• Guided meditation
  • What was your original face before you were born?
  • A Zen koan sometimes used to guide contemplation of one's ancestry

Most of this is material I've seen or heard in other forms in the past. It's relatively well reviewed and summarized here though, but it's incredibly dense to try to pull out, unpack and actually use if one were coming to it as a something new.

3 Productivity hacks

• Zen Meditation (Zen Mind, Beginners Mind by Shunryū Suzuki
• Research Process -- Annotations and notes, notecards
• Rigorous exercise routine -- plateau effect

The Zen meditation hack sounds much in the line of advice to often get away from what you're studing/researching and to let the ideas stew for a bit before coming back to them. It's the same principle as going for walks frequently heard from folks or being a flâneur. (cross reference Nassim Nicholas Taleb et al.) The other version of this that's similar are the diffuse modes of learning (compared with focused modes) described in learning theory. (Examples in work of Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski in https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

I've generally come to the idea that genius doesn't exist myself. Most of it distills down to use of tools like commonplace books.

Perhaps worth looking into some of the following to see what, if anything, is different than prior version of the commonplace book tradition:

The Ryan Holiday Notecard System @Intermittent Diversion - https://youtu.be/QoFZQOJ8aA0

Article On Notecard System [1] https://medium.com/thrive-global/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read-4f48a82371b1 [2] https://www.writingroutines.com/notecard-system-ryan-holiday/ [3] https://www.gallaudet.edu/tutorial-and-instructional-programs/english-center/the-process-and-type-of-writing/pre-writing-writing-and-revising/the-note-card-system/