Tag Archive for 'Andrew Smith'

Social networks breed creativity

Published on 21 November, 2008 in High Performance and Personal Growth. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Not surprising anyone who has been involved in collaborative work before, NewScientist has reported a Cornell University study that has looked at social connections and found that larger cities have a greater amount of connections than towns, etc., and that larger cities produce more patents and more innovation than smaller places.

Why?  In larger cities, brilliant people are more likely to be socially connected with someone who may be able to help them on their project, whatever it is – maybe through complementary personalities, maybe through complementary backgrounds, maybe through something as simple as being able to bounce ideas off someone else.  The production of innovation rarely comes purely through one’s own personal effort, but through the involvement of others.

In short – those who want high performance need to do some social networking with people who are likely to help: perhaps with like-minded people in different fields; perhaps with colleagues who think differently, even though they are in the same field.

In African philosophy, there is a concept that, loosely translated, means that people are people through other people .  We definitely find this in expert performance – we perform at our best through the involvement of others.

“Genius at birth” basically a myth

Published on 17 November, 2008 in Change and High Performance. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

One of the first things that we have to get out of our heads when we start looking at the formation of genius is the idea that people are born brilliant, or born average, or whatever the case may be (illnesses aside, of course).  Physically, we may be big or small, but the genetics of size don’t apply in anything like the same way as it might to any ‘genetics of the brain’.

In fact, we have very little basis on which that belief may rest.  Even in the human body, there is certainly a canvas, but the way each person lives will dictate where the canvas goes – a person can get a tan, for example, or can bleach their hair or work out at the gym.  The same principle applies to thinking – if anything, moreso.

Ericsson, Prietula and Cokely stated exactly this in their 2007 article, The Making of an Expert .  There, they provided support for the claim that expertise comes primarily through years of intense practice and dedicated coaching, through constant performance above and beyond what is currently possible – even comfortable – for that person.  This is something that is beyond a particular sport – managers, surgeons and musicians all had the common trait of deliberate, long-term focus on not-yet possible tasks and changing what was faulty in technique.  Ericsson (et al) makes clear that this takes at least a decade to reach expert performance, requiring another expert to give (often unpleasant) feedback.

K Anders Ericsson , Michael J Prietula, Edward T Cokely. 2007. The Making of an Expert. Harvard Business Review 85, no. 7,8 (July 1): 114-121.  Accessible through proquest.com .

This means something very particular for us: we cannot throw up our hands in despair whenever we hit a problem in our lives, whenever what we are doing just isn’t good enough.  If we want to be experts in a particular area, we must understand from the outset that it will take a lot of work, often painful work, and that it will be over a long time – about a decade’s worth of work, for starters.

That’s really hard.  It’s really daunting.  But, in my understanding, the most daunting part is that it’s all our choice .  We are able to choose to be experts in a given field, to be operating at that level.  As any expert can tell you – such as dancer-choreographer Twyla Tharp – it’s not through personal talent and innate genius alone.

Tharp’s interview was in: Diane Coutu 2008. Creativity Step by Step. Harvard Business Review 86, no. 4 (April 1).  Accessible through proquest.com .

It’s all about our choice – what we choose to do with our lives.  The one thing that we can change, no matter what stage or status of life we are in, is our selves.

Genius in Specificity

Published on 12 November, 2008 in High Performance and child genius. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

One of the fairly standard findings in research about genius is that genius is something that can be very domain specific – and, depending on the area, specific to domains within domains.

There was a study done on soccer players around 2008.  To briefly summarise, there is a skill in soccer that is about anticipating where the ball is going to go.  The offensive and defensive soccer players were divided into two groups, and it was found anticipating where the ball is going to go was done far better by defensive players than offensive players (even when done in defense and offense, respectively).  Obviously, the defensive players have this as a central part of their role, while it’s more peripheral (and has less damaging results) for offensive players.

