The recipe for genius.
Every strategic mind has the capacity for genius. What varies is whether circumstance has allowed it to be cultivated.
I named this programme GeniusYou after years spent finding genius for brands, distilling what made organisations magic until I had a repeatable system, then turning that same process on the mind itself.
Genius, it turns out, isn’t rare or reserved for the recognised few, it’s conditional, not on raw talents, we come with plenty of these, but on the circumstances needed to bring it about.
Talents are the ingredients for brilliance; brilliance is the fuel for genius. Genius is what happens when you turn it into something the world can use, and that’s exactly what I want for you: the circumstances that let your talents become a gift to the world.
What follows are the circumstances that allowed me to find and hone my ingredients.
Genius is not born whole. It forms. Ingredient by ingredient. Moment by moment.
Every thread below is one of these moments.
Pull on one, and you’ll see what it’s made of.
Want — The yearning for what’s underneath.
I was four years old.
It was Dunedin. A new subdivision. The houses were fresh and uniform, the kind that would end up looking kit-set. Our parents owned the inside. We owned the outside.
There were no trees yet. Nothing to break the sight lines. So when anything moved, you noticed it. We were hunting for anything new.
A man walked past. He probably wanted to avoid us. Heading somewhere, recently relocated from a university flat to this new subdivision and not entirely sure how he felt about that. But he couldn’t avoid us. We were right there.
Tracey noticed he was chewing gum. She asked if she could have some. As any four year old would.
He dismissed her. Casually, the way adults do when they want to close a conversation. He told her he couldn’t share because he was chewing his own tongue.
Tracey turned around and headed inside. The opportunity was lost. It hadn’t worked out.
I was still on the footpath. Not because I wanted the gum. I’d already forgotten about the gum. I was stuck on the man. On the lie that made no sense. On what was actually happening underneath what he said. On why a person would choose that particular story to close a door.
Tracey wanted the gum. I wanted that.
Collaboration — The first colab.
It was late at night and most of our classmates were already asleep, but for my brother and me, our work was about to begin.
I was five. Che was six. Thirteen months between us, which meant we did everything together. What happened to him happened to me. We were in it together from the start.
Me on the bottom bunk, Che above. I had my legs in the air, feet flat against his mattress, pushing. He rode the waves. Neither of us ever talked still.
The beds were soft. The questions were hard. The dark made everything sharper.
The current topic was a bully. A kid in our class who didn’t make sense. Unpredictable. Nasty when nobody important was watching. Nobody else could see it clearly. We could.
We loved figuring her out and hated that we had to. We couldn’t leave it alone.
Every night on the bunks, we took her apart. Examined the evidence. Compared notes. Tried to work out the rules of a person who seemed to have none. There were long pauses. Sometimes one of us fell asleep mid-thought. It didn’t matter. We picked it up again the next night.
The goal was simple. Understand her well enough to navigate her. The quality of playtime was evidence our theories were working.
We were five and six years old, running our first colab.
Systems thinking — Solving the whole problem.
I was eleven.
Our class was given an assignment. Break into groups. Create a habitat.
Most groups made bush environments. Somewhere a bird could hunt and gather. Safe, logical, exactly what was asked for.
My group made an island.
Population 50,000. A fully functioning economy. A purpose, world peace. And a religion to organise around it: the Bahai Faith. A faith that advocates unity is made possible by diversity.
We built it out of paper mache on a board. It looked like Waiheke. I didn’t even know Waiheke existed yet.
I wasn’t trying to be clever. I was trying to solve something.
I had already been watching the world long enough to see what was wrong with it. The island was my answer. Contained, complete, every piece connected to every other piece. Not just a place where things could survive, a place where things could work.
Nothing else mattered while I was building it. I wasn’t thinking about the other groups. I wasn’t thinking about what the teacher would say. I was too far inside it for any of that.
Someone said something when we presented it. The word remarkable is in there somewhere. I can’t tell you who said it or what came before it. I wasn’t looking for it so I didn’t catch it.
What I remember is the island.
Truth before safety — The compulsion that couldn’t be switched off.
I was thirteen.
A friend was complaining about something. I listened. And then I did what I always did. I could see the answer, so I shared it.
The wisdom felt comfortable. Natural. Like home. Not the uncertainty of a thirteen-year-old trying to figure out who she was. Something steadier than that.
She didn’t receive it well. I knew it had landed because of what happened next. If it hadn’t hit home, she would have just walked away.
Instead, she and another girl spent a class period spitting paper in my hair.
I was sitting directly in front of them. Close enough that the teacher standing at the front couldn’t see. But everyone at the same level could feel the tension. They watched carefully. Not carefully enough to stop it but carefully enough to let it keep going.
I froze. I didn’t want to pull attention to it.
I had scars on my face from a bike accident. They had healed but hadn’t gone away. My hair though. Curly, thick, the kind that stopped people. Rachel Hunter hair. That part I had going for me.
That’s where they aimed.
