Lighting Fires
Check out the above photograph from the Kenyan town of Iten, just sent to me by Dr. Randy Wilber, a senior sport physiologist at the U.S. Olympic Committee Performance Lab. In it, two elite Kenyan runners trailed by a little kid who’s running to school. It’s a tiny moment, and yet one that helps explain why this relatively small place produces the vast majority of the world’s great runners. As Wilber writes,
…it captures the “passing of the torch” from one generation of great runners to the next. The little boy is serious and working hard to keep in contact. The older runners are holding back just a bit so that the young one will stay relatively close and not get discouraged. They are sending the message, “Yes, you are the next in line. Someday you will be as good as we are. Believe in yourself and grow in confidence.” Please be aware that this is not an isolated image. You see this same “passing of the torch” scene all over the streets and roads near the tiny town of Iten (pop. ~4000), both boys and girls.
Passing the torch is a nice way to put it. It’s the same thing that happens in Brazil in halftime of a futsal (indoor soccer) match, when flocks of four-and five-year-olds zoom around the court, pretending to be Robinho. Or at KIPP schools when inner-city fourth-graders travel to Ivy League colleges to visit KIPP alumni. It’s a simplest of connections; no words are required, no expensive facilities, no “development programs.” Just two dots connected by a powerful idea: you could be them.
Let’s set all the psychology aside, and ask a question: where else can this kind of connection happen — in education, sports, art, in music, business? Where else are the opportunities to create this kind of identity-electricity?
The Talent of Creativity
“Would you like to spend tonight in the throws of passion?”
My older brother Maurice has a talent for creativity. I could list dozens of of examples, but you should just click this: Men_R_Dogs It combines suggestive personal ads (complete with misspellings) and puppy photos. It’s pee-your-pants funny. And he churns out this kind of stuff all the time.
Most of us think of creativity as a kind of conjuring, where, as Webster’s puts it, something new is “brought into existence.” But I’m not so sure that’s right. In fact, I think it’s dead wrong.
My reasoning has to do with my brother and also with the prolific (and, for my money, underrated) writer Stephen King, who delivers some insights into the creative process in his 2001 memoir, On Writing.
King’s opinion: we don’t create ideas; rather we connect them. We make a link between two things that hadn’t been linked before. As he puts it, we unearth a connection, and then, POW!
This idea works to explain King’s immense creative output. In fact, most of his books are fueled by these sorts of combinations. For example: Mysterious Barrier + Quiet Maine Town = Under the Dome; Classic Car + Demon = Christine, High School Cruelty + Telekinesis = Carrie. Of course, there’s a lot more that goes into converting these primitive combinations into works of art, but they are like the uranium core of creativity: the big bang.
The deeper question is, how do we create more of these explosions?
To answer that, let’s look at what those connections really are. They are neural links — connected wires in our brain. Ideas don’t just float in the air — they exist, as electrical circuits. Maurice’s idea is funny because his brain built a connection between the neurons for “Suggestive Personal Ads” and the neurons for “Cute Puppies.” In fact, we could replace the word “creativity” with a new term: “connectivity.” And to maximize creative connectivity, you need to do two very different tasks:
1) gather ideas
2) connect them
For the gathering phase, we need lots of inputs, lots of filtering and categorizing. To be good at this is like being a human vacuum cleaner, hoovering up ideas and funneling them into various memory bins.
For the second phase, we need time and space to let the connections form and grow. It’s what management consultant and author Jim Collins refers to as “the white space” — the area of the day when real thinking happens.
Look closely at any creative person, and you’ll see that they have structured their lives to create acres of white space; Charles Dickens took endless walks through the city; Einstein played violin; Collins unplugs all electronics and goes “into the cave” from 8 a.m. until noon every day. All are good examples of Flaubert’s code: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
We’re living an interesting moment. For gathering ideas, it’s unquestionably richest time in history; we are standing in a torrent of stimulus and ideas. For finding that quiet place to connect those ideas, however, it’s exactly the opposite; white space is scarce and getting scarcer. Which makes it all the more valuable.
(Special thanks to my friend Michael Ruhlman for urging me to read On Writing.)
p.s. We went back to press for the eighth printing today — thanks, everyone!
Greatest Teachers: Who Would You Choose?
If you could gather six of the planet’s best teachers in one place for three days, who would you choose?
Would you pick:
- Rafe Esquith, who teaches Los Angeles inner-city fifth-graders to perform Shakespeare?
- Hans Jensen, the world’s best cello teacher?
- Michael Sandel, whose Harvard class is so life-changing it was just turned into a public-television special?
