I disagree with Seth Godin about Genius and Lizard Brain

I'd like to disagree with this statement by Seth Godin in yesterday's blog:

When the lizard brain kicks in and the resistance slows you down, the only correct response is to push back again and again and again with one failure after another. Sooner or later, the lizard will get bored and give up.

Much as I love Seth Godin, and have for many years, I think he's got this one wrong. There's no point and a lot of wasted effort in pushing back at what you call Lizard Brain. Save the calories and let the synapses rest. We're programmed to crash after a high as a way of keeping us out of danger and letting us build up some energy.

Here's what I have concluded over my years of thinking on this subject:

Excitement (caused by inspiration) is half fear and half joy. An idea hits you like lightning. It's fabulous. (I do believe it's definitely, by any definition, a flash of genius, but it's available to everyone.)

First you get high on the joy, then, when you get too high for safety (according to your survival mechanism) and you crash. Then you usually give up. I agree you shouldn't give up, but I see the process and the solution differently.

I see excitement as having 3 stages and no one seems to mention the third. (It's not a return to the excitement.)

Phase One: you're on a real high and when you're high, it's like being in love. When you're in love, you're a genius. You can see, hear, smell, understand what no one else can. That's why no one else understands that your newborn baby the most beautiful baby that has ever existed. You're not crazy. You can actually see details that they miss. And, because you're not in love with their babies, they look ordinary to you. Nature is no fool. She's got survival down pat.

In Phase One I advise all my readers/listeners/audiences to write down each and every detail, not in notes, diagrams or outlines, but in English, in long declarative sentences that explain how you came to each conclusion. You'll need to understand them later.

Phase Two: You got too high. Fear trumps Joy. Your primitive survival mechanisms respond to fear with a great mechanism designed to make you safe: a micro-depression.

You experience it as a crash. And when you crash, you have all the attendant frills of any 'real' depression: you lose energy, you lose interest, and you no longer calculate in action terms, or in the present at all. You feel all knowing about the past and the future. You feel old and wise and start to speak in terms like 'never,' 'always,' and 'how could I have been so blind?' 'It has always been so. It will ever be so. Those who hope are fools." Etc.

That's what some call Lizard Brain. That's where some say you must make yourself become positive again. I strongly advise against that. Fighting nature isn't smart. You, Seth Godin, thankfully, don't ask us to try to rearrange our brains and force positive thoughts.

But you do say to battle this phase. And that's where we disagree again, and most importantly.

At Phase Two of excitement, the crash, I advise everyone to give in. Relax. You feel stupid? Call yourself stupid and despise happy, excited people for not realizing that life sucks. Lay about watching disgusting TV shows and eating crackers in bed. Bathe less.

When you've gotten bored with Phase Two you will move into the most important phase of all. When your energy begins to build up a little, self pity, though enjoyable at first, becomes tiresome. That's when you get up and take a shower, and, if you're like most of us, you try to maintain the micro-depression brand of wisdom so you'll stop getting excited about things.

Fortunately, that never works, but what usually happens instead is that you wait until you get excited about another idea and go through the process over again.

But you're not finished with the genius idea you had in Phase One. Starting to feel normal is actually part of the process:

Phase Three You've gone through two of the three phases of excitement and now it pays off. You hit pay dirt. Phase Three is where you lay out a plan and roll up your sleeves -- without the high, without the crash, but with the clarity and steady energy that makes things happen.

You won't have that energy unless you collapsed when you were supposed to.

Now you can dig up those carefully written, completely understandable notes you wrote in Phase One and read them in sober daylight, without a negative bias, without heart-banging excitement.

Because Phase Three is where all the work actually gets done. It's always been like that: slow and steady. The Genius is gone. the Hopeless One has recovered, and the Intelligent Hard Worker has returned.

And you'll get there sooner if you value the first fabulous insights (aka 'genius insight,' 'inspiration') enough to properly record them and you don't wear yourself out battling Lizard Brain.

My two cents.