The 46 Rules of Genius

by Marty Neumeier

   But here’s the catch: You have to make bold mistakes. Smart mistakes. New mistakes. Because if you only do what you’ve always done, you’ll only get what you’ve already got. You have to try, fail, and learn. Then try something new, fail a different way, learn more.

   When you make a prototype, you’re making a prediction—a testable assumption that lets you see what works and what doesn’t. This is not unlike the way your brain works. It continually makes predictions against reality while your dopamine cells keep score. Before your predictions can be right, they have to be wrong. A wrong prediction then becomes a “wake-up call” that your dopamine cells convert into an emotion, which is stored in your memory as knowledge. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the memory.

   One of the benefits of purposeful failure is a gain in resourcefulness. Often the most resource-ful person is the one who has tried the most approaches, taken the most risks, failed the most times. The continuous process of trying, failing, and learning builds up a wide range of responses that can address a variety of problems.

   The lesson for innovators is this: Instead of fearing failure, embrace it. Fail big. Fail often. Keep trying. Remember that making anything begins by making mistakes.

  Rule 34

  SEEK INSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM

  When you’re working in creative mode, you’re more likely to be imaginative and intuitive. But you’re also more likely to make logic errors. Switching back and forth between creative mode and critical mode is difficult, since it requires considerable mental and emotional effort. The best cure for logic blindness is to seek regular feedback from people who can critique your ideas instructively rather than constructively. It’s your job to be constructive—you’re the maker. What you need from them is a clear view from the outside. Ideal critics are those who will:

  1. Listen to your idea, ask questions, and not react too quickly.

  2. Strive to judge your idea against your specific intent.

  3. Summarize your idea in a way that seems fair and even insightful.

  4. Identify any aspects of your idea that they agree with or appreciate.

  5. Finally, identify aspects that they question or find lacking.

  In the real world, however, the feedback you get may be reactive, subjective, negative, or less than insightful. Sometimes you’ll find it possible to erase the doubts of naysayers with a slight modification to the work. Resist the temptation to argue. Try to understand your critic’s position, do your best to act on any advice, and always express your gratitude. Even off-target feedback can be instructive if you approach it objectively. What doesn’t kill your project can make it stronger.

  Rule 35

  FUEL YOUR PASSION

  Creativity doesn’t respond to time management so much as passion management. Passion—the deep excitement you feel about your subject, your project, your profession—is the engine of creative genius. While you only get a certain amount of time in each day, you can expand your passion nearly without limit. You can pump it up, stretch it out, increase its intensity—all with a bit of management.

   The key to passion is to treat it as a resource, like a savings account or a kitchen garden. If you want to maintain a bank account, you need to make deposits. If you want to keep a vegetable garden, you need to tend your plants. If you want to feed your passion, you need to invest in your projects, your learning, and your inspiration. The investment can come in the form of reading, seminars, workshops, internships, pro bono work, time off, or simply doing projects you love. The goal is to return to work refreshed and renewed.

   But where does passion come from? Do some people have more than others? Is the game somehow rigged? The best answer is that each of us is born with a certain capacity for it, and then we develop it according to our abilities and desires.

   You may be the kind of person who falls deeply in love with a subject overnight but has trouble maintaining interest for more than a few months. Or maybe you’re the opposite: a person who takes a long time to develop an interest but then stays with it for decades. There are some people with so many interests they can’t seem to focus on one, and others who grapple with periodic depression, unable to stay excited about anything at all.

   While everyone’s situation is different, the principle is the same: Passion drives creativity. Fuel it, protect it, tend it, grow it. Manage it as the renewable resource it is.

  Rule 36

  DEVELOP AN AUTHENTIC STYLE

  Everyone has a personal style of working, but not everyone has a “good style.” Good style grows out of good taste—an appreciation of the way aesthetic principles determine beauty. Think of your taste as an ability to recognize what’s beautiful, and your style as the way you apply your taste. Personal style is unique by definition—it responds to a variety of factors, including your goals, your profession, your training, your culture, your life experiences, and the quirks of your personality.

   But what about good taste? Is it personal or universal? Here we wade into muddy waters. When it comes to taste, it’s impossible to separate the personal from the universal. Still, it may be helpful to think of good taste as a universal ideal, an understanding of aesthetics that crosses all boundaries by addressing our deeply human need for delight. Those who are trained in the principles of aesthetics are more likely to notice the presence of good taste wherever and however it occurs. A Ming vase is beautiful whether you’re Chinese, German, Australian, or Icelandic. A J-class yacht would be as beautiful to a thirteenth-century peasant as a twenty-first-century sailor.

   Those who are untrained may “feel” the presence of good taste, but not necessarily recognize it as such. They’re more likely to define good taste as only what’s fashionable, lavish, elaborate, or expensive.

