Step Into the ‘Zone of Genius’ (Before A.I. Takes Your Job)

Everyone wants to thrive in their careers. Those in the know — especially, as of late, in tech — are not just grasping for satisfaction. They are trying to enter what they call their “zone of genius.”

The concept, popularized by Gay Hendricks in his 2009 self-help book, “The Big Leap,” describes the intersection between one’s skills and passions. When you’re in the zone of genius, “it’s not exactly creativity or workplace satisfaction,” he said in an interview. “It’s freedom, it’s zest, it’s energy.” Mr. Hendricks believes he was the first to use the term.

Ideally, he said, one could find work that sits in that zone and then start to eliminate everything else. In his own career, he offered, he managed to cut out work that he performed with mere competence to focus more fully on writing, which he is both good at and loves to do.

Lately, as workers anticipate the incursion of artificial intelligence and other unknowns into their careers, the term is cropping up all over X, LinkedIn, tech podcasts and newsletters. The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz even called a podcast that it started in 2023 “Zone of Genius.”

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