- How about Idan Ravin, basketball’s Hoops Whisperer, who ignites NBA players to new levels of performance?
It’s not a hypothetical question. Some educators I know are aiming to do just that — to assemble six great teachers from sports, art, music, and math for a three-day workshop. The idea: to create a miniature Florence of master teaching. To explore the deeper parallels between these teachers; to see how they make emotional connections, to see how they work their magic. (Which isn’t really magic, of course, but rather a skill set that can be analyzed, copied, and taught.)
More to come on this — but in the meantime, which teachers would you choose?
The (Hidden) Genius of Editing
Pattern of genius: Dickens's original manuscript
Editing has a bad name.
To many of us, the word evokes fussy red pens, nitpicking, stilted progress. Editing — which we can define as locating mistakes and fixing them — seems in every way to be the precise opposite of genius. After all, geniuses are fluid, perfect. Geniuses nail it the first time — that’s what makes them geniuses, right?
Uh, no.
In fact, when you peel back genius, you usually reveal editing. Lots and lots of editing. Ridiculous amounts of editing. Here are two useful case studies: Charles Dickens and Michael Jackson.
Check out this amazing original manuscript of “A Christmas Carol,” which went online today thanks to the cooperative efforts of the NY Times and the Morgan Library and Museum. It’s a riotous quilt of writing and rewriting — and looks for all the world like an 8th-grader’s term paper.
Of course, the changes are being made at an exceedingly high level — but the thing to recognize here is the pattern of work. Dickens read and re-read it dozens of times, finding fixes both small (changing “spot of mustard” to the more vivid “blot of mustard,” for example) and large (writing, then crossing out, a long paragraph comparing Scrooge’s character to Shakespeare’s Hamlet).
(See more examples of Dickens’s editing here. And George Orwell’s spectacularly mashed-up first draft of 1984 here. And Bruce Springsteen’s six-month-long editing of the song “Born to Run” here. All proving why many writers hide their first drafts.)
It’s weird to think of writing a sentence as a neural circuit — as a chain of wires inside Dickens’s mind — but that’s precisely what it is. And in his editing, Dickens is firing those circuits, noting the mistakes, fixing the mistakes, then firing them again and again (and again) to gradually hone it into a smooth, natural-seeming result.
Michael Jackson, who was famous in the music industry for his work ethic, did the same thing with his dancing. Here is his tap-dance instructor, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, on what it was like to work with Jackson.
“He was a perfectionist and in four hours we might work four bars [about one song 15 seconds]. He would not move on until he was completely comfortable with one movement. That way he took the material in and made it a part of himself. He polished it before he moved on. I saw the passion in his work, very intense.”
Think about that: Four hours of work on one song 15 seconds’ worth of moves.
As so often with the truth, there’s a paradox here: the final performance is designed to create the illusion of naturalness and fluency — of genius — which distances observers from the deeper force that truly created it: the humbler but still powerful force of a craftsman at work.
Thanksgiving
Mozgala at work
Back when I was reporting the book I went to see neurologist George Bartzokis of UCLA. We were sitting in his tiny office, talking about myelin and how the brain can learn new behaviors, and Bartzokis said something that got my attention.
He said, “In a most basic sense, myelin is hope.”
Myelin is hope, I remember thinking. Could that possibly sound any more cornball?
I’ve found myself thinking about his words more than a few times — especially while reading Neil Genzlinger’s remarkable story in today’s Times.
It’s about a man named Gregg Mozgala who, with the help of a master teacher, learned to dance. The twist: Mozgala suffers from cerebral palsy, where the brain can’t send the right signals to the muscles. Until a few months ago, he couldn’t walk normally. Now? (Hit the link and check out the video for the proof.)
Before, [Mozgala's] gait was extreme enough that it would draw stares on the street. Now, when he is fully concentrating, a passer-by might have to look twice to realize he has a disability at all.
How? That’s the interesting part. It’s a combination of forces — the same forces that build any new circuitry.
First, a relationship with a master coach, Tamar Rogoff, a dance instructor who purposely didn’t read up on cerebral palsy before starting her work. “That way I didn’t have any ideas about what he could and couldn’t do,” she said.
Second, they built new circuits (as opposed to fixing old circuits). This involved spending (a lot of) time on the edge of Mazgola’s ability.
They began doing intensive one-on-one sessions they call body work, Ms. Rogoff using her knowledge of the body and dance-training techniques to help Mr. Mozgala “find” individual bones, muscles and tendons that he had had no command of before.
They started at the top and worked down — sternum, sacrum, knees — with Mr. Mozgala’s body and brain opening paths of communication that had not existed.
