"Everyone has a zone of genius, you just have to find it"

IT’S 8.45am, Notre Dame University, South Bend, in my son’s off-campus student house. On waking, I look up at my sister, who’s sitting up in bed and gazing around as if she’s just been told the punchline of a joke she doesn’t understand.

“I forgot where I was for a moment,” she says, “then I looked at the vent and remembered: Josef Fritzl’s dungeon.”

From the bed we tossed a coin for last night, she looks down at me where I lie across three sofa cushions laid end-to-end on the dungeon floor, with my feet in a cupboard: my already extensive experience of student accommodation has quite literally plumbed new depths.

Glancing at my sister’s morning-face it occurs to me that there’s a good chance mine looks worse, what with it being five years older.

We must primp ourselves quickly and go upstairs, where my son and his friends are robing up for their graduation ceremony.

I want my sister to record this on her iPad; my husband will kill me if I return home without evidence.

We primp at top speed, which results in a bad shaving cut on my shin.

I attend to the bleeding and watch while my sister films, for posterity, the sight of four engineering and entrepreneurship scholarship students trying to work out how to turn their gowns — which they’ve put on back-to-front — the right way round. A topic they’d have done well to cover in their curriculum, if the time it takes them is anything to go by.

She also records the following exchange:

Son [in back-to-front gown and mortarboard cap missing a tassle, pointing at the tassle on his housemate Nate’s cap]: “Where’d you find your tassle?”

Nate: “In the front pocket of my gown.”

Son: [trying to find the pocket on the front of his gown, where it isn’t, instead of the back, where it is]: “Oh.”

Nate: “Just because I found mine in my pocket, moron, doesn’t mean you’re gonna find yours in yours.”

Then she films my son finding it on the stairs.

On campus, my sister and I find seats in the stadium where the graduation ceremony has just begun.

After spotting my son in the serried ranks of students below (third row, cap off, fidgeting with tassle) and waving madly at him, we turn our attention to the woman who’s making the commencement speech, which is all about “our zone of genius” and “our zone of competence”.

She says she’s discovered her zone of genius, and my sister rolls her eyes. “Very Field of Dreams,” she whispers and the man beside her looks at her like he’s just licked a lemon, hissing, “Shhh. Some of us would like to listen to the speeches, if you don’t mind.”

My sister falls silent and thinks hard for a minute with a villainous look I know. Then she tells me very, very quietly that when my son goes up to get his certificate, she’s going to do her wolf-whistle — which is more piercing than any I’ve heard — just to get that lemon-look off him again.

The speaker says everyone has a zone of genius, it’s just a matter of finding it.

She assures us all that if she found hers, we can find ours. Her zone of genius is all about helping other people discover what their particular zone of genius is.

She left a stellar academic career to build up a multi-million pound company based entirely on this concept, she says, and ever since, she’s never worked from her zone of competence again. Only her zone of genius.

And to keep herself in the genius-zone, and her company in the lucrative one, she asks herself all sorts of questions on a weekly basis such as: “What would my dreams be times ten?”; “How can I be the exception, not the rule?” and last but not least, “How would it be if I served thousands more people?”

Then she pauses, after which she tells us to ask ourselves this last question right now. We all do as bidded but my sister and I just think we’d be very, very tired.

My sister risks another lemon look. “What’s your zone of genius, sis?” she whispers.

“Applying liquid eyeliner in a moving car,” I say. “What’s yours?” And she gives me a look which has her lifetime of experiences in it.

“Plodding on,” she says with decisive, cheerful resignation. “Plodding on.”