What Separates the Gifted from the Schlubs and How Praise Can Backfire

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What makes someone gifted?

Raw talent?

Sure. An apptitutde for something always helps. But it appears it’s not enough. True expertise takes work. And those trying to help (i.e. parents, teachers, coaches) can hinder if they give the wrong kind of praise.

I wanted to share three articles reporting the results of a number of interesing studies on expertise which often appears as a skill level that seems unobtainable by normal, motivated individuals.

The Meadow Mount School of Music

This music school in the Adirondacks has “trained such luminaries as Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Lynn Harrell, and Yo-Yo Ma.” A number of researchers wanted to see what the difference was between the students who seemed most skilled and those who weren’t. They divided students “into three skill levels, including one the faculty had identified as having the best chance of becoming world-class soloists.” Then they looked at the differences.

According to the report, “the results were clear-cut, with little room for any sort of inscrutable God-given talent. The elite musicians had simply practiced far more than the others…Psychologists found a second attribute in elite players that is less obvious than sheer hours of practice. While most of us think of practice as the repetition of tough spots (and this is how many young people do practice), elite musicians, they found, took a different approach.”  Read full article.

The majority of childhood prodigies never fulfill their early promise

Why? According to these researchers it’s because so many early-bloomers get warped by their experience and fail to develop perseverance. More here.

Praise that Undermines Achievement

It appears that how we praise achievement affects performance. Sometimes in large and startling ways.

You may think that it’s good to praise your child for being “smart” or “good” in some subject. But there’s growing evidence that giving kids such labels doesn’t improve or motivate performance, but actually reduces it.

Psychologist Carol Dweck and her team have studied the effect of praise on students in a variety of settings. “Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.” So what type of praise actually works? Read here.

When does genius bloom?

We often think genius must be tied to being precocity. After all, Motzart was doing musical flips when he was still a kid.  For writers, however, it appears this isn’t the case. More here.

Bees Sniff Out Land Mines

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The bee. We slather its delicious vomit on bread and muffins. We send colonies out to pollinate our crops. Now Colin Henderson and his University of Montana colleagues have partnered up with bees to “locate buried land mines” and do it more quickly and thorougly than any dog.

“We can survey in one day what takes more than a week with dogs,” he says, “and humans stand 300 yards away.”

Bees can find not only land mines, but also drugs and decomposing bodies. Oh, and they are smart enough to recognize a sugar daddy when they see one.

Here’s the full article. Read it. Enjoy. Things like this are part of the wonderfulness of life.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

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I enjoyed Joss Whedon’s movie Serenity as well as many of the TV episodes of Firefly which featured the same characters and world. So when I saw Whedon had put up another movie called Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and made it available over the internet, I had to watch it. And then watch it again, and again.

I loved the characters. I couldn’t get some of the songs out of my mind. Some of the plot turns simply delighted. Here’s a preview.

And here’s where you can watch it right now for free. It’s only 42 minutes long. Give it 4 minutes (literally). If you’re not hooked, let me know right here. I’d give it a PG-13 for some language and thematic stuff.

Petermen, Gunpowder, and Urine Laws

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King Charles the 1st

King Charles the 1st

On your left you may observe King Charles the 1st of England, the man who mandated the collection of urine. It was a patriotic thing.

Dude.

I love, LOVE, finding out how they used to make things. And it seems that making gunpowder back in the day spawned all sorts of jobs that beg to be put into a novel.

You’ve heard of tanners, bakers, tailors–how about a peterman, as in a collector of saltpeter?

Here are some juicy quotes from http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~cowen/~gel115/115CH16fertilizer.html

QUOTE 1: “By the end of the 1500s, the standard formula for military-grade gunpowder was saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal dust in the ratio 6:1:1.

At this time, the only source of potassium nitrate was from rotting organic matter, especially rotting meat and urine. The saltpeter supplier would send out teams of collectors who would locate promising places to dig (abandoned privies and dungheaps) by tasting the soil before digging it out and carting it off to be boiled, strained and evaporated to produce saltpeter of the required purity. It is said that throughout Europe no privy, stable, or dovecote was safe from saltpeter collectors or ‘petermen’.”

QUOTE 2: “In 1626, King Charles I ordered “his loving subjects [to] carefully and constantly keep and preserve in some convenient vessels or receptacles fit for the purpose, all the urine of man during the whole year, and all the stale of beasts which they can save and gather together whilst their beasts are in their stables and stalls, and that they be careful to use the best means of gathering together and preserving the urine and stale, without mixture of water or other thing put therein. Which our commandment and royal pleasure, being easy to observe, and so necessary for the public service of us and our people, that if any person do be remiss thereof we shall esteem all such persons contemptuous and ill affected both to our person and estate, and are resolved to proceed to the punishment of that offender with what severity we may.”

There are more interesting facts in the short article. In fact, a number of the pages at that site yield up some gems like this Rudyard Kipling poem:

Gold is for the mistress, silver for the maid
Copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade
“Good!” said the Baron, sitting in his hall
“But Iron–cold iron–is master of them all.”

I hate mission statements, but…

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Stephen R. Covey (or is it Lex Luthor?)

Stephen R. Covey (or is it Lex Luthor?)

First of all, if I could look like Stephen R. Covey does in that picture, I would shave my head and never look back. Holy moly, I love that picture. But that’s not why I’m writing.

James Maxey is a writer who I respect and whose comments on the boards of Codex Writers often make me think or laugh. He recently started a thread about writing mission statements.

Ack!

I groaned when I first read the title of his topic. I know first-hand how useful goals are. I know how vital it is to identify what’s vital in any endeavor. Heck, I’m a Covey-lover through and through.

But every mission statement I’ve seen has either been useless corporate toilet paper (because they’re printed on stuff that’s too stiff and rigid to be of any help in the bathroom) or it’s a personal artifact that has a six week half life, after which it turns into something like that singing fish you bought and can’t for the life of you figure out why or where to put it now that you realize you could have eaten a steak for just as much money and the pleasure would have lasted longer.

And yet consciously thinking about how you want to live is so powerful. I think the corporate world ruined the term for me. I cannot bring myself to write a “mission statement.” I know what I want to do in my various roles in life. I know how I want to live. But I cannot use that label. Alas.

So here’s my “what I want to do” as far as writing is concerned. It’s not crisp and clean. And if I had to write it again, it would come out differently. But it has the gist.

—-

I want to make people fall in love like I did when I first watched the Sound of Music–that sweet, pure yearning. And when they’re out of love, I want them to see a way back.

Every once in a while I want the ground to shift under the feet of my readers like it shifted under mine when I first watched Les Miserables with Anthony Perkin.

I want them to laugh.

I want to give them the wonder and adventure that was given me when I read the Hobbit.

I want them, at least once, to shout in triumph.

I want to share my delight in people who are fascinating, flawed, salt-of-the-earth, odd, funny, strong or a hundred other wonderful things, but who show some courage, a little or a lot.

I want readers to weep at the hope of redemption. I want them to despair at loss.

I want the sun to shine. I want the world to crack.

And when my readers are done, when the book’s closed and they sit back, I want the story and people to linger, I want my readers to want to go back. I want them to feel it was, not only a surge of living, but a good thing to have once been lost in the pages of my book.