What do I do best? Where is my genius?
What do I do best? Where is my genius? This is a question I think we should all ask ourselves, and I want to share my exploration of it because it might help you through your own process. I'm reading a book right now called The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, and this book has really been getting to me, because it explores the different levels we operate at in life.
At the lowest, you can operate at a level of incompetence, where you're doing something you're not even really good at, you don't like it, and people generally don't even appreciate you doing it. That's how you know you're really in a bad spot. The next level up is competence. You're doing something you can do, you're decent enough at it, and people are happy enough that you do it, but everybody gets the feeling there's something else you could be doing. A lot of people working menial-labor jobs are at a level of competence, where you're good at it but you feel there's something else you could do. That said, some of y'all out there are picking the heck out of tomatoes and taking the garbage out, and you're doing an excellent job at it, and we really appreciate it.
The next level is excellent, where you're doing something you are very good at and other people really appreciate you doing it. Often this is where we land in our jobs. We get into a job where we're good at something, we're better than most, and the people around us agree we're good at it and appreciate us doing it, but that's not what we're really best at. This is where a lot of resentments come in, and then we complain and criticize others, because there's some part of us, our genius, our highest potential, the most we can give to others, that is often something different than what we're merely excellent at. And often we're not doing it.
For example, you're working at a corporate job, but your true calling is to be a doctor, or an artist, or a YouTuber. You feel that calling, and you've tried it a little bit, and it's scary, and you don't know how you're going to make money, so you don't go there.
Asking where my own genius is
For me, I've been asking, where's my genius? Clearly I'm excellent at creating videos. I'm clearly excellent at educating, I can do that, and I'm excellent at public speaking. But today I've been wondering, where is my genius? And I invite you to ask too: where is it? Where is the thing you can do that you are absolutely the very best at, that you have the most fun doing? What can you do where it just feels like time passes, where it just flies by?
This is actually kind of a scary question to ask sometimes, especially if you already have a job that pays the bills. If what you want to do as your genius would require big changes in your life situation, like your job or your living environment, then it can be scary to look into. And that's what I'm looking into today: what am I a genius at? I don't care what I'm pretty good at, or what I offer great quality at, but where am I absolutely a genius? Where I love it whenever I'm doing my genius work, time flies, I'm having fun, and other people love when I do it as well. Where other people have huge passion for it, and where I'm operating doing something that is the best I can offer.
I've been thinking about that today and getting honest with myself, because this is a hard one. I've been thinking, am I a genius when it comes to crypto videos? And I have to say, no. It feels like work. It feels like I'm just making crypto videos for money. It doesn't feel like if I had a billion dollars I'd make crypto videos. And that's annoying, because I like how crypto videos make money, and I liked teaching online courses, and I liked the money they made and the views I got. But if I'm doing something short of my genius for any significant amount of time, then I'm not in my genius.
I would love your feedback on this. What do you think I do that's truly the best I can do? If you want to go deeper on this with me, you can join the Jerry Banfield Family and tell me what you see in me. After I first asked the question, I got some blankness, which happens a lot. When you ask, what am I a genius at, what is the highest level I can do, often you won't even get an answer at first. When I first asked it, I thought, I don't know, I don't know what I'm a genius at. But that's just logically stupid. You know what's inside you. You're just playing hide and seek.
The answer I didn't want: competitive gaming
The answer I got today, when I asked what am I a genius at, was competitive gaming. And especially competitive gaming on livestream. Like live competitive gaming. I'm a genius at that. I love doing it, I'm very good at it, and I put on an incredible show. And I am annoyed with that answer. I'm annoyed with that answer. But if I think back to the videos I'm most proud of, that I love that I made, yes, my educational videos like my AA speaker meeting, I love those. But the videos I just feel this huge love and attachment for that I made are my gaming videos. Those are the ones I go back and watch.
Like the video where I was wearing the pink tube top, yelling Scarface lines, knocking a dude on his back in Warzone at second place, messing around, letting him get back up, and screaming, I'm playing with my food. That's genius. That's a level of creativity that hardly anybody who's gaming gets to. When I started gaming on Facebook, it was like everything came to support me. The Facebook community just built up massively. That's what happens when you're doing your genius activities: it's like everything comes to support you.
