When I was growing up, a lot of people told me that I was smart. As well intentioned and complimentary as this may have been, it wasn’t helpful. Being young and immature, I hadn’t reached a point where I was ready to question the implications of thinking one’s self more intelligent than the average. For the record, I don’t really believe that I’m any smarter than most people, and I don’t say that just to be humble.
The two most important things I’ve learned so far in life are the following: 1) I should never miss a good opportunity to keep my mouth shut, and 2) all I know is that I know nothing (thanks, Socrates). But once again, in my youth I hadn’t come across these gems of wisdom just yet, and I was inclined to believe that I was smart and I wasn’t afraid to open my mouth to let everybody know.
One of the long-term consequences of this early behaviour is a lifelong problem with developing good work habits. We all make our own universe; when people told me that I was smart, I chose to interpret that to mean that I didn’t need to work as hard as everybody else to make it through school. I slacked off and rarely studied. It’s true that I didn’t find high school to be particularly challenging, but that’s because I chose not to challenge myself. I did the minimum work required to pass in most cases. If I was really smart like some people said, I would have realized that the intelligent choice would have been to apply myself even more than everybody else and elevate my understanding to the next level instead of being arrogant and ignorant.
It’s been a decade since I started high school, so with the benefit of hindsight, I’m a lot better at catching myself now before I slip in to self-destructive patterns of behaviour that stem from thinking that I don’t need to study to understand. One of my least favourite things to hear is that I’m successful because I’m “smart.”
As a father, I’m proud of my son and I know that he’s a smart boy, but I also know that I won’t be doing him any favours by telling him that all the time. I think that it’s important to caveat that sort of compliment with the admonition that intelligence is never a predictor of success. It’s a grave error to draw a causal link between smarts and success when there a tenuous correlation at best. Nobody who achieves true mastery of any pursuit has ever done so by virtue of their intelligence alone. It’s the same idea that makes people think that some individuals are “naturally talented.”
There’s no question in my mind that everyone’s brain comes out wired differently. Some people will already have a neural structure that reinforces learning in certain areas while struggling with it in others. That’s why there are a lot of different learning styles - auditory, visual, tactile, etc. The same concept holds true for things like math and science, musical ability, artistic ability and other talents as well. But like intelligence, natural talent is a poor predictor of actual mastery of that art form. To draw an example from my own life, I’ve been playing music on a few different instruments for most of my life, but if you sat me down with a piece of sheet music that I hadn’t seen before, I would butcher it for my first several attempts. I definitely have a natural inclination towards playing music and learning instruments, but I haven’t practiced the fundamental theories and basic techniques with any sort of rigor or discipline for several years, so I’m not actually very good at any of them.
We’ve all watched, awestruck and perhaps a bit jealous, as some tremendously talented individual or group presents their craft. Less apparent than, say, the fantastic musical performance unfolding before our eyes is the process that allowed it to take place. Namely, the thousands of hours that were invested in study, practice, writing and arranging. It’s easy to forget about the process or initiative that brought a talent to life.
*If you chanced upon a talented graffiti artist’s notebook, you would see the process that led to the bold experiment with letters on a wall. The chosen tag, now executed with speed and precision, would have been repeated hundreds of times until the artist was confident in his handstyle. The artist would have attempted, set aside, and developed letters and forms over thousands of iterations before they could be understood and duplicated.
If you were listening when a drummer executed a stylish fill, you heard the end result of perhaps thousands of hours of practice. The accents and the patterns in the interplay between the hands and the feet may have been composed in a very careful and deliberate attempt. They may have emerged from a moment of musical serendipity when they played what felt right and it came out golden. Either way, the drummer had to recognize how the appropriate application of certain rudiments leads to a certain feel and which ones lend themselves to particular styles of music.
This thread will be familiar with anybody who practices to develop a talent. It takes a basic manoeuvre, a rudiment, that is practiced until it becomes instinctive. Then the artist (or scholar, or teacher, etc) can call it up and execute it with speed and precision and deft skill.
It makes me sad when people say that they’re not smart or talented enough to learn how to do something. When confronted with a high-level presentation of skill, it can be extremely intimidating - frustrating, even - for a novice. But what is being performed is simply a higher order presentation of the fundamentals. The basic ingredients are simple and logical and anyone can learn them. Math, music, art, writing - it’s all there for everybody who’s willing to put in the work.
