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    Your Genius Mind: Why You Don't Need To Be A College Graduate But You Do Need To Think Like One
    Your Genius Mind: Why You Don't Need To Be A College Graduate But You Do Need To Think Like One
    Your Genius Mind: Why You Don't Need To Be A College Graduate But You Do Need To Think Like One
    Ebook144 pages3 hours

    Your Genius Mind: Why You Don't Need To Be A College Graduate But You Do Need To Think Like One

    By K. Candis Best, Ph.D.

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    About this ebook

    Don’t let the subtitle fool you. Your Genius Mind is a passionate and unapologetic appeal that serves as a clarion call for increasing the percentage of people in the U.S. and around the world, with a four-year degree. But in this frank, insightful and often humorous account, author K. Candis Best makes clear that a degree will be worthless to anyone who graduates without college level thinking skills. In this book readers will learn why everyone has a genius to share with the world; how a quality college education can help them to find it; and what anyone can do to grow their genius through higher education no matter what school they attend. This is a must-read for anyone who is about to start college for the first time, considering a return to college to complete a degree or needs to be convinced about the true value of a college education.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherK. Candis Best, Ph.D.
    Release dateJul 6, 2014
    ISBN9780990398226
    Your Genius Mind: Why You Don't Need To Be A College Graduate But You Do Need To Think Like One
    Author

    K. Candis Best, Ph.D.

    Dr. K. Candis Best is a passionate advocate of getting people to use their minds to find their genius. An inspiring thought leader in higher education, she has focused her attention on creating a movement around growing genius. Candis has helped hundreds of students and professionals to use their genius minds to leave a legacy through self-leadership and service. She is this creator of the Holistic Leadership model which she used to found Learningateway, a social learning platform for non-traditional students who are at-risk for not completing their academic goals. With “Your Genius Mind: Why You Don’t Need to Be a College Graduate But You Do Need to Think Like One,” Candis is taking the “Growing Genius Minds”movement global. Her perspectives on transforming education have made her an in-demand speaker and expert in crafting educational solutions. But she isn’t just a spokesperson for education, she’s a proud customer. She holds a law degree from Villanova University and is licensed to practice law in the States of New York and New Jersey and before the federal courts of the Eastern District of New York. In addition, she holds masters degrees in business administration and psychology and a Ph.D. in social welfare research and policy development. She holds board certifications in Healthcare Management and as a Human Services Practitioner and is a fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives. She currently serves as an Associate Professor and the Brooklyn campus chairperson for the departments of Human Services and General Studies at St. Joseph's College. She resides in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, New York.

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      i loved reading this and i reccomend everyone to read it. Discover your genius mind

    Book preview

    Your Genius Mind - K. Candis Best, Ph.D.

    INTRODUCTION

    (to your GENIUS mind)

    Everyone is a genius.

    But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree,

    it will spend the rest of its life thinking it’s stupid.

    - Matthew Kelly

    Let me begin with a question. When you look at your life, are you happy with what you see? If the answer is no or you’re struggling to come up with an answer, be encouraged. You’re not alone. It’s a sad curse of adulthood that we’re expected to prove we know the secret to a successful life in front of an audience. On any other stage, performers have a chance to practice, but life seems to push each of us onto the grandstand before we’re quite ready. And we often seem to follow someone whose performance looks better than our own. It’s not you. (Okay, it is you, but not for the reasons you think.)

    Life used to be much simpler than it is now. In the United States, you go to school until the age of 16 whether you want to or not. After that, it used to be that most people followed one of three paths with fairly predictable results:

    Drop out of school, find a hustle and try to stay out of jail;

    Graduate from high school and get a job; or

    Stay in school, graduate from college and get a better job.

    On average, people who took the second path did better than people who took the first and people who took the third path did better than the other two. You had a script to read from, a playbook to follow, and when it was your turn to step into the spotlight, you could feel confident that you knew what to do. But the paths aren’t so predictable anymore. These days, people are dropping out of school and creating billion-dollar companies (see the story of the guy who invented Tumblr) and college graduates are either finding hustles, making fast money and going to jail for 150 years (shout-out to Bernie Madoff), or asking you if you want to supersize your burger meal. The script is missing some pages and the plays in the playbook aren’t working.

    The truth is that the rules of the game have changed. Welcome to life in a knowledge society. Call it the Bill Gates lie, the Steve Jobs lie, the Mark Zuckerberg lie, the Henry Ford lie or name it after any other successful entrepreneur who never graduated from college. The success of these individuals and others like them seems to imply that college is irrelevant. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The need has never been greater for high-quality thinkers, with or without a degree. All their success shows us is that there are other ways to develop college- level thinking skills. In fact, college doesn’t really develop those skills. It refines them. And make no mistake, a college or university is still the best place to go to make that happen. But there’s a catch. The colleges that live up to their missions all assume that entering students are already thinking at the college level when they arrive at their doorsteps. If you read the biographies of any of the entrepreneurs I just mentioned, you’ll find plenty of proof that they already possessed these skills in abundance long before they started their businesses.

