The Garden.
We hear it all the time. “This person is a genius.” “This thing is genius.”
But there’s a third state you don’t hear much about.
The place of genius.
Coming from twenty years in music, I only knew the first two. The anointed ones. The rest of us hoping we might bump into it by accident.
When I stopped making music two years ago, I spent a summer writing poems - memories and small moments from childhood. I wrote three times a day like it was prayer, sitting by a window looking out at the scorched desert in Andalucía.
In that routine I found a place between logic and instinct. A small garden between two states. If you wait there long enough, something shows up you didn’t expect: an idea, an image, a tiny detail you never noticed before.
There, I met myself. A child. The one who always saw things. He showed me what he saw, and I had enough craft to put it together. It felt like he’d been waiting for me to notice.
I didn’t reinvent myself or go searching for a true voice. It had always been there. I’d just been waiting in the wrong place.
If genius is a place we visit, then the real question is access.
The boy I met was pre ambition, pre performance. He taught me not to try, but to allow.
Then we wait together and see what shows up.
I work with founders and creative teams on the origin of their ideas.
Bring me a problem you’re stuck on.