What's tricky is that a lot of what I'm listening to in The Big Leap is about reaching your ceiling of feeling good, your ceiling of success. I've noticed that has happened pretty drastically for me, especially in competitive gaming, where I would reach a ceiling of feeling good and being successful and then somehow sabotage it. But I don't see anything else that is my genius more than competitive gaming.
And yet you might ask, well, why are you not competitive gaming right now? Because of the money, and because of what I've done in the past with the money in competitive gaming, at least this is what my mind says. This is the resistance coming in and saying, well, you're not going to make money competitive gaming. And then there's the time too, competitive gaming takes a lot of time, though I was able to do it in a few hours a day. But you notice it's starting to sound like I'm making excuses now. I have gotten a pretty clear answer: my genius is in competitive gaming. That's where I have the most fun. I just went to the retro game store today and unloaded almost all of those retro games I'd bought, because I didn't have fun a lot of the time just playing by myself. I love doing the competitive gaming.
Why not the crypto reviews
Someone suggested my honest crypto reviews are genius and I should do more. The trick is, with the crypto reviews, I'm excellent at doing crypto videos and educational videos, but I don't actually enjoy doing the crypto reviews that much. If there was no concern about getting views or getting money out of those, if I was just doing them for fun, I don't think I would do them. If you just put a billion dollars in my bank account and said, you can do whatever you want today, what would you do? I don't know if I'd do any of the crypto videos, because I never reached the levels of fun in anything else I create that I do when I'm gaming. The highs, the wildness of it, the emotion. Out of all the stuff I create, it's the gaming that has the biggest emotions, and that's what viewers really respond to.
You can tell I'm annoyed with this answer. I keep thinking, it can't be competitive gaming. But I was just telling a guy yesterday that one of the biggest ways to fail in life is failing to live a life where you're giving the most you can give and having a whole bunch of fun. What's the definition of a genius? Let's look it up: the exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability. And yeah, where is my exceptional creative and intellectual power? It's in the gaming. It's in making an enjoyable gaming experience to watch. That's how I blew up so much on Facebook, because I was creating a truly exceptional experience to watch. You could find a hundred other people and I would be the most engaging, interesting one to watch. Even if you didn't like it, you had to talk about it.
I had a lot of fun playing God's Unchained, but God's Unchained is not the right game. There's another game I need to play, and I don't think it's Warzone either. I need to find the right game to play. Maybe try a few games. What is the best game to learn and play? What are people needing?
Is it just resistance?
I'm also wondering, is this just resistance? What have I been doing over the last few weeks? I've been taking more time with the family, time to reflect, to look at what I'm doing, to consider how I'm making a contribution to the world. Especially while the family's been in London this past week, I've been cleaning things out. I just got rid of hundreds of games. I got rid of five old consoles: PlayStation 2, Nintendo Wii, the original Xbox, Xbox 360, and Sega Genesis. I got rid of all of those.
Someone in chat pointed out that I open up and talk freely about what's on my mind, and that's true, I love having these conversations while I'm live too. But this format of just chatting isn't the most genius implementation of it. Having these kinds of conversations while I'm playing a game, that's kind of special. What I've noticed is that there's often serious resistance to really doing or giving at our highest levels. We get drawn to just do the things we're good at that'll make us money and make other people proud of us. But it often feels like this big leap to say, look, competitive gaming is my passion. I've tried everything else. Competitive gaming is where I really shine. It's where I can give the best experience to the viewer, and it's where I have the most fun myself. And my mind throws up all these roadblocks immediately.
You might tell yourself you don't have enough time to game competitively, that you're not going to make enough money competitive gaming, that you already threw away your chance to be a competitive gamer. But this book I'm reading, called The Big Leap, is so good at looking at the things that come up when things are going really well. For example, there were a bunch of times on Facebook in 2021 and 2022 where things were going really well for me. I was getting tons of growth, tons of views, tons of money. And repeatedly, I allowed things to sabotage that growth. My whole creative story has really been a story of doing well and then knocking myself down one way or another. You bring yourself down instead of growing into that ceiling.
In my relationship with my wife, every time we've hit one of those ceilings, we've then expanded and our relationship has gotten even better. I've never seen anybody have a relationship better than the one I have with my wife today, which is amazing. And I'm interested in seeing how good I can make my business as well. I've had my business be absolutely fantastic in the past, where I've been giving with joy and having a lot of fun and helping a lot of people. Lately I've felt like I'm out of that. In Gods Unchained, I felt like I was close. The competitive gaming was there, but giving away all these gods to get people to watch, and the game itself, was not the place for my genius to really flourish. It's a small community. There's not a lot of room, and I was already getting toward the top of where you could be in the Gods Unchained community.
