What is my struggle? What are the quotidian challenges I face? And the flipside of this: What is there about my environment and my moment that I can do something about? What can I change?
GOING VIRAL
Inspired by my colleague and soul sister, Ruha Benjamin, whose book Viral Justice just hit the stands this week, I have been asking myself: How do I want to grow the world I want? One of the life lessons I have learned from her book is that wherever we are, whatever we are doing, there is something we can do to better nurture the love in our world. One of the life lessons that I have learned from her friendship, and from the relationships I have held with all my loving soul sisters, brothers, mamas, dadas, and kiddos in my life, is that manifesting love means manifesting equality. In other words, growing a more loving world means growing a more equal one.
HOW I GOT TO STUDYING INTELLIGENCE
My journey since then has been to bring together the many threads of science, from sociohistorical analysis and content analysis to genomics, neurogenetics, and systems biology, to bring us a better definition of intelligence. My upcoming book, Rethinking Intelligence: A Radical New Understanding of Our Human Potential will share this new definition along with the emerging science that is telling us how inherently human it is to constantly learn about your environment, to compare and manage that knowledge with what you already know, and to seize on new information to build a better way forward.
HOW I GOT TO SOCIOLOGY
Instead of seeing myself as entitled to the comforts of community, culture, and all things good in life, I learned that I would have to piece out my own way forward. I would have to make a new script for myself with my own narrative. I knew firsthand that aspects of our identity that seemed to be so intrinsic to us, like our race, and social statuses that were supposed to be so basic, like our class, were not as clear-cut as they seemed. I had to learn more.