Today I’m proud to announce the brand new website for my upcoming book, Practical Genius: The Real Smarts You Need to Get Your Talents and Passions Working for YOU (in stores October 11th). Please check it out at www.PracticalGenius.com.

There you can:

• Find out more about the book
• Pre-order your copy today
• Share your personal insights and comments
• Join the movement
• Follow me on Twitter
• Join me on Facebook
• Connect with me on LinkedIn

Lastly, I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to—please do send me an e-mail when you get a chance.

All the best,
Gina

www.PracticalGenius.com

I don’t know how it happened, but I recently lost my camera on my return from a family vacation to Puerto Rico. I probably took a hundred pictures on that trip and I have literally been sick to my stomach, as you can imagine, over this loss. I smiled this morning, though, when I came across this photo I had taken on my iPhone.

As I mentally swam once again across the lanes of this great pool, I realized it’s not about the photo but rather about the memory of this moment—how it felt and smelled and sounded—that really matters.

This is a short but important reminder to cherish your summer experiences. Keep them alive in your memory and use them to fuel your genius.

Writing from a balcony in El Condado, San Juan, Puerto Rico that overlooks the Atlantic Ocean, I realize the trick to making the best out of your summer is to design it your way.

If you’ re racing to work this morning, daydreaming about a much-needed vacation or wondering if you’ll ever be able use the summer hours afforded to you by your employer, keep reading. Here are three summer vacation design tips for you to chew on:

Summer Design Tip #1
Don’t take time off, create time off. Whether you’re a boot-strapping entrepreneur like me or a corporate professional who doesn’t dare take time off because your projects will suffer, you are hurting yourself by not creating the time to reboot. Remember, we all have to fuel our genius and our colleagues, clients, partners, and bosses benefit from us returning with a full tank of experiences, insights, and new stories versus being someone who is running on empty throughout the summer season.

Summer Design Tip #2
Genius travels on a budget. To afford this family vacation, I decided to stay with family for two days and then found a Hilton promotion to pay for three nights and get a fourth night for free. This enabled me to take a week-long vacation for the cost of three nights. Get creative with your budget. Do your research, ask friends, subscribe to a few travel discount newsletters, and take advantage of summer promotions. Believe me, they can save you a heck of a lot of money. Hey, budget isn’t a four-letter word, you know!

Summer Design Tip #3
Don’t drink it away. When you make the time to fuel your genius with a mini-vacation, use the precious time in a healthy state versus an intoxicated one. If you have to have that morning mimosa or rum runner, have one instead of three. Experience your vacation in real time, fully present and able to take in every breeze, sound, flavor, and color in an active state of mind. Alcohol numbs your senses to a degree and although you may think it adds to your experience it actually reduces it. Instead of running up a monster bar tab on your vacation, try my “one drink rule.” Let yourself have one drink per day, any drink you like. For example, it could be one mojito on Monday, one glass of wine with dinner on Tuesday, one beer by the pool on Wednesday and so on. Try it, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how moderation enhances your experience.

You are the designer and curator of your life. Design wisely this summer and don’t let my favorite season go to waste.

If you are a High Achiever playing it safe, this one’s for you:

Many High Achievers play it safe after achieving a certain amount of success because they have come to fear failure and don’t want to mess with their status, credibility, or comfy identity. If this sounds like you—highly motivated, driven to get results but now shying away from high risk—you better think again. The concept of the Paradox of Excellence suggests that you have to make mistakes, experience setbacks, and demonstrate vulnerability right along with your success and achievement in order to truly sustain excellence.

Here are four recommendations from the article to help you embrace the Paradox of Excellence:

Put the past behind you. If you are caught up with past failures and can’t move beyond them, remember to shift the way you view any painful interaction and begin right away to put the past behind you.

Use your support network. High Achievers are independent and don’t use their networks as well as they should. Engage the Yodas, ambassadors, and fat brains in your network and seek out candid feedback. Praise alone in life is truly is a waste of learning time. Don’t be dismissive and garner all kinds of feedback from your support network whenever you can.

Become vulnerable. This is my favorite piece of Thomas and Sara’s advice: If you have “bitten off more than you can chew” on a project, a commitment, or even with your volunteer work, let it be known. Admit when you have made a wrong decision, out your anxieties, and realize that vulnerability demonstrates honesty and is truly liberating.

Focus on the long term. There is no way you will ever achieve long-term greatness without many short-term risks.  Remember that turtle steps many times win the race. Focus on the long-term goals and realize there will always be setbacks along the way but as long as you keep your eye on the long term, you will continue to achieve.