“There’s a lot of howling, screaming, crying, sweating,” Ms. Rogoff said. But “we often have these huge eureka moments.”
I’m sure this could (and might well be) made into some cornball Hollywood movie. The screenplay practically writes itself — the hopeless angry man (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the understanding teacher (Cate Blanchett), and a skeptical head of the dance company (Judi Dench) — toss in a smoldering romance, a sweat-dappled “Eye of the Tiger” training scene, a triumphal Carnegie Hall performance.
But if they do make a movie, I hope they find a way to zoom in on the real forces that made a difference: the ability all human brains have to build new connections; to transform deep practice into fast, fluent circuits.
(And the Oscar goes to… Neuroplasticity!)
Good Reads, Links, Tunes
Tis the season and all, so here are a few things I’ve been enjoying lately, in no particular order:
- Manhood for Amateurs, by Michael Chabon: Okay, I’m a huge Chabon fan and would probably love anything he scribbled, but this collection of nonfiction essays is uniquely great for its insights into parenting, kid freedom, and the cultural power of Wacky-Packs.
- The Weepies: My friend Dave got me into this Brooklyn singing/songwriting duo during a long drive to Denali National Park. We listened to them for six hours — and never got tired of it.
- How Lincoln Learned to Read, by Daniel Wolff: What were the educations of great talents really like? By looking closely at 12 greats (Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, Sojourner Truth, Rachel Carson, even Elvis Presley), Wolff makes you want to jerk your kids out of school and apprentice them into print-shops, music studios, political groups. (Well, for a split-second, anyway.)
- Game Six, by Mark Frost: A you-are-there recreation of my all-time favorite baseball game: the Cincinnati Reds versus Boston Red Sox in the 1975 World Series, aka the Carlton Fisk Home Run Game. I remember watching this game as a ten-year-old; it made me love baseball.
- Angle of Reflection: Michael Reddick’s terrific blog in which he documents his audacious attempt to become a professional pool player in two years. I like it partly because he’s putting the ideas of The Talent Code directly to use; but mostly because of his sharp analysis and good storytelling.
- The Lucksmiths: Australian indie pop band (who just apparently broke up). They’re funny, whip-smart, and kinda twee — but hey, is it so wrong to like twee?
Tina Fey’s Transformation
Check out this video of Tina Fey in her early days, back when she was growing her skills doing improv at Chicago’s Second City. A few things leap out:
- Young Tina’s not all that funny.
- Young Tina takes LOTS of risks (as evidenced by the sketch).
- Young Tina sees the direct connection between taking smart risks and getting better. Listen to her at the 1:45 mark: “There’s a huge amount of risk but there’s a really fun freefall once you’ve done it a bunch of times and had it go really, really poorly. There is a freedom in that freefall that is kind of like skydiving, and that’s when you find something interesting.”
Once you’ve done it a bunch of times and had it go really, really poorly.
We often talk about the fearlessness of great comics (and athletes, and writers), but we frequently overlook the fact that it’s a learned fearlessness. They become fearless slowly, by making mistakes, learning from them, developing fast, fluent neural circuits.
For Fey, the circuits are definitely firing:
The Underrated Benefits of Faking
As kids, we do it all the time: we pretend we’re the quarterback with one second left in a tied Super Bowl, or we’re about to walk onstage with the Rolling Stones, or (if you grow up in Alaska like I did), we’re mushing our dogteam toward an Iditarod victory. We invent fabulously detailed, pressurized make-believe situations, then see if we can deliver.
I see a lot of top performers doing precisely the same thing. They create systems where they create a convincingly fake world where they can crank up the pressure over and over. A few examples:
- From comedy: Mel Brooks’s famous “2,000-Year-Old Man” routine (which became one of the greatest comedy albums of all time) began in the fifties as a dare. Brooks would go to dinner parties with his friend Carl Reiner, and Reiner would introduce Brooks (who nobody recognized at the time) as a world-famous alligator-wrestling champion, or a self-trained Swedish heart surgeon — and Brooks would be forced to play along, improvising a comic character out of thin air.
- From music: Skye Carman, who teaches at Meadowmount Music School, recommends that students prepare for performances by replicating every condition of the performance — the dress clothes, the chair, the introduction.
- From sports: The three-time Super Bowl champion New England Patriots practice game situations more than any other team in the league, adding the ticking clock, crowd noise and, if necessary, a watered-down field to replicate game conditions.
The usual explanation for the effectiveness of these strategies goes like this: fake pressure works because we get familiar with real pressure, and thus at some level inured to it.
This is basically true. But the deeper question to ask is this: what is this familiarity made of? Why does fakery — this transparent, imaginative baloney that we objectively know is utterly untrue — work so well?