The two most important things I’ve learned so far in life are the following: 1) I should never miss a good opportunity to keep my mouth shut, and 2) all I know is that I know nothing (thanks, Socrates). But once again, in my youth I hadn’t come across these gems of wisdom just yet, and I was inclined to believe that I was smart and I wasn’t afraid to open my mouth to let everybody know.
One of the long-term consequences of this early behaviour is a lifelong problem with developing good work habits. We all make our own universe; when people told me that I was smart, I chose to interpret that to mean that I didn’t need to work as hard as everybody else to make it through school. I slacked off and rarely studied. It’s true that I didn’t find high school to be particularly challenging, but that’s because I chose not to challenge myself. I did the minimum work required to pass in most cases. If I was really smart like some people said, I would have realized that the intelligent choice would have been to apply myself even more than everybody else and elevate my understanding to the next level instead of being arrogant and ignorant.
It’s been a decade since I started high school, so with the benefit of hindsight, I’m a lot better at catching myself now before I slip in to self-destructive patterns of behaviour that stem from thinking that I don’t need to study to understand. One of my least favourite things to hear is that I’m successful because I’m “smart.”
As a father, I’m proud of my son and I know that he’s a smart boy, but I also know that I won’t be doing him any favours by telling him that all the time. I think that it’s important to caveat that sort of compliment with the admonition that intelligence is never a predictor of success. It’s a grave error to draw a causal link between smarts and success when there a tenuous correlation at best. Nobody who achieves true mastery of any pursuit has ever done so by virtue of their intelligence alone. It’s the same idea that makes people think that some individuals are “naturally talented.”
There’s no question in my mind that everyone’s brain comes out wired differently. Some people will already have a neural structure that reinforces learning in certain areas while struggling with it in others. That’s why there are a lot of different learning styles - auditory, visual, tactile, etc. The same concept holds true for things like math and science, musical ability, artistic ability and other talents as well. But like intelligence, natural talent is a poor predictor of actual mastery of that art form. To draw an example from my own life, I’ve been playing music on a few different instruments for most of my life, but if you sat me down with a piece of sheet music that I hadn’t seen before, I would butcher it for my first several attempts. I definitely have a natural inclination towards playing music and learning instruments, but I haven’t practiced the fundamental theories and basic techniques with any sort of rigor or discipline for several years, so I’m not actually very good at any of them.
We’ve all watched, awestruck and perhaps a bit jealous, as some tremendously talented individual or group presents their craft. Less apparent than, say, the fantastic musical performance unfolding before our eyes is the process that allowed it to take place. Namely, the thousands of hours that were invested in study, practice, writing and arranging. It’s easy to forget about the process or initiative that brought a talent to life.
*If you chanced upon a talented graffiti artist’s notebook, you would see the process that led to the bold experiment with letters on a wall. The chosen tag, now executed with speed and precision, would have been repeated hundreds of times until the artist was confident in his handstyle. The artist would have attempted, set aside, and developed letters and forms over thousands of iterations before they could be understood and duplicated.
If you were listening when a drummer executed a stylish fill, you heard the end result of perhaps thousands of hours of practice. The accents and the patterns in the interplay between the hands and the feet may have been composed in a very careful and deliberate attempt. They may have emerged from a moment of musical serendipity when they played what felt right and it came out golden. Either way, the drummer had to recognize how the appropriate application of certain rudiments leads to a certain feel and which ones lend themselves to particular styles of music.
This thread will be familiar with anybody who practices to develop a talent. It takes a basic manoeuvre, a rudiment, that is practiced until it becomes instinctive. Then the artist (or scholar, or teacher, etc) can call it up and execute it with speed and precision and deft skill.
It makes me sad when people say that they’re not smart or talented enough to learn how to do something. When confronted with a high-level presentation of skill, it can be extremely intimidating - frustrating, even - for a novice. But what is being performed is simply a higher order presentation of the fundamentals. The basic ingredients are simple and logical and anyone can learn them. Math, music, art, writing - it’s all there for everybody who’s willing to put in the work.
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*Big shout out to my good friend, Adrian, who's been putting in work for years and is now seeing the fruits of his labour. Check out his blog: http://ajalouden.blogspot.com
Yo John props on another great post - so far they've usually left me self-relfective and then motivated, in that order, and this, good sir, is not an exception. 'Nuff thanks for the shoutout too!
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