A Mark Williams,  Paul Ward,  Julian D Ward,  Nicolas J Smeeton. (2008). Domain Specificity, Task Specificity, and Expert Performance. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 79(3), 428-33.  Available from Proquest.com .

On the surface, this looks counter intuitive – soccer players should be soccer players, right? – but even mentally, there are quite different skills required in defense from offense, even though it’s within the one game.

We can apply this to everyday life, too.  I have a friend who works as an engineer for a major mining company, and at the drop of a hat, he can tell you the exact specifications of any given bolt that can be used in mining machinery.  Another friend worked in air conditioning, and could easily diagnose any problem that happened to an air-conditioner. I’m sure many readers could bring out other stories like this (and feel free to comment with some of them).  By the same token, that engineer would be at a significant disadvantage in, for example, electrical engineering – even though it’s engineering, with similar concepts required.

What this means for us is that we choose to excel at needs to be defined, specific and achievable.  We can’t be afraid to spend several thousand hours perfecting that skill, either…but that’s another post for another time.

Andrew Smith.

Sleep and Time Management

Published on 7 November, 2008 in High Performance. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

An interesting article by Jim Horne in the New Scientist magazine, Time to wake up to the facts about sleep , discusses the amount of sleep that humans need.  It’s a common myth that we’re getting less sleep than previously – stemming from a 1913 test on 8-17 year olds, who slept an average of 9 hours per night (just as they do today) and supported by tests that measure the speed at which people fall asleep in a supportive environment and claim that this is indication of a need for sleep.  Horne argues that this is faulty, and damaging to society in general, provoking a rise in anxiety and increased demand for sleeping pills.  According to the article, several studies have shown that healthy adults average around 7 to 7½ hours of sleep each night.

This gives us a crucial piece of information.  We have 24 hours in each day, of which we should freely allocate 7½hrs to sleep.  That gives us just over 16 hours each day that we need to use to be productive – whether directly used to achieve greatness, used to continue living (the mundane activities such as shopping) or used to prepare ourselves for other activities.

The worst thing we can do with each of these hours is throw them away doing something useless.  The most prominent example in many homes (at least, in the Western world) is watching television.  Excessive watching of television has been linked with poor academic performance in schools by teenagers – even those who claim a lack of conclusive link between the two should concede that TV wouldn’t be helping academic struggles.  It is generally used in ways that do not foster social interaction, and does not engender people to the kind of active participation in learning that is required to upbuild society.

Those who are able to contribute and benefit others, it is postulated here, have an obligation to do so.

Genius as made, not born

Published on 3 November, 2008 in child genius. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

There was a place in California known as the ‘Repository for Germinal Choice ‘.  From the early 1980s to the late 1990s, they offered a place where women could be artificially inseminated by people of genius IQ levels.  It was dubbed the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank by media reports, despite only a single Nobel Prizewinner was actually known to have contributed.

Even allowing that only 50% of the genes passed on were from a genius, the Repository did not produce geniuses at any kind of documented rate.  It did produce people who felt a void from never knowing their father, as David Plotz found in his 2005 book, The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank .

Claretta Yvonne Dupree 2007. The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. Review of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank by David Plotz. New York: Random House, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-6124-5; 262 PAGES, HARDCOVER, $24.95 (USA), $34.95 (CANADA). Ethics & Medicine 23, no. 1 (April 1): 63-64.  Available from Proquest.com .

Of course, there were a number of structural problems with the operation of the sperm bank (self-selected donors, the donors of dubious giftedness…), but as other research has correlated, the fundamental problem was that genius is not something that happens to infants at the moment of conception.  Genius – particularly in any societally meaningful way – is largely something that happens far further in the future than that… and continuously along the genius’ life.  This will be a focus for a number of my upcoming posts on this blog.

If this is the case – and research suggests that it is – then the influence of parents on their children cannot be understated, and what the parents consistantly convey to their children can make all the difference…

Andrew Smith.