Where My Genius Actually Lives
If I'm going to really give my genius, it shouldn't be that easy. To me that's also a function of my genius. I can just start streaming Gods Unchained and go straight toward the top of the community in a couple of months. That's genius operating. And I want to get out of doing everything that's not genius, at least for the majority of the time. I do love educating. I do love helping people. But there are a lot of ways to do that, and I want to do it at the highest level I can. So right now I'm asking these tough questions and having these tough conversations and looking within, because that's where we get the real growth. That's where all the external stuff flows from, and I want to do that.
I remember as a kid just thinking, if I could play video games for a living, that would be the coolest thing in the world. I didn't think teaching online courses or investing in crypto. It was, if I could play video games, there's nothing I'd rather do than that for a living. And I'm back there. I'm thinking, man, that's where my genius is. But it needs to be competitive games, because it's boring doing these single player games. I like playing them sometimes, and that could be something done here and there, but I'm wondering which competitive games to get into.
I'm grateful I was able to have these insights today, and I think I got some of them as a function of cleaning out stuff in my life. I spent the morning wondering what I should do with all these games, hundreds of PS2 games, original Xbox, Xbox 360, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, and NES games. I bought all those games when I was streaming on Facebook. Sometimes I was playing some of those games and making hundreds, even thousands of dollars off a single livestream of one game. So I bought a whole bunch of games, and then things came crashing down on Facebook.
Getting Too Successful to Handle
I'm 100 percent responsible for that. On some level, I was so successful that it started to scare me. I had the choice to grow and expand and lean into that success and joy, and I chose to bring it all crashing down. Now, looking at all those games, every time I'd see them in my office, it just reminded me of that. And yet I felt this attachment. I didn't want to be wrong about having spent those thousands of dollars on those games and then just dumping them off at the game store. It took a good bit of reflection this morning. Should I give those games away? Should I not? This is the best time for me to get rid of the games. The family's out of town, they're in the UK, and today I had the time. So I got rid of all those games. I took them all to the game store. And from there, I got the insight into my genius.
Where is your genius? Clearly my genius is not playing retro games. There are other people I see on YouTube where that is their genius. They are so good at these retro games. They love playing them. They just constantly upload videos playing them. That's not my genius. My genius is competitive gaming. It's okay if I do some other things sometimes, but live competitive gaming is the center. If I'm doing anything else for the majority of my time, I'm off center. And that's so annoying.
People point out that the results say I found a gold mine coming back to crypto, that I grew the same as Joe Parys, so why leave it? Well, I definitely want to finish this crypto education video. And while I did find a gold mine financially, the crypto videos feel like work to me. It's been great learning about crypto. I've enjoyed the journey of figuring out how to do crypto investing in a way that's sustainable for me, and that I can teach others about. Maybe my genius is learning something new and teaching it. Maybe that's my genius. I don't know.
The Excellent Zone Versus the Genius Zone
If you ask what are the things you love that you've created, it's the gaming videos. The most organic views I've ever gotten on a video that I didn't promote was a League of Legends video with a coach. The most views I've gotten on any single kind of video I've done have been gaming videos. I've gotten so many views on my gaming videos, tens of millions of views. Out of all the things I've tried online, competitive gaming has been what people wanted to watch the most. That said, maybe my genius is going into something new and figuring it out. But the crypto videos, I very much got into those with an "I want to make money" motivation. I'm actually excellent at making crypto videos, but I'm not a genius at it.
There are some people who are geniuses with their crypto videos. I can't tell you whether you're operating in your excellent zone, where you're really good at it, or in your genius zone, where there's nothing else you should be doing, where you love it and there's nothing you'd rather do. I would say Supoman and Joe Parys are both in the genius zone doing crypto and money and financial videos and educating. I'm not. When I'm filming these crypto videos, I'm looking at the clock. I'm trying to get to the end and finish it. I'm not as present a lot of the time. I'm doing something to get a result instead of doing it because there's nothing I'd rather do. That's where the genius zone is: doing it just because it's what you want to do, because there's no place you'd rather be. But if you're doing it because you want the money, that's a different thing.
