This link has been bookmarked by 71 people . It was first bookmarked on 14 Nov 2006, by Brendan M.
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12 May 08
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It seems the ability we're so fond of calling talent or even genius arises not from innate gifts but from an interplay of fair (but not extraordinary) natural ability, quality instruction, and a mountain of work.
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some critical things line up so that a person of good intelligence can put in the sustained, focused effort it takes to achieve extraordinary mastery.
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very supportive environments, and they almost always have important mentors.
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incredible investment of effort.
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They generally invest about five times as much time and effort to become great as an accomplished amateur does to become competent.
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115 to 130 range, where some 14 per cent
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"fire in the belly".
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10-year rule
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3 years of age
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expert, focused instruction
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His genius has been laboriously constructed.
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talent as less an individual trait than a creation of environment and encouragement
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We were looking for exceptional kids," he said, "and what we found were exceptional conditions."
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one-on-one relationships with mentors who prepared them for the challenges they would face after their studies ended
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"chunking", is the ability to group details and concepts into easily remembered patterns.
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clusters of pieces, each of which is familiar from experience
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The better the master, the larger the clusters he'll remember.
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learn to identify quickly which bits of information in a changing situation to store in working memory so that they can use them later. This lets them create a continually updated mental model far more complex than that used by someone less practised, allowing them to see subtler dynamics and deeper relationships.
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Eric Kandel
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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
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Genius must be built.
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focused study and practice literally build the neural networks of expertise
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our genetic potentials are activated and realised only through environment and experience
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"genius" is really a set of exceptional skills cultivated through disciplined study
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expertise
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24 Dec 07
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an interplay of fair (but not extraordinary) natural ability, quality instruction, and a mountain of work
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the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort
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five times as much time and effort to become great as an accomplished amateur does to become competent
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Bloom, in fact, came to see great talent as less an individual trait than a creation of environment and encouragement
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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
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a continually updated mental model far more complex than that used by someone less practised, allowing them to see subtler dynamics and deeper relationships
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02 Sep 07
arobertTalent or genius arises not from innate gifts, but from an interplay of fair (but not extraordinary) natural ability, quality instruction, and a mountain of work. The new discipline is detailed in Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.
intelligence psychology experts toread blog mindsets books delicious
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Rob PfeiferI love this article. Just don't know of anything i want to be that good at.
BrainzBoobz career education intelligence genius brain learning
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15 Nov 06
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New Scientist Print Edition
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My mother, rest her merry, brainy soul, convinced me early on that I was - as she liked to put it, quoting the cartoon character Yogi Bear - "SMARRR-ter than the average bear!" I happily assumed that my Yogi-like intelligence would ensure great things. My sense of entitlement grew when I easily won good marks in school, then grew some more when three different college professors told me I had a talent for writing. Rising to the top, I gathered, was a matter of natural buoyancy. The reality check came in my twenties, when nearly a decade of middling effort failed to cast the glow of my writing genius much beyond my study walls. By my early thirties I saw the obvious: my smarts and "talent" - above average or not - would count for little unless I outworked most of the other writers. Only when I started putting in some extra hours did I get anywhere. About the time I had my epiphany, a growing field of scholarship was more rigorously reaching the same conclusion. It seems the ability we're so fond of calling talent or even genius arises not from innate gifts but from an interplay of fair (but not extraordinary) natural ability, quality instruction, and a mountain of work. This new discipline - a mix of psychology and cognitive science - has now produced its first large collection of expert reviews, the massive Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 052184097X). The book essentially tells us to forget the notion that "genius", "talent" or any other innate qualities create the greats we call geniuses. Instead, as the American inventor Thomas Edison said, genius is 99 per cent perspiration - or, to be truer to the data, perhaps 1 per cent inspiration, 29 per cent good instruction and encouragement, and 70 per cent perspiration. Examine closely even the most extreme examples - Mozart, Newton, Einstein, Stravinsky - and you find more hard-won mastery than gift. Geniuses are made, not born. Extraordinary eff
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14 Nov 06
highrollerHow to be a genius 0. 15 September 2006 0. Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. 0. David Dobbs
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feedergoldfishBeing smart ain't enough, you gotta work like hell. Damn.
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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.
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The crËme de la crËme appear to develop several important cognitive skills. The first, called "chunking", is the ability to group details and concepts into easily remembered patterns.
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Apart from chunking, the elite also learn to identify quickly which bits of information in a changing situation to store in working memory so that they can use them later. This lets them create a continually updated mental model far more complex than that used by someone less practised, allowing them to see subtler dynamics and deeper relationships. Again, this is something skilled readers do with good novels. However, it appears more striking - more suggestive of "genius" - when we see these skills used by Garry Kasparov to simultaneously beat 30 grandmasters or Zinedine Zidane to spot a killer through-ball that no one else saw.
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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." He was intrigued to find that few of the study's subjects had shown special promise when they first took up the fields they later excelled in, and most harboured no early ambition for stellar achievement. 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.
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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.
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Ira"It's complicated explaining how genius or expertise is created and why it's so rare," says Anders Ericsson, the professor of psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee who edited the handbook. "But it isn't magic, and it isn't born. It happens because some critical things line up so that a person of good intelligence can put in the sustained, focused effort it takes to achieve extraordinary mastery. These people don't necessarily have an especially high IQ, but they almost always have very supportive environments, and they almost always have important mentors. And the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort."\n\nThis is mixed news, says Ericsson. "It's funny, really. On one hand it's encouraging: it makes me think that even the most ordinary among us should be careful about saying we can't do great things, because 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."
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Eric Kandel
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