Let us begin by stating right from the outset that there is a big difference between genius and technical intelligence. In our culture we tend to call very intelligent technical people; nerds. A nerd is usually someone that either through choice or through natural ability has focused most of his life to academic pursuits of one kind or another. This is usually a derogatory term because nerds are seen as people that have very little social aptitude.

This article is not about how to become a better nerd. It’s also not an article that will allow you to input large sums of knowledge in a really small amount of time. This article is a small tidbit on how to acquire true genius; which is the ability to tap into a deeper part of yourself. This inner genius has the ability to take you into mental scapes that can greatly expand your mental perspective and your overall intellect.
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All the great minds of the past, from Davinci to Einstein and beyond, have been able to tap into this inner resource. They have been able to channel this inner knowing in themselves and as a result, they have expanded human thought and knowledge beyond all past limits.

Technical knowledge, or book knowledge if you prefer, won’t allow you to make these giant leaps in mental ability. The best way to see this is to realize that most of the really smart people that you know or deal with, are really just very good a memorization and application. Smart people are able to take a concept, learn it, and apply this to whatever task demands that knowledge. No small feat to be certain but it is one that has limitations.

Please understand that I don’t want to downplay intelligence as we understand it. What I do wish to point out is the fact that smarts will maintain a system and will allow you to thrive by using all of the tools at your disposal in that system, but they are seldom responsible for creative invention. True genius creates by breaking the rules, not by memorizing and applying them.

Therefore, to be able to allow your inner genius to come out, you have to be able to empty your cup. This is like the Zen monk that admonished his new pupil to let go of all that he had learnt and empty his cup or else he will never be able to understand the enlightened truth. To be able to find your inner genius you have to also be able to forget all those things that you have learnt or else you will never be able to find a different and better way. In order to think outside the box, you have to get out of the box. This is the catch 22 of true genius.

To do this you will have to be able to unlearn, at least for a while, what you have learnt. We will explore in a future article how you can get out of that box both figuratively and mentally and hopefully these methods will allow you to unleash your inner genius.  For now what you need to understand is that true genius is found by first letting go of preconceived notions. True genius means breaking the rules.

It can be a pretty difficult thing to go up and talk to people. We have all found ourselves in situations where we have to make small talk and mingle. Sometimes we also run into people that we like and would love to have just the right thing to say to be able to get the other person interested and smiling.

Guys can find the act of going to talk to a girl very daunting and a nerve racking affair that can have you tongue tied and sounding stupid. Girls can also find themselves in situations where they are desperate to say something witty and fun to impress and entertain. But it seems that the harder that you try, the harder that it becomes to be cool.

The ‘gift of the gab’ as the Irish call it is a great blessing and allows those blessed with it, to talk to anyone and bring a smile to all. The best way to meet girls is to be funny and the best way to not seem bitchy or snotty is to have a good sense of humor.  Laughter creates instant rapport with anyone and there is no better way to make a good impression than to make them laugh.

This article will give you all of the know-how that you will need to create a great comedy stand-up routine. Why?
Because a comic routine is sort of like a small funny story that you relate to people that allows you to bring out your inner comedian and create instant rapport with anyone.

Have you ever noticed that comedians have really hot wives??

Yeah, get a girl to laugh and they will instantly like you. Keep them laughing and you will have all the girlfriends that you can ever want. If you think that I am kidding, look at the girls that Jim Carrey has been with, or Dan Aykroyd’s wife!

Funny girls also have it good. They are surrounded with friends and can usually get away with murder since everyone likes them so much. A great example of the great appeal of a funny girl is Ellen.

So a stand-up comedy routine then is a funny story? Yes but its a lot more than that; it’s a story full of funny twists and turns with not just one joke but a bunch of jokes interwoven throughout. A great comic routine catches you by surprise and leaves you wanting more. It turns that dull everyday and twists it so that it becomes a great big fun romp.

Life is pretty boring mostly, anyone that can add a spark to our dull day, will have our thanks and will be instantly transported into our good books.

To begin, lets look into the anatomy of a joke:

•    Most jokes are really a REFRAME; this is when you change the way a person perceives a certain event and as a result, you change the meaning. All good stories have a reframe of sorts, my favorite is when you find out the Rudolph’s giant red nose is not weird and ugly but its actually the only thing that will get Santa’s sleigh safely through the snow storm.

Why did the frogs cross the road?…
It was stapled to the chicken..haha

See, you were maybe thinking ‘frogger’, but the reframe turned it into ‘the hills have eyes for amphibians’ 🙂

If you are having troubles with the whole reframe thing, just think of it as; SURPRISE! Basically a good joke is always a good surprise. You were expecting this but…Bang! You got something totally  different. A surprise is like a light bulb going off in your head. Eureka!