People have said they really enjoyed my solo Warzone videos, and I did too. I had so much fun doing those Warzone solo videos. It was so emotional, so entertaining. I loved the highlights. I loved the reactions I had. And that audience just built up rapidly for those. I think it's time to start researching a game for me to play and learn, to try some new competitive games and see which ones I really like. I enjoy playing Warzone, but I don't know if that's the game for me to play right now.
The Grind Is the Fun Part
I do have a lot of fun learning a game, like taking a game such as PUBG and playing PUBG solos until I get a win. It seems my favorite time in a competitive game is learning until I get to the top, or toward the top. That grind to get that first Warzone solo win was really sweet. And maybe where I slipped out of my genius a bit was just continuing to grind Warzone even when it got boring. But I loved doing those Warzone videos and sharing those tips and having that audience and community. I loved showing up for those. Some days it felt a bit like work, and maybe that's where there's an opportunity to tune in a little more, to switch things up, to figure out where the core of what I'm doing is, what I like best.
It seems what's really fun to me is learning and struggling through something new. Once I get to the mythic level, like in Gods Unchained, it makes perfect sense that I quit Gods Unchained right after I had my best weekend ranked ever. I won 12 out of 18 games in mythic, and I quit right after that. Maybe in Warzone the mistake was sticking with it over and over after I'd already felt that I'd mastered it, because the real fun for me, the real emotional ride, was going and getting that first win, then getting to a place where I was really good at it. That grind from not being good at it to being good at it might be my genius zone. Once I hit that place where I'm toward the top and one of the best, then it starts to get boring. So maybe my genius is learning new competitive games, going into something I've never played before and getting better at it.
Someone suggested I could highlight my skills by trying to win a solo on three different games. I've actually done that. I won Fortnite back when it put you in with bots to start, winning about seven out of nine Fortnite solos. I won a PUBG solo, and it didn't take that long. What other solos? I got second in that Vampire Battle Royale. One of the hardest ones was Fall Guys. It's interesting, I'm noticing some sensation in my throat while I'm talking about this. And on some level, that comes back to this book I'm reading called The Big Leap.
Why symptoms show up right when life gets good
It talks about how often physical symptoms, and even illnesses and injuries, are things that come up when you're reaching a new level of joy, of success, of happiness. These things come up from our unconscious to try and stop us from going there. In my experience it's often a function of beliefs, like I believe I'm not worthy of being happy, or I feel guilty about being so successful in my life because one of my other family members is not as successful in theirs.
Making a vlog-style video like this is definitely not my genius. There are some people for whom this is their genius, and that leaves me wondering what I should do with this crypto video. I've really got a strong pull to finish this crypto video, and then maybe I don't do anything else with crypto. Like I just finish that crypto video and leave it there, or occasionally do a little something with crypto, but I intend on living in my genius now and forever, consistently. The little affirmation that I have makes a big difference.
The mind and the body are connected
I'm feeling some significant physical and mental reactions just having this conversation. And if I can help you with something today, it's this: the mind and the body are so connected. The things you're thinking about, the emotions you're having, and the physical feelings you're experiencing are all very connected. It's clear to me that the body can manifest physical symptoms to try and help you get out of doing something you don't want to do, or even to sabotage you from feeling good and enjoying something, because on a deep level you feel like you should be punished.
There's a great story in The Big Leap that'll make this clear. The author is talking about one of his clients, an executive at a company who was having an affair with his secretary. He'd go have that time with his secretary at lunch, they'd have lots of sex and feel great, and then he'd get a headache right afterward. When he stopped the affair, talked to his wife, and made some changes in his life, it eliminated his headaches. It's like the headaches were hitting him to punish him for the activities with the secretary. He was hitting really high levels of joy, and on a deep-down level he believed he didn't deserve that, that he was doing wrong and should be punished for it, so his body physically manifested that symptom. When he made changes in his life, the symptom went away. That's what's so amazing, that you can do that.
You could call it the curse of going against yourself, against your own inner values. Having some secretive affair, hiding and lying, often goes against our own internal moral codes, and we'll often unconsciously punish ourselves for it.
Where to go from here
If you want more Jerry Banfield reflections like this and you want to be part of the community walking through it with me, the best way to do that today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family. Let me know what's landing for you, and we'll see what happens together.
If this way of looking at the connection between what we believe and what our bodies do resonates with you, there's a lot more of it waiting for you in my Life playlist, where I keep working through exactly these kinds of questions out loud. Thank you for being here with me for this one.