Introduction

When I was growing up, my family had two unspoken rules: (1) Graduate from college; (2) Start saving money from the womb to pay for college. My eight siblings and I all started working very young, and by the time I was eighteen, I had saved $12,000.

In 1980, I went off to a small liberal arts college and used $6,000 of my hard-earned life savings to pay for the first year. This college was my backup choice; my first choice had been Georgetown University, but I wasn’t accepted. I didn’t really want to go to the liberal arts college and hadn’t even bothered to visit it ahead of time. When I arrived on the first day, I discovered that it was a Baptist school with some pretty strict rules, most of which were not to my liking. A few days after the semester started, I knew the school just wasn’t for me. I’m more attuned to bending and breaking strict rules than abiding by them. Plus, I was just not willing to waste half of my life savings to pay for a college I disliked.

A week later, I was sitting in a pickup truck with my dad and my new girlfriend of five days, making the two-and-a-half-hour drive from school back to our house—in absolute dead silence. My dad is pretty hard to rattle, but you could imagine his frustration with me, quitting so soon. His attitude was heard loudly and clearly in his deafening silence. No radio. No conversation. Just silence. About two blocks from our house, my dad finally said, “Have you thought about your next move?” Of course I hadn’t. I was eighteen, and I had just dropped out of school on gut instinct. I had no idea what I was doing.

Two days later, my girlfriend and I boarded the Amtrak out of Detroit and disembarked in Palo Alto, California, where my girlfriend’s family lived. Palo Alto seemed infinitely preferable to Detroit. Within six months, my girlfriend was pregnant and I was swinging a pickaxe twelve hours a day for $5.50 an hour. One blazing hot day in July it hit me: This situation is going to kill me. What do I do now?

“What do you think about driving across the country?” I asked my girlfriend. She had been accepted at the New School for Social Research in New York City. I wanted to try again to go to Georgetown University, even though I hadn’t reapplied or been accepted into the freshman class. Of course, when I proposed the plan to my girlfriend, I may have left out this key detail—I would figure out that technicality later. In mid-August 1981, we bought a 1965 VW bug, packed up what little we had, and drove to New York. My pregnant girlfriend settled into a campus apartment near the school, and I continued on to Washington, DC.

On registration day, I went to the Georgetown administrative offices to see what I could do about enrolling. The place was chaotic, with students standing in lines, confused, excited, and clueless all at the same time. I knew the incoming class consisted of roughly 1,900 students. Statistically speaking, I figured at least one person in that group was not going to show up, which would leave an open spot for me. I just needed to find someone in the registrar’s office who would buy in to my simple idea of filling a vacant spot. As I mentioned earlier, I like to bend the rules, especially when they seem arbitrary.

The first person I talked to said, “What the heck are you doing? Get outta here. It doesn’t work that way. You’re holding up the line.” Note to self: don’t talk to that person again.

I got in a different line and talked to a different person, who said, “Why don’t you apply for next fall, or maybe even January and come back and see us in three months.”

“Okay,” I said. “But, could I just come back in a couple days instead?”

“Sure, come back in a few days,” the person said with a sigh, assuming her blow off would solve the immediate problem of me slowing her line.

Two days later I walked back in and explained my theory to yet another person. “Surely there must be people who didn’t show up,” I said.

“Well, yes, but we don’t really know who they are,” the person replied.

As he said this, I noticed a piece of paper lying on the desk, facing away from me. Sure enough, it was a list of people who didn’t show up, and it had four names in alphabetical order, it seemed. I could only read the top one. “Well, what about Baldwin?” I asked. “Could I take Baldwin’s spot?”

“How the hell did you know—” The person stopped, looked down at the desk, and moved the papers around so I could no longer see anything.

Now the real game started, as far as I was concerned. The person said, “Well, Baldwin is in the School of Foreign Service. I can’t just let you into the School of Foreign Service.” Of Georgetown’s five different schools, the School of Foreign Service was both the most prestigious and the hardest to get into. That would be off limits, it seemed. Still, there were four other colleges, so there had to be open slots in one of those.

“What if I went into a different school?” With every prohibitive response from the person behind the desk, I kept asking, “What if…?” “What about…?” “What would it take…?”

After three or four days of this, I finally found an advocate, someone much closer to my age—a student who worked in the admissions office as his student employment. “Yeah, you know, you’re right,” the younger man said. “That guy has a confirmed spot in the dorm. He’s got a freshman schedule. He even has financial aid.” One by one, I started chipping away at the barriers, none of which constituted a major issue but collectively looked rather daunting.

About a week after the semester started, I was officially a Georgetown student living in a dorm with enough financial aid to pay for my first semester plus books. When the second semester rolled around, I was still enrolled, but I had to secure more financial aid. I employed the same system and ended up with a suitable result. Using similar tactics over the next three years, I attended and graduated from Georgetown University without having been officially accepted and without paying a dime. I simply gathered up aid from students who had left the school for various reasons.

Years later, everyone who hears that story says basically the same thing: “That’s impossible. You just can’t do that.” In my naïveté, it never occurred to me that it wouldn’t work. Besides, I had no backup plan, other than going back to the pick and shovel.

Genius Talent in Our DNA

I was nineteen when I pulled off my first free year at Georgetown. I didn’t know anything about genius talent or the how and why behind what I was doing. I just knew there had to be a way to get into the university of my choice—that this situation was only seemingly impossible—and through a nonlinear, trial-and-error process, I figured it out as I went. By the end of my time in school, I even had a group of people in the Georgetown office quietly rooting for me, the underdog who was possibly succeeding against all protocol and against all odds. In a sense, my win was a win for the staff as well: they had fun helping me beat the system, knowing that they played a part in my success.

Years later I realized my actions gave evidence to my singular gift of genius talent—a talent that was embedded in my DNA without me even knowing it. Today I would state my genius talent like this:

My genius talent is creating seemingly impossible outcomes, that address multiple and divergent agendas. I do this by creating one unifying game, by enrolling each of the participants, and then by continually altering the game and its rules so that everyone gets exactly what they came for.

Can you see how this talent could lead to some pretty amazing results in seemingly impossible situations? But how helpful would it be if I had to facilitate the building of a house? Or organize a community garage sale? Or design an accounting software program? Not very. I’m at my best when I take on a task that others consider impossible (and, hence, dismiss out of hand), and I have the freedom to figure it out—even better when I have the pressure of a short time frame to pull out a miracle. Oftentimes, I get the job because no one else sees it as attractive or even feasible. I get the lost causes. If you give me a project with a designated due date and prescribed series of logical steps, I’ll be bored to death and I’ll probably set the task aside or mess it up. That’s the way genius talent works: in the appropriate context it’s amazingly powerful, but it’s irrelevant in situations that don’t allow for its full expression.

Maybe you can relate. Perhaps you have requirements at work, like conducting peer reviews or completing quarterly expense reports, that have to get done but leave you bored and frustrated because they don’t take advantage of your skills. Or maybe there are parts of household maintenance such as fixing leaky faucets, doing laundry, and mowing the lawn that drive you crazy, either because you hate doing them or you’re not good at them or they simply suck up your whole Saturday.

What if situations like this weren’t a...