You know how we do.
A few years back, you know during my formative late high school teenage/4 year college dwelling years I didn't like calling myself smart, or hearing that I was smart for that matter. I was quick to point out that it was less a matter of smarts for me, and more about how my "stong work ethic" kept me ahead, alert, and on my toes. I sough comfort in my oft-repeated tale of trying to "keep up with Joneses" academically by actually you know, reading, studying, and taking it all in, on my own accord, to a beat that worked for me, til I got it, mastered it, and could take it out to the streets in the form of a few sentences here and there during conversations with my peers or inside the classroom. Yeah, being smart had nothing to do with it. It was the ethic. No combination of the two. All you had to do was put in a little work, and you'd get it, it'll come to you. And then, it's smooth sailing, you got it! That's what I told myself. That's how it went down. And that's all I could think about, when I started to read this:
"Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness — Dante, Mozart, Einstein — whose talents far exceeded normal comprehension, who had an other-worldly access to transcendent truth, and who are best approached with reverential awe...
...What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.
The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft...
...The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance."
Oh? Word.
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