   Good taste is often none of these things. It’s the knowledge of how aesthetics can make a designed object or outcome more of what it should be, and less of what it shouldn’t.

   Furthermore, you can’t buy good taste. You can only earn it through effort. Good taste, unlike beauty, is not in the eye of the beholder. It’s universal.

   Good style, however, is particular to the person creating the work. Your personal style is different from my personal style.

   In developing an approach to work, resist the temptation to put on a style by adopting “stylistic” elements—such as overusing jump cuts in a movie, or always wearing one red sock. Reject all mannerism, ornament, and affectation. The route to style runs straight through authenticity, simplicity, and directness.

   Now, here’s a secret: A good personal style will mostly come from your limitations, not your strengths. It’s the result of working around your shortcomings, using all the aesthetic skills you can muster. Since your limitations are unique to you, your style will also be unique. This is what people find most fascinating about stylish people. They’re uniquely and delightfully themselves. We can look to Oscar Wilde for the best advice: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”

  Rule 37

  PRACTICE

  All creativity contains an element of craft, a set of making skills that connects aesthetic judgment with creative tools. The musician needs to turn her instrument into an extension of her mind and body. The furniture designer needs to get a “feel” for his equipment and materials. The CEO needs to master a wide range of reports, metrics, and control mechanisms. The software engineer needs to make his development tools second nature. The writer needs to develop an “ear” for vocabulary, grammar, and punctuation.

   Without the skills of your craft, you might be able to come up with original ideas. But you’d have difficulty making your ideas stick—demonstrating, developing, testing, and sharing them. Skills bridge the gap between thinking and making. There are no skills without practice—practice is the exercise gym of genius.

   But what kind of exercises do you need? It’s obvious that a concert pianist will need to practice scales for many hours a week. It’s not so obvious what an app
designer should practice. The fact is, there are as many ways to practice as there are practitioners. It’s up to you to decide what skills you’ll need to build, and then what kind of exercises you’ll use to build them.

   Whereas what to practice is specific to your craft and your goals, how to practice is universal. Here are seven tips for mastering the art of practice:

  1. Control your environment. Have a regular place to work—a room, a shop, a desk, a lab, a studio, or a quiet corner with a comfortable chair. Find a space where you can work without interruption.

  2. Practice consciously. High-level skills don’t come from mindless repetition. They come from intelligent repetition—doing something over and over while thinking about how to improve. If you’re conscious of your actions now, they’ll become mindless good habits later.

  3. Set aside a regular time. If you try to fit practice sessions into random time slots, your progress will be slower than if you practice on a schedule. You might not need much time—15 minutes, 45 minutes, maybe an hour—depending on the skill you’re trying to learn.

  4. Take baby steps. It’s better to learn in easy stages than in one big practice session. Practice, take a break, practice, take a break, practice, take a break. You’ll find that after each break, your skills will be stronger.

  5. Make your exercises fun. Design your sessions to be games. Keep them light, change them around, invent new rules, play around with them. As soon as you make practice a chore, the learning goes right out of it.

  6. Seek feedback. Learning any skill depends on a feedback loop. You try something, then you measure the result against a goal or a standard. With every try, your subconscious is learning what works.

  7. Celebrate small gains. When you take notice of your gains, you learn more joyfully and more eagerly. Take a moment to appreciate them when they happen. You’ll find that small improvements add up quickly.

  Part 4

  HOW CAN I MATTER?

  The age-old riddle,

  What is the meaning of life?,

  turns out to be astonishingly simple:

  The meaning of life is meaning.

  —Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Rule 38

  OVERCOMMIT TO A MISSION

  Passion is a powerful thing. But it’s not always strategic. We live in a society where competition creates winners and losers. Unless you apply your passion to a unique purpose, you’re likely to be squeezed out by equally passionate competitors. It’s a cruel world. But it doesn’t have to be if you master “nichemanship”—the art of dominating a specialty that’s unavailable or uninteresting to others.

   None of us is born with a purpose, but nature has equipped us with goal-seeking minds that let us perform better in the context of one—a sense that life means something. It’s the belief that we matter, that we’re making a positive contribution to society. The best way to make a contribution is to find the overlap between what you have to give and what the world needs.

   You may be passionate about acting, for example, but the theater doesn’t need another actor. It has plenty of actors, and thousands more waiting in the wings. What the world needs is a remarkable actor. It needs an actor who is exceptionally good, exceptionally different, or special in some useful way. If you want to be an actor, you need to find out what the profession needs, then decide whether you alone can be the solution. If you can’t, you may end up as one of thousands who compete away each other’s chances for work.