If you can master this notion of creating a surprise effect (or in other words, a reframe) then you  can turn anything into a joke.

And a great comedy routine is a bunch of jokes in a row that add up to a story, a really funny, ,messed  up story.

•    Another thing that we have to consider when we are trying to understand jokes is; TIMING. If you remember the idea of surprise, then the art of timing is pretty simple (most comedians will want to string me up for saying that but in the great words of Bob the Merciless, “ Fuck’em if they can’t take a joke.”).

What you want to do is to catch your audience completely by surprise…So good timing means saying things when they least expect it and to say it in ways that they hadn’t imagined.

For example you could be saying something in one rhythm but then you totally change that rhythm to say something really weird. Or you tell a really sad story with a giant smile on your face. Good timing means breaking patterns and waiting for just the right moment to let them have it!

Ok, so now that you have basic idea of the joke, how do you get started?
Well the best way to create a comedy routine is to take an ordinary story and to add a few surprises to it. Try to come up with a relevant story; that is a story about something pertinent or significant to where you are and what you are doing. Try to think of things that have happened to you, or are happening. It can be anything from you working at your computer, to going to the bookstore,  looking for a book at a bookstore, or even eating pizza.

My advice is to have a bunch of stories and to create as many comic routines as you can so that whatever happens, you will always have at least one routine that fits right into what you and others are talking about. Think of these routines as a comedy bag that you can reach into. The more stories that you have, the better your inventory, the more prepared that you will be to deal with any social circumstance.

So lets see what we can do with a simple story:

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.

So this buddy of mine…Jack, went up this hill with this chick that he had been trying to pounce for months.
Jill or something…slut.
Anywho, Jack takes Jill on this bogus walk supposedly to get water from a well or something, he told me after that she was wearing the shortest skirt ever, any shorter and it would have been a tank-top… I guess the bulge in his pants was so huge he could barely walk. Freakin pervert!
So Jacko is straining just to walk, but dumbdumb is so hot right now that he start to drop the bucket, bending down trying to look up Jill’s dress…He walks with a limp now, I guess he strained his crotch or something..
So Jack keeps dropping the bucket and bending over, when all the sudden he gets lucky and Jill gets a bit ahead of him, he looks up these hot sexy longs legs and…”God,” he screams, falls down, and starts rolling down the hill. Hits some rock or something and passes out.
Jackie boy tells me later that as he bends over and looks up at the sexiest longest legs ever, he eyes under the inziwinzy mini skirt… what could only be described as..The biggest pair of hairy tea bags ever!  So traumatized was the poor guy that he slipped, fell, and nearly broke his crown.
So he thinks he’s dreaming; bad nightmare.. but when he wakes up, there is Jill standing over him, one leg on each side of his body. He can’t help it but to look up those hot legs again and sees the biggest Johnson this side of the Mississippi..I guess Jill was flying commando.
Crazy man! I guess Jill was actually Jason a while back. She just needed one operation to make the girl complete…If you know what I mean.
What happen to jack?
Him and Jill got married last Tuesday,
They flew to Hawaii…See that’s how I got this awesome tan!

Anything has potential.  Just remember about the surprise effect and learn to tell your stories with great timing. You don’t have to swear and it does have to be a dirty story but try and take that originally dull life event, and give it a bit of color.

Have as many routines as possible, this will give you tons of practice. Before long you will be able to improvise on the spot and be able to come up with great jokes and twists that will have the people around you laughing their heads off.

One bit of warning; let other people have a word in. Don’t talk endlessly; there is nothing so unfunny as to have to hear somebody go on and on. Good timing means knowing when to shut up. Let others talk and put in your two cents, if it looks like they want to hear the rest of your story, then tell it but stop and get input from the other people.
Also, don’t laugh at your own jokes. It’s terrible when you see people going on laughing their heads off while the audience looks at them in growing horror. Tell your stories with a straight face; there is nothing funnier than to tell a funny comic routine with a straight face.

Learn to read your audience so that you know when to laugh, when to shut up, and when to talk.

Keep those comic routines handy, so that you are never caught unprepared. The best way to break the ice with people is to have a great sense of humor and to blow them away with a really good stand-up comedy routine.

You never know when you might be stuck in an elevator…with a Rabbi, a priest, and chicken…

Because of the great interest in ‘How to create a stand-up comedy routine’, I have put together an ebook that answers all the questions that many of you have. It explains how jokes and comedy routines are created in a a step by step fashion, how to apply good comedic timing, how to use comedy as a persuasion tool, and how to use comedy to relax and improve your health. Please check it out!