The adults concluded that the child being humiliated was the problem. If Simone stopped telling people what to do, nobody would spit in her hair. The spitting, apparently, was a reasonable response to telling a friend that if she wanted better grades in English, she needed the hours after school, not the minutes before class.
Code recognition — Genius finds the system underneath.
I was fifteen.
There was a girl in my class who occupied the spot I wanted. Intelligent. Hard working. Beautiful. People liked her easily, and she wore all of it without any apparent effort.
I was still figuring out how to be in the world. Still paying the price for saying true things out loud. Still not quite landing the way I wanted to. From the outside, she had what I didn’t. So I decided to beat her. Not loudly. I didn’t tell anyone. I just locked in.
We were running mates in history. Each exam she came first, I came a close second. And by the third term it was time to come first. Previously I studied in a time-based way, this time I used a different measure. Knowing more than my rival.
What I discovered, when I locked in, was that there was a system underneath every subject that had meaning at its centre. History. English. Economics. Every one of them had a code, a structure, a logic, a way the argument was supposed to move. Once I could see the code, I could work inside it completely. I could articulate the idea like it was mine, because I understood the workings. Not just what the answer was, but why the answer was the answer.
The obsession felt like confusion first. Then a knowing. An assuredness that arrived quietly and stayed.
I remember walking out of the history exam while the rest of the class said it was the hardest one yet. I didn’t say anything. I just knew I knew.
Weeks later the teacher held up the results. “Simone, I could have read your essay upside down and you still would have got 100%.” The next closest mark in the class was 82%.
I had beaten her. And then I stopped trying. Not because I was lazy. Because I didn’t need to anymore.
The competition she sparked in me was real and useful. Without her, I wouldn’t have locked in the way I did, and I wouldn’t have found the code.
But the satisfaction wasn’t in beating her. It was in the cracking.
Code cracking is what let me answer with certainty. It’s why I could regularly get 100% on exams and essays. My handwriting didn’t matter. My spelling mistakes didn’t matter. I could make sense of an idea the teacher had never seen put that way before. I could see the system underneath the behaviour, the reason behind the outcome, the pattern driving the theme. And once I’d seen it, the answer was unequivocal.
The competition gave me a process. What I was really chasing was assuredness in who I was and my place in the world.
Hitting it felt like a jackpot.
Genius vs intelligence — Not the same thing.
I was eighteen.
Six years had passed since the island. In that time, I had learned some new tricks.
I had figured out how to use my body to get attention. I was, by this point, a world-class flirt. I could probably write a separate book on that subject alone. The point is, it was no surprise that he noticed me. What surprised me was what came next.
He asked if I was Simone Mearns. I said yes. He said he’d recognised the voice. Can’t change that with lipstick.
And then he told me that at school, they had all been scared of me. You had a kid’s body but an adult’s mind.
Michael had been in my class the same year I built the island. So, the statement made sense. But I hadn’t known he was watching. I hadn’t known any of them were.
When you only know your own mind, you assume everyone thinks the same way. That they’re just quieter about it.
This is where people get confused about genius. We look for it in test results. In exam scores. In quantifiable intelligence, because that’s what we can measure.
When you step into your genius, something shifts, in you and in the room. Michael felt it at eleven and still remembered it at eighteen. I hadn’t felt it at all, because I didn’t know I was doing it.
He lent me a book before we went our separate ways. Clan of the Cave Bear. I never gave it back. Sorry, Michael.
Genius is transferable — Same method, different subject.
University broke the spell.
At school, the path to my genius was study. I didn’t choose it, I was compelled by it. The deep dive into a subject, the moment the system revealed itself, the look on people’s faces when I articulated something they hadn’t seen. That was my food.
University slammed into my neurodiversity and paralysed me. The structure that had carried me through school was gone. The compulsion went quiet. The hits stopped coming. When you’ve been fed a certain way your whole life and the source disappears, you go looking.
I found bartending at seventeen. Underage and underqualified, when I started I didn’t even drink. Don’t worry. I caught up. My brother asked me once how I managed to collect so many fans. The answer was simple. It was how I made them feel.
Everyone wants love but everyone wants a different flavour of it. They want to be seen as a specific version of themselves, brilliant, significant, funny, wise, desired. I could find the flavour instantly. I could see who a person wanted to be, and I could reflect it back to them. I could also solve their problems while I was at it.
Saturday afternoon I’d open the bar, serve through until four, and by the time I left there’d be a group of ten regulars who’d come in ostensibly for the beer but really for something else entirely. I had found another way to do genius. The subject had changed from textbooks to humans, but the method was the same. Find the system underneath, understand it completely, use it.
And for the first time, instead of being spat at for it, I was adored. I was mesmerised.
Genius finds its workshop — The distillation and use of brilliance, aka branding.
I was adrift. No degree, no direction, and the mesmerised feeling that had carried me through the bar years was wearing thin. I had squeezed what I could from that source. It was time to move.
The UK was calling. Before I got there, something else found me first. My brilliant mother opened an agency.
Whether she did it as an opportunity to employ her wayward children, or whether her wayward children were exactly what she needed for the job, we will never know. Probably both. Probably neither of us would admit it either way.