And the answer, I think, has to do with two facts: 1) we’re suggestible beings; 2) emotion — like every other skill — is a neural circuit, a connection of wires that can be forged, honed, and deeply practiced.
We don’t instinctively think of emotions as practice-able skill, but there’s lots of interesting evidence that they are, most notably the work of Dr. Albert Ellis and cognitive-behavioral psychology, where emotions are treated as if they were muscles. The fakery works because it is the equivalent of a workout in which we can fire our emotional circuits over and over, and thus learn to control them better.
Thinking about this reminds me of the Shyness Clinic I visited for the book, a place where therapists were exceptionally imaginative about creating pressurized practice situations for their clients. One of their drills: to have the client walk into a grocery store alone, pick up a watermelon, and purposely drop it on the floor. It makes a big cracking, squishy noise, like a giant egg. People stare… clerks scurry… it’s completely mortifying.
It also works like a charm.
Geek Power: How Peyton Manning is Like Warren Buffett
Last night, with four minutes left and his team trailing by 13 points, Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning did something amazing: he led the Indianapolis Colts to an improbable win, 35-34.
Warren Buffett had a pretty good week too, purchasing Burlington Northern Railroad for $34 billion.
All in all, it’s a fine time to ask a simple question: what do these two have in common? The answer, I think, starts with two facts.
- Football and investing are about constructing systems: specialized, high-speed, adaptive organizations that can respond to adversity and opportunity.
- Manning and Buffett are geeks.
I think these two facts are related. I’d like to make the case that Peyton Manning is the Warren Buffett of quarterbacks (or is Warren Buffett the Peyton Manning of investors?) Both are successful because they build their lives around eccentric-seeming routines, which seem hopelessly geeky from the outside. But the closer you get, the more the truth is revealed: what appears to be geeky from the outside is in fact good strategy for building a reliable high-speed neural circuit.
Let’s be clear: there are many different species of geek. Among them:
First, there are Data-Set Geeks: memorizers of vast quantities of obscure information (Star Wars characters, Yo La Tengo lyrics) who use their knowledge to define and enhance their social status.
Second, there are Process Geeks: people who are utterly enraptured by a particular, usually repetitive task (Rubic’s Cube, novel writing) and who cannot stop thinking about it. Their geekdom isn’t outwardly expressed; it’s directed internally, and tends to show itself in telltale eccentricities.
Then there are Geeks Who Aren’t Really Geeks: people who, in this age of Steve Jobs, pretend to be obsessed with some data set or process, but who in fact lack the true signifier of geekdom: the willingness to be uncool.
Manning and Buffett are both the second kind of geek. They are hopelessly in love with process. They are willing to be uncool. What’s more, over the years they’ve both developed a template to produce high performance.
Manning is beyond meticulous when it comes to the basics of his job, carrying a notebook where he records mistakes and fixes, not just for himself but for the team. He is so addicted to his practice routine that he’ll explain it in jaw-dropping detail to ten-year-olds without noticing they can barely grip the football. He is unique among quarterbacks for the amount of time he spends working with receivers, starting the moment they are drafted (Last year, Manning sent rookies a text message the day after the draft: “Meet me at the facility at 8 a.m. tomorrow. Warmed up. Ready to go.”)
It’s the same ferocious attention Buffett brings to his investment playbook; to his dictum of “turning pages;” i.e. doing the homework, eschewing the get-rich-quick idea, to patiently unearth value that will grow over time. As Buffett put it, “When I got out of school, I turned every page in Moody’s 10,000-some pages twice, looking for companies.”
Of course, there are many other sound reasons behind their success. Both Buffett and Manning had enviably early starts toward their 10,000 hours (Buffett bought his first stock at 11 years old; Manning was born into NFL quarterbacking royalty–though as this clip shows, was hardly an all-star from the start). Both had good models and mentors, and no shortage of opportunities. More important, both of their identities are so wrapped up in their jobs that they radiate the feeling that if the money and fame suddenly were to evaporate, they would continue doing it for free.
The point I’d like to make is that in our culture we tend to underrate Process Geeks. We tend to see Buffett and Manning’s eccentricities as “colorful” or “entertaining,” when in fact those traits reside at the very core of their abilities, because they help them build and maintain the neural circuitry to make high-speed, accurate decisions.
When one questioner recently asked Buffett how he was able to decide on investments so quickly, he said, ”Well, that’s 50 years of preparation and five (minutes) of decision making.”
Peyton Manning couldn’t have said it better himself.
Never Mind the Book!
This just in: apparently some talents are natural-born.
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