Author · since 2006
Genius is a loop you run, not a rare thing you are.
The everyday word says genius is a gift you’re born with. I use it for a repeatable loop anyone can run — Current → Desired → Actions → Results — carried through starting, focusing, and finishing. You don’t have genius; you run it. Naming it matters because a gift can only be envied, while a loop can be described, taught, and run.
Current
The honest read on where you actually are.
Desired
The call on what is actually worth wanting.
Actions
The moves that close the gap — increasingly delegable.
Results
What really happened, resetting the next pass.
Done
Twenty years studying one question, written down to be used.
Since 2006 I’ve studied how capable people become more capable, applied what held up to my own work, and written it down. The result is the loop and its plain vocabulary — Current, Desired, Actions, Results — plus the honest part most frameworks skip: the loop breaks at the seams. Most people don’t fail to plan; they fail to start, focus, or finish.
The word itself backs the reframe. In ancient Rome your genius was a guiding spirit that accompanied you through life — an operating presence, not a score. The “rare gift you’re born with” sense is the late arrival (1640s), hardened into measurement culture by Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869) and Terman’s IQ studies (from 1916). That idea is about 150 years old, which is what licenses reclaiming the older meaning.
A century of performance research points the same way — deliberate practice (Ericsson), growth mindset (Dweck), self-efficacy (Bandura), metacognition (Flavell) — with the honest caveat that practice explains a large but partial share of the difference (Hambrick, Macnamara). The loop doesn’t claim to make everyone equal; it names the part you can actually run.
Pólya, How to Solve It (1945)
Understand → plan → carry out → look back
Shewhart → Deming, PDCA
Plan → do → check → act
John Boyd, OODA (1970s–80s)
Observe → orient → decide → act
Locke & Latham, goal-setting theory
A “discrepancy-creating process” — the Current→Desired gap is the engine
Independent traditions kept finding the same four moves. That convergence is why the loop is trustworthy; my contribution is the plain-English naming.
Doing
Refining it in public, running it on my own work.
The writing continues in the open — the loop applied live to the things I’m actually building. AI changes the shape of it: the Actions are increasingly delegable to agents and the Results arrive faster, while the honest Current read and the Desired call stay irreducibly human. That shift is what I’m writing through now.
To do
The loop, taught and run by many.
The record is young, and that’s the story. Ahead: the fuller written canon, and the loop taught plainly enough that people run it without me in the room. That’s intent, not a promised date — a story still being written.
What came next
What I know became something I make — the loop, run at family-office scale with AI agents.
See what I make