The bottom line is this:
“Moving your A game to a new level or in a new direction takes humility, it takes practice, and it takes patience. But it’s a necessary step on the road to doing the right thing well.”
—Thomas and Sara DeLong, “The Paradox of Excellence,” Harvard Business Review, June, 2011

Scratch the flowers, the baskets of soap and hand lotion, the potted plants. Let’s bring on the real love for all the working moms who work their hearts and butts off 365 days a year nurturing their two greatest passions—their life’s work and their children.

My gift to you this Mother’s Day Weekend is a completely inappropriate but dead-on reality check on motherhood, work, and balance.  (And believe me, I know a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t—I am running a business, launching my first book this fall, raising a 5-year-old boy, and cook dinner every night for my family!)

Here’s the deal with balance: It’s unattainable.  So instead of engaging in the tug of war battle between your work or your family, prioritize both side by side.

What does this look like? It may mean bringing your child with you on a business trip. It may mean having a conference call from your car as you drive to soccer practice. And it may mean your husband quitting his job to support yours and the raising of your children.

At-home dads are on the rise and this is a revolutionary opportunity for many families. Sometimes it’s just the right thing, for the mom to wear the fabulous pants and bring the home the bacon, while our husbands lead the nurturing and daily care of our children.  Believe me, this can be the perfect answer to the balance question.

A year ago this month, my husband left his career to support my dream of writing a book and to focus on caring for our son. Because of that radical decision, life as we knew it changed dramatically for the better. At first it was scary and it took some getting used to, both emotionally and financially, but the truth is, my husband and I grew closer, my son now gets more of both of us, and we are finally the team we were meant to be, tackling everything together.

The greatest lesson I’ve learned since embracing the truth that I love my work as much as I love my son is that there’s nothing wrong with this truth. I conduct my life as a mother and a wife in a non-traditional way and that’s why it works. When you decide to be the designer of your life and its destiny, everything fits like a good Hong Kong-tailored suit.

If you haven’t’ taken control of the design of your life as a mother, get over your fear and have a candid conversation with yourself.  The goal is to embrace your optimum motherhood style—whatever that may be. This weekend take the opportunity to reflect on and tweak your approach to motherhood, to commit to making it what you really want it to be. Let go of striving for “balance;” instead, design motherhood to suit you.

This is dedicated to all the mothers out there and to the amazing men who love them.

Last night, I set out with the same formula, made a great meal, got the playlist of music together, and set the mood lighting just right for the evening’s gathering.  The only difference was that our guests were three young guys between the ages of 23 and 31 who were crashing at my place before embarking on a conference at sea for young entrepreneurs called Summit Series <http://summitseries.com/>  (it’s basically the Davos conference for young people). These young people are a few of what I call the Fat Brains in my life—the young smart explorers who remind me every day how much there is to learn and do if we want to live our lives all the way to the edges.

Let me tell you, last night I experienced one of those moments where you step back and look upon the scene and think out loud to yourself, “Is this really happening?” We dug deep into topics ranging from entrepreneurship, body hair, galactic travel, emotional intelligence, and “The Price is Right.” And the highlight for me was spending hours discussing Brain Computing Interface (BCI) while we played with Emotiv’s EPOC <http://www.emotiv.com/corporate/media.php>, a revolutionary mind-reading headset.

I happened to have met the founder of Emotiv, TanLe, at the TEDGobal Conference in Oxford last summer and I have been a huge fan for the potential of the device. But I had never had the opportunity to try it and last night I got to play with it extensively. Discussing and debating the whole world of possibility this extraordinary device represented with these smart, nimble-minded, funny, colorful, big-hearted Fat Brains. And all this happened outside with laptops and candlelight under an avocado tree. Now that’s genius!

I could not believe this was my Wednesday night. Now for the lucky techies reading this post, yes, maybe this is every Wednesday night for you. But that’s just not what Wednesday night usually looks like for me and I was so grateful to have them in my home for this unique, amazing, glowing moment. I have long been a vocal advocate of having people in your tribe who are half your age, as a way of cross-seeding knowledge and exploration and energy across the generations. Now I’m challenging every Baby Boomer reading this to open your home to guests half your age for a real adventure in learning and growing.

Think about it:  What kind of person travels from New York to Miami with a mind-reading headset in his suitcase? Only a determined, full-out Fat Brain who curates his life’s experiences the way a master works on a masterpiece.

This post is dedicated to the hundreds of Fat Brains heading out to the Summit Series. Have fun, play hard and come back with inspirational tales of your intellectual excavations!