On May 1, 2009, you will be able to purchase a copy of The Genius Machine: The Eleven Steps That Turn Raw Ideas Into Brilliance. A few months ago Jason Gardner, my wonderful editor at New World Library, asked me if I thought about processes in the book as being a real machine. That got me thinking. Where is the genius in The Genius Machine? Is it in the book? Or is the genius latent in the user, and the book works to bring it out somehow? Or maybe the genius is to be found in the space in between the user and the book.

In George Soros’s recent book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, he tries to explain his concept of reflexivity, the idea that there is an interplay between people and the markets that most market analysts can’t even see. (I say “tries” since Soros would have been greatly helped by a Jason Gardner.) Difficult as it may be to understand Soros’s theory, its validity is easily found in the billions that Soros makes in the markets using his insights, and the fact that others, who don’t understand reflexivity, are losing those billions to him. I think reflexivity might also explain how The Genius Machine will work with readers. They will act on the book, and the book will act on them.

The Genius Machine is intended to be a real machine — you take your notion, work it through the eleven steps and, Bingo! — out comes your idea brilliantly thought through and ready for prime time.

But there’s another side to The Genius Machine. And that’s while you’re using the machine to change your ideas into pure brilliance, the machine is doing something to you, too.That’s right! While you’re cranking The Genius Machine, The Genius Machine is cranking you. Use it a few times to develop your ideas, and you’ll discover that the machine is beginning to turn you into a brilliant thinker. You won’t need to think about any of the eleven steps, such as Distinctions or Testing or Connecting. You’ll be thinking that way all the time, automatically.

What might be different about you after the Machine has been cranking you for awhile?

The Genius Machine will turn you into a noticer!

You’ll start to realize that you see things no one else does. And those are the very things that are important to you. You might notice really subtle things, like how the wind blows a leaf, or you might notice the various ways an airplane flying overhead sounds to you depending on the cloud cover, or you might notice how your sister kind of rolls her eyes when she has something important she’s about to say.

Also, The Genius Machine will make you into a better listener. Now that you are paying closer attention to the differences you are seeing all the time, you will become much more acute in your sensitivity to what other’s are seeing and saying. You’ll be listening carefully for new distinctions that other people are making. And you’ll be on the hunt for new and important ideas.

You’ll never be bored again.

Now that you’ve got this eleven-step thingy with gears and belts and steamwhistles running somewhere inside your head, you’ll find that everything is grist for your mill. You’ll find yourself always asking if something is really true or not, and if so, what are the Implications of everything. You’ll be Testing, and making surprising connections, and noticing stuff you never noticed before. You’ll find that nothing is boring because everything fits into the big picture in some way — so there’s something to learn from virtually everything. Someday you’ll find yourself stuck in an airport for three hours, and you’ll suddenly realize that watching how that person goes about mopping the floor tells you tons about what clean might mean. And then you start thinking about clean, and you speculate about what a microscope might tell you about that salad bar over there, and… well, you get the picture.

You will be able to think things through and develop your ideas so that they will be valuable to others.

All of us have mastery at something. We’re really good at fixing things, or playing a game, or teaching children how to draw what they see. And for most of us, that’s about as far as we take our special gifts. We use them, be we only share them with a close circle. When we’ve been using The Genius Machine for awhile (and it’s been using us) we will begin too understand that we now have a way to figure out exactly how our gift works. We’ll be able to take it apart and put it together, refine it, complete it, and best of all, teach others how to do what we do. We will now be able to share our knowledge.

A friend of mine is a Swiss economist, who has been an early test case for The Genius Machine. He started cranking it about six months ago, and he’s already starting to feel the effects. He sent me a note recently saying he realized that the new Distinctions he had seen were driving him crazy, and he knew that he had no choice now but to start his second book.

So you need to be careful when you start using The Genius Machine. If you start turning that crank you could find yourself upside down before too long! And you’ll never be the same.