   The fastest way to find your niche is to pay attention to what makes you different. This is counterintuitive for students and beginners who assume that what’s different about them is what needs to be corrected. As you enter the workplace, it pays to find out which of your flaws might actually be features. The actor who loses key roles to charismatic competitors might prove highly successful in supporting roles. The family practice physician with a so-so bedside manner could end up as an exceptional medical researcher. The corporate manager who has trouble staying focused might be surprisingly effective as an entrepreneur.

   The best strategy is to choose a direction that lets you work with your whole heart instead of a divided heart. Overcommit to a mission that fits your interests, stretches your abilities, and gives you the potential to make a difference. If a thing isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well. Wholeheartedness confers a distinct advantage upon those who can offer it. It turns ordinary work into extraordinary work, and it opens the tiniest niche to a world of possibilities.

  Rule 39

  STAY FOCUSED

  Creativity requires sustained focus. Whether you’re working alone or in a group, you need the ability to pay attention. Paying attention is an apt phrase, because it costs something to focus. You pay the price in psychic energy. Most of us can focus on a difficult task for a few seconds or a few minutes, but it’s real work to stay in the game much longer than that. Our minds tend to wander, looking for an escape. We can almost feel our brain squirming in its seat.

   Difficulty focusing isn’t new, but our attention spans are getting shorter as the pace of life speeds up. This is the trap of today’s “always on” culture. If we’re always on—dealing with distractions, interruptions, and just plain busy-ness—then our creative brains are always off. We’re left with partial thoughts, partial experiences, and partial understanding.

   This doesn’t mean that you should avoid any activity that doesn’t align with your mission. In fact, outside interests—and downtime—are just as critical to achieving your goals as direct interests. They serve to round out your skill set and reignite your passion. The point is that creativity takes concentration, the ability to stick with a problem long enough to get beyond shallow, multiple-choice answers.

   Leonardo da Vinci was the very model of focus. By all accounts he was a highly social creature—dressing in the latest fashions, hobnobbing with royalty, attending and designing the most glittery social events—but he would also disappear for weeks at a time, incommunicado, to pursue a line of questioning without interruption. With this discipline he produced a huge body of artwork and invention, plus an extensive series of notebooks that included as many as 100,000 drawings and 13,000 pages of handwritten text.

   You can’t switch off the world. But you can lock it out temporarily while you work. You can carve out quiet time to think things through by yourself, so that when you return to the world you have something deep and whole to show for it.

   Working alone doesn’t mean being lonely. It doesn’t even mean being alone. But it does mean paying attention, listening to your own voice, and listening to the voices of others with sustained focus. Only when you’ve mastered this habit can you hope to approach genius-hood.

  Rule 40

  FOLLOW THROUGH

  Creativity takes perseverance: A great idea is not a great idea if no one gets to experience it. What makes creativity especially difficult is that there are so many unknowns. So many judgment calls. So many doubts about the outcome. A genius is the person who can power through the doubts to cross the finish line. Only the strongest are able to bounce back from the false starts, the setbacks, the wrong turns, and the strident voices of naysayers.

   This puts the creative genius in the same class as the mountain climber, the triathlete, or the seeker of high office. Without perseverance, all you have is a plan, an intention. You can’t win if you don’t complete the race.

   There are several tricks for overcoming adversity on the long road to creative success:

  1) Focus only on the next step.

  2) Give yourself a reward at every milestone.

  3) When you encounter a setback, label it a setback.

  4) Revel in your mistakes and record them for posterity.

  5) Remember that all unfinished work seems unredeemable.

  6) Work so fast you won’t have time to evaluate it until it’s done.

  The vast majority of people give up before completing an ambitious personal project. By simply follo
wing through—by persevering—you may well find yourself among an elite group of innovators.

  Rule 41

  DO GOOD DESIGN

  What is good design? It’s a question that has kept designers debating for decades. Usually it circles around questions of taste, fashion, or functionality. Whenever the conversation comes up, the “eye of the beholder” argument shuts it down. One person will say good design is design that “works,” and another person will say what works depends on the individual user. At this point everyone nods and the conversation ends. But the question is never fully put to rest.

   There’s a deeper and more satisfying answer. Good design does not depend as much on the eye of the beholder as it does on a combination of aesthetics and ethics: Good design exhibits virtues. What virtues? Timeless human virtues such as generosity, courage, diligence, honesty, substance, clarity, curiosity, thriftiness, and wit. By contrast, bad design is design that exhibits vices such as selfishness, fear, laziness, deceit, pettiness, confusion, apathy, wastefulness, and stupidity. In other words, we want the same things from design that we want from each other. When you combine ethics with aesthetics, you get good design.

   Can you have a generous brand? A courageous company? A diligent algorithm? An honest product? Of course you can. Just as you can have a selfish business, a fearful policy, a lazy service, or a deceitful ad campaign. Good design is always aimed at long-term, broad success, whereas bad design settles for short-term, narrowly defined success. If design is change, then good design is change that benefits the largest number of people over the longest period of time.