How to be a genius .. hmmm

An excellent article from New Scientist about how great people actually become great. The nice thing about it is that its not just opinion. It quotes various research studies and analysis of various super-achievers in arts, athletics, science, thus being more of an investigative piece than huff puff.

• It highlights the common dilemma many people face when they enter their twenties: they do very well in school, get great marks, teachers pamper them and they get the mindset that rising to the top is a buoyant process. Indeed in school and college, that much effort may not be required to rise to the top, if you do have exceptional IQ or the genes. However later on in life, things suddenly seem no longer so easy…ppl who one might not have exceptional IQs or innate talents rise to amazing heights whereas those with buoyant mindset are left wonderin why they aren’t going up anymore. This article does a great job of distinguishing this mindet from the mindset of the genius: reasonably smart, conducive environment, great mentors, and persistent doggone practice.
• A new quote for the geniuses: “1 per cent inspiration, 29 per cent good instruction and encouragement, and 70 per cent perspiration.”
• The article mentions 4 crucial aspects of high achievers:
  • a person of good intelligence
  • have very supportive environments
  • almost always have important mentors
  • And the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort
• “people have proven again and again that most people can do something extraordinary if they’re willing to put in the exercise. On the other hand, it’s a bit overwhelming to look at what these people have to do. They generally invest about five times as much time and effort to become great as an accomplished amateur does to become competent. It’s not something everyone’s up for.”
• The concept of “inherent genius” is a myth
• Musicians have an old joke about this: How do you get to Carnegie Hall from here? Practise.
• A sober look at any field shows that the top performers are rarely more gifted than the also-rans, but they almost invariably outwork them. This doesn’t mean that some people aren’t more athletic or smarter than others. The elite are elite partly because they have some genetic gifts – for learning and hand-eye coordination, for instance – but the very best rise because they take great pains to maximise that gift.
• Decade of dedication: This has led scholars of elite performance to speak of a 10-year rule: it seems you have to put in at least a decade of focused work to master something and bring greatness within reach.

The Role of environment

• Bloom, in fact, came to see great talent as less an individual trait than a creation of environment and encouragement. “We were looking for exceptional kids,” he said, “and what we found were exceptional conditions.”
• Rather, they were encouraged as children in a general way to explore and learn, then supported in more focused ways as they began to develop an area they particularly liked.
• Another retrospective study, of leading scientists, similarly found that most came from homes where learning was revered for its own sake.

Role of Mentors

• Finally, most retrospective studies, including Bloom’s, have found that almost all high achievers were blessed with at least one crucial mentor as they neared maturity.

The Process of becoming an expert

• So what do elite performers attain through all that deliberate practice and sensitive mentoring? What makes a genius? The crème de la crème appear to develop several important cognitive skills.
• The first, called “chunking”, is the ability to group details and concepts into easily remembered patterns. The article provides several interesting chess based examples.
• We all exercise such clustering skills when we read. Learning to read means coming to recognise chunks of letters as words, then chunks of words as phrases and sentences, and – at a deeper level – sentences and paragraphs as components of a work’s larger meaning. This chunking puts individual words into logical, recallable contexts. As a result, we’ll remember almost all of a logical 20-word sentence and only four to seven words from the same 20 words ordered randomly.
• Eric Kandel of Columbia University in New York, who won a Nobel prize in 2000 for discovering much of the neural basis of memory and learning, has shown that both the number and strength of the nerve connections associated with a memory or skill increase in proportion to how often and how emphatically the lesson is repeated.
• So focused study and practice literally build the neural networks of expertise. Genetics may allow one person to build synapses faster than another, but either way the lesson must still be learned. Genius must be built

Nature vs Nurture

• What really intrigued me in the article is the blurring the line between nurture vs nature. This quote is amazing: “What we call talent or genius illustrates vividly what the past 25 years have taught us about gene expression - that our genetic potentials are activated and realised only through environment and experience. Natural buoyancy merely gets you off the bottom. You rise to the top by pumping yourself up”

So what is genius ?

Certainly a clear-eyed analysis shows that “genius” is really a set of exceptional skills cultivated through disciplined study. We should probably shelve the notion of genius as an innate, almost irrepressible gift and speak instead of expertise, talent or even greatness – terms that hint at the work underlying supreme accomplishment.

But as something to believe in, genius is not looking so smart. You want to play the big stage, you got to put in the time.

Some great examples from the article

• Mozart was playing the violin at 3 years of age and received expert, focused instruction from the start. He was precocious, writing symphonies at age 7, but he didn’t produce the work that made him a giant until his teens.
• The same is true for Tiger Woods. He seems magical on the golf course, but he was swinging a golf club before he could walk, got great instruction and practised constantly from boyhood, and even today outworks all his rivals. His genius has been laboriously constructed.
• Pete Sampras didn’t possess more talent than Andre Agassi, but he won 14 grand slams to Agassi’s eight because he worked harder and more steadily.
• And as cellist Yo-Yo Ma once said, the most proficient and renowned musicians are not necessarily those who outshone everyone as youths, but rather those who had “fire in the belly”.
• In a 1985 study of 120 elite athletes, performers, artists, biochemists and mathematicians led by University of Chicago psychologist Benjamin Bloom, a giant of the field who died in 1999. Every single person in the study took at least a decade of hard study or practice to achieve international recognition. Olympic swimmers trained for an average of 15 years before making the team; the best concert pianists took 15 years to earn international recognition. Top researchers, sculptors and mathematicians put in similar amounts of time.