But I was good at it.
Branding held my attention in a way very few things could. Every project was new. Every project involved a transformation. And every single one had a puzzle at its center. All the pieces laid out, waiting to be assembled into something that hadn’t existed before. A visual identity. A brochure. A newsletter. The process of taking what was scattered and making it coherent, making it land.
I didn’t know then that I had a hyper-focus ability built in. I just knew that when the puzzle was interesting enough, I couldn’t put it down.
By twenty-three I was an Account Manager selling to the Ports of Melbourne.
Have you ever played Pac-Man? I was like that, ripping through the levels, consuming understanding as fast as it appeared, always hungry for the next one. But it wasn’t knowledge that fascinated me. It was brilliance.
Brilliance was at the centre of every brief. Defining it. Using it. Presenting it. That’s what branding is, the distillation of what makes an organisation special, and the transformation of that into something other people can feel.
I had been doing this my whole life. In developing the island. Behind the bar on Saturday afternoons. In the history exam at fifteen.
I just hadn’t had a name for it until now.
The true test — Genius applied at home, or it isn’t genius.
I have three daughters. The first arrived when I was twenty-six. The second at twenty-eight. The third I joyfully inherited when I remarried at forty-one. Lucky doesn’t cover it.
I have always been struck by the fact that every single person alive carries the best story ever told. Not just the recognised ones. Every person. The lust, the longing, the disappointment, the resentment, the love. The most incredible biopic ever made, sitting inside an ordinary human being going about an ordinary Tuesday.
Yet, we treat people as though there is a hierarchy of specialness. There isn’t one. The potential is equal. Some just get trampled before they get the chance to actuate it.
Now imagine me, with all of these thoughts about the incredibleness of being human, holding two of these miracles at twenty-eight. What a responsibility.
Before the girls, I was running on hedonistic behaviour, with some superiority disguised as strong principles thrown in. After them, my north star changed completely. I had to become the person I wanted my children to be.
The obvious read is that I had to cultivate the girls. And I did. But the real work was cultivating the brilliance in me. For it to be genius and not just a bit of external shine, I had to become the mother I wanted to be, not the one I wanted to show.
That’s the front door test. Anyone can hold the room when they’re getting paid. If your genius stops at the threshold, you’re a fraud. You can’t outrun that.
I recognised that you cannot teach your children anything you haven’t already achieved yourself. Not a loving relationship. Not a successful career. Not good sense with money. Not a healthy body. Not how to move through disappointment and put it to use.
You can’t model what you don’t have.
I was a mother of two. And I was still in the transition.
The gap — Between what you see and what you reflect.
I was twenty-nine. By this point I had been in branding long enough to see something that bothered me.
We were trying to grow the agency the hard way. Honing the pitch. Perfecting the presentation. Walking into rooms full of people who didn’t know us, trying to win them over on the spot.
What I could see, clearly, the way I always saw things clearly before I could make anyone else see them, was that we were concentrating on improving the parts that we were already good at, and in actual fact, had very little control over.
If we put all this effort into the development of us, making us more brilliant everyday and then talking about it, loudly, creating the energy that came with the expression of true excellence, then the companies we wanted to work with, would know us before we even got there.
We could build people so genuinely extraordinary that winning the pitch became inevitable. From pitch to pitch we each honed our own thing. My briefing technique, Mark’s creative solutions, Phil’s next-level Photoshop, Peter backing his ideas, Raewyn being on time, Joanne’s illustrations, Sue’s marketing mix. It didn’t matter what it was. What mattered was that pitch to pitch, we grew better at what we did, not how we looked.
I pitched the idea. I got laughed at. It stung.
But looking back, the laugh made complete sense. There was too big a gap between what I could see and what I was reflecting. I hadn’t yet built myself enough to make the idea tangible. I couldn’t make visible what I could only feel. The vision was there. The vessel wasn’t ready.
Years later I built GeniusYou. And this is exactly what it does.
The idea was right in 2003. I just needed another twenty years to become someone who could prove it.
The captain — Leading your own life.
I was thirty-six.
All the boxes were ticked. I had done what I was supposed to do. By any external measure, I had succeeded.
Yet when I closed my eyes and stopped flapping, I was bored. Unfulfilled. Disappointed. Not at my children, my friends, my family, my work. At my life. Nothing moved the way I wanted and expected it to.
So if it wasn’t the things in my life, what was it?
I’d earned everything I had. But I was still acting like I owed someone, still defaulting to the demands of the people who gave me opportunities, even though I’d tripled their return long ago.
I was being the junior, even though I had become the senior.
So I took the seniority. Properly.
I wanted a legacy. Not a compromise.
The first decision was simple and non-negotiable. We were living in Wellington. My life was in Auckland. I moved back.
Not a dramatic gesture. Just the first decision made from the right place, by the right person, for the right reasons.
Everything that followed came from that.
By the time I was thirty-seven, I was single, had my own agency, and had become a strategist.
Now everything moved the way I wanted and expected it to.