    All successful entrepreneurs share the same characteristic – they’re better than others at thinking about ways to solve problems. That’s the core of every good business idea. Identify a problem or a need that you can solve better than anyone else so that customers will pay you for your solution. In the pages that follow, I’ll show you how these traits equate to the first three elements of genius – as I define it. That is, geniuses can generate extraordinary solutions that fulfill what others need. But here’s something you may not know. The most valuable college classes aren’t the ones that relate to a professional skill. They’re the liberal arts courses students often complain about having to take, like philosophy, ethics and literature. Those courses force you to write, which, in turn, challenges you to think. Courses that lend themselves to multiple-choice exams prepare you to choose from solutions that are already in front of you. Entrepreneurs create solutions that others haven’t thought of yet. Living a successful life in a knowledge society requires developing the mindset of an entrepreneur, even if you never start a business of your own.

    This is a book for those without a college degree, but it’s also a book for those who have a college degree but not a college education. And this is a book for anyone and everyone who has ever believed in the potential of someone who did not see potential in themselves. I know that’s a big audience, but we’re not talking about a game or a performance anymore. This is a battle, and battles need an army. More than that, the pages that follow are intended to chart a journey, because this book isn’t so much a brochure for the value of a college education as it is a treasure map. I’ll have more to say about that shortly. First, I want to tell you a story.

    It’s early May, 2006. I have a college degree but I don’t have a job. The reasons for my unemployment aren’t important¹ except to explain that at this particular moment in my life, I really needed an emotional pick-me-up. And I got one. It was a surprise visit from my globe-trotting brother-from-another-mother, Derrick. When he appeared on my doorstep this time, Derrick was living in Dubai, and in 2006, Dubai was a name-dropper’s paradise. It was glossy with stories about the world’s tallest ‘this’ and most expensive ‘that’, and being able to say sorry, I can’t, I’ll be in Dubai, was a great way to end a conversation. So when Derrick invited me to come for a visit, I jumped at the chance.

    But five minutes after we said goodbye, my feet started to chill. Someone inviting you to stay with them if you’re ever in the neighborhood is the polite thing to do, but 6,850 miles is a long way to travel to find out that they didn’t really mean it. I needed to make sure Derrick was really willing to play host. I must have emailed him ten times before I finally clicked the ‘buy’ button on my ticket, and every one of the emails read the same way –

    My flight will arrive on Monday, July 17th at 12:20 am. Are you sure it’s okay to come?

    And every time his reply was the same –

    No problem, K. I’ll be there.

    Off I went on the cruise of Northern Europe that I’d already booked before nervously adding a five-day detour to Dubai. From the moment I stepped onto the ship, every bit of stress I’d been feeling from my recently disheveled life seemed to float away on the waves. In fact, I was having such a good time that I didn’t bother to check my email until the day before the cruise was scheduled to end. I sauntered down to the ship’s library and logged on to the computer that had the best view of the snack bar. After hearing the familiar ping followed by You’ve got mail, I found, located near the top of a list of 143 unread messages, an untitled email from Derrick.

    Aww, he can’t wait to see me, I thought.

    The email contained a slightly different message.

    K, are you still coming? Because I’m in Afghanistan.

    What the … wait … am I screaming out loud?

    People were definitely staring at me. Maybe it had something to do with the way I was pounding on the computer keyboard.

    Yes, I’m still coming!!! Monday, July 17th 12:20 am. Somebody better be there to pick me up! YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON I KNOW IN DUBAI!!!

    Suddenly, I didn’t like cruises anymore. This was my last day on the ship, and thanks to brother Derrick, I was not having any fun. I spent all day, except for bathroom breaks and trips to the frozen yogurt bar, pacing back and forth in front of the computer, waiting for his reply. I began to imagine him dodging a gauntlet of enemy fire and never even seeing my email. But sometime before dinner, I finally heard the ping I’d been waiting for.

    No problem, K. I’ll be there.

    Right about now you might be wondering how Derrick was going to get from a battlefield in Afghanistan to a passenger pick-up lane in Dubai in just over 24 hours, but once I read his email, I was too relieved to be skeptical. And really, what choice did I have?

    The next day, I made my flight and my connection and landed in Dubai at 12:20 am on Monday, July 17th. The Dubai International Airport is pristine and crisp but surprisingly understated given the country’s press coverage. I began the slogging march toward customs, sandwiched between screaming infants and a variety of languages that I did not recognize. After clearing customs, I quickly found myself outside, shrink-wrapped in a heat too oppressive to come without a warning label. Welcome to summer in the Persian Gulf. Throngs of brown faces peered hopefully in my direction, many wrapped in an unenviable amount of dark fabric given the temperature. No matter where you travel in the world, the passenger arrival lounges always look the same. Everyone is searching for someone, and I was no different. I searched … and I searched … and I searched some more. No Derrick.

    I wanted to believe that I was looking in the wrong place, but the waiting area wasn’t that big. A gnawing feeling of disappointment began to expand from the pit of my stomach and didn’t stop until it reached the hollow space at the base of my throat. That expansion took forty-five minutes. I know this because that’s how long it took for me to accept that Derrick wasn’t there and wasn’t coming. I wasn’t happy but I was too tired to be angry. Instead, I did what most people would do in that situation. I pulled out my cellphone. It didn’t help. My price plan didn’t cover Dubai.

    Okay, I sighed to myself.

    I still wasn’t worried. There was a

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