You Aren’t Lazy or Untalented. Your Environment is Wrong

Your success has less to do with you “trying harder” and more to do with the expectations placed upon you.

Most days, a single question haunts my every step. It has become my obsession, my shadow, my dogged companion:

“What does it take to become creative?”

The splatter of bold up there is not for nothing. Creativity is treated as a magical switch in our culture, flipped on or off at birth, never to be adjusted again.

I have now spent over 1,000 blog posts, 2 books, several speeches, and countless conversations with individuals trying to prove the exact opposite of this “common knowledge.”

Why do I disagree? Some reasons are philosophical. The others lie on my knowledge about the field of of Epigenetics, which is the study of our body beyond what our genes have given us.

All 7 billion humans on our planet share a fixed number of genes. As of right now, we believe this number lies somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000. 20,000 genes to create 7 BILLION unique individuals. That’s a ratio of 1:350,000. Doesn’t seem like that many, does it?

Why does this happen? Each of those 20,000+ genes have thousands of different expressions…