Want to learn to make any task easier?

Then learn to concentrate. The reason why a person gets bored, is because they are not putting enough concentration into the task that they are doing at the moment.

The ability to concentrate is sort of like the ability to put blinders on yourself, so that you are focused only on the thing that is directly in front of you. Distractions then become as they say, “ out of sight and out of mind”.

When we engage in any particular task, our boredom and lack of skill is usually a result of not committing 100 % of ourselves to the thing that we are doing. If you need to write a paper for school for example, the reason that you get so bored and uptight and the reason that you tend to do such a bad job, is that your mind wonders all over the place. Your mind is spread out in a wide arc, thinking a little about the paper that you have to write but also about the weather, what’s on tv, what you could be eating, etc., etc.

The power of focus allows you to be where you are, doing what you are doing. What it really is; is the power to take your attention which is usually spread out over a large mental area and focus it like a laser beam on one thing. Concentration therefore is the ability to control the focus of your attention.

Developing the power of concentration is very much like working out. In many ways it is like exercising your muscles. You need to take a small bit of time out of your day, and engage in exercise that will allow you to focus and train your attention. And ANYONE can benefit from this kind of exercise.

You might think that because you are a laborer for example, you might not need to work on your concentration. Certainly you imagine an accountant or someone like that who needs to focus on a mental task, would benefit, but not you. Well that is not correct thinking; even physical tasks require great concentration. If you work in a dangerous area then you will need to focus on what you are doing or you might end up losing some fingers or toes. Concentration and focus give you more energy, elevate your output and give you peace of mind. There is nothing more soothing than to focus on a manual task so intently that you block out everything else in your life. Work then becomes a type of mental freedom and a source of inner peace.

In order to begin to develop your concentration, I am going to give you this time tested exercise. It would be ideal that you thought of it as a type of physical exercise, so that you devote 15 minutes to half an hour to it, every second day. As you get better you might want to devote more time to this exercise because as you shall see, if you try it, it will bring a great sense of inner peace and inner strength.

I want you to take a small sheet of white paper; anything from 4X5 to 8X10 will do, and make a small black dot on it. The dot’s ideal size would be about ¼ of an inch or half a centimeter in diameter. The size of the dot or the color of the paper are not critical. Just make sure that it’s a black dot on white paper.

Now find the most comfortable, and quiet place in your house. Take some tape and stick the dot to a wall. Sit in front of the dot that you have created. You can either sit on a chair or sit on a comfy pillow or sit cross legged. Sit however you are most comfortable and make sure that the dot is in front of you. You don’t want to strain your vision by having to look up at the dot. The best place to position your dot is slightly below eye level.

When you are very comfortable with the dot’s position in front of you and how you are sitting, I want you to start staring at the dot. I want you to start looking at the dot and only the dot so that you become completely focused on it to the exclusion of everything else. Your vision might start to get blurry so keep blinking and make yourself blink a few times in a row if you need to.

Stare at the dot in front of you. Forget about who you are, where you are, how you are sitting and anything else that does not matter or pertain to you staring at the dot. Focus only on the dot. If any thoughts arise, which will surely be the case, then stop that thought in mid stride and continue to think only about staring at the dot.

You will catch yourself over and over again thinking about the past or the future or any old daydream that happens to occur. Suddenly you will wake up as if from a dream and realize that you are supposed to be staring at the dot. When this happens, cut that invading thought as soon as possible and begin to once again concentrate on thinking only about staring at the dot.

Try to always keep a good posture so that you do not injure your back, especially if you are sitting cross legged on the floor. But aside from a straight back, forget about your physical comfort or discomfort as much as possible.

The task is to make the dot and the act of staring at the dot, the entire focus of your life. Continue to do this for fifteen minutes.

As you first begin with this exercise, you will find that there is a million and one distractions and it will probably be very hard to endure the fifteen minutes of intense focus. But don’t worry; this will change with practice until you get to the point where you will wonder where the time has gone.

When fifteen minutes becomes pretty doable, extend the time of your focus meditation to thirty minutes. Do not get upset with yourself for having all those rampant thoughts, impulses and feelings. Just remember to end these thoughts as soon as you realize that you are dreaming, and redouble your efforts to concentrate on the dot. The mere act of doing this exercise will allow you to develop a great deal of focus and discipline.

Do this three times a week for a month and see for yourself the difference in all aspects of your life. That is my challenge to you; try this exercise for a month and let me know how it has affected your psyche and your everyday life.