Greatness: Finally Explained!

Last week I read a column in the New York Times by former Obama Administration economist Peter Orszag. He is commonly known as an incredibly dweeby guy with a lisp who only dates smoking hot women. You don't have to tell me twice. I plan to drop "percentage of GDP" and "Keynsian" into all future conversations with attractive single ladies. His column focused on the age old debate: is talent something you're born with or something you acquire through long hours of practice? He cited a book on ping pong that he had just read. (Are ping ping books also a turn on, ladies?). But folks the evidence is in: if you work hard enough, you too can become ping pong champion of the world.

I was struck by the online reader comments. VICIOUS opposition to the notion that natural born talent is overrated. A few scattered readers then attacked the authors of those comments for being player haters, noting their own lack of greatness is probably due to laziness they just don't want to face up to. Can't we all get along? Oh wait--it's the Internet. No we can't.

I had just read the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell in which roughly the same issue is discussed and Gladwell also posits that those who achieve greatness at a particular skill worked tirelessly to become great and innate ability had little to do with it. It was a combination of everyday intelligence and work ethic with opportunities--often quite random and lucky--that some people are given. Bill Gates was lucky enough to live down the street from the University of Washington computer lab at a time when there were virtually no other such places in the world--so he spent hours and hours there and developed his computer skills. The Beatles were given an opportunity to play endless 8 hour per night gigs at a strip club in Hamburg, Germany and were almost forced to become a great band by sheer accident. Their manager did say they were given powerful incentives in the form of tons of booze and babes . (I'm talking about the Beatles here, not Bill Gates ). Studies apparently show it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master at a skill and Gates and the Beatles both put in their 10,000 hours. But they both did it with a little help from their friends--with the Fab Four having much more fun friends who didn't just want to hold their hand. More of the "why don't we do it in the road?" demographic of ladies.

Okay fine. Work hard, get a break or two, and become great. Sounds suspiciously like a cliche-ridden commencement speech, doesn't it? But I do happen to mostly agree with this. Granted, not everyone can be Michael Jordan. Take me, for example. I am 5'8", very white, and have a best corrected visual acuity of 20/300. The fact that our driveway growing up was on a steep hill and prevented us from putting up a basketball hoop so I could spend 10,000 hours working on my sweet jump shot has absolutely nothing to do with why I'm not a six time NBA champion today. But......there are plenty of 6'6", athletic, shooting guards with 20/20 vision in the NBA even as we speak and none of them are Michael Jordan. Why? I suspect God given talent has nothing to do with it. "It's gotta be the shoes", then? Maybe but focus, practice, and determination probably have a lot more to do with it than Air Jordans.

But why? Why do some people commit themselves to 10,000 hours of practice on ONE thing while others don't? Don't they realize how many cool I-Phone apps are out there? Quit working so hard! Gladwell can say Bill Gates fell into success by living so close to UDub's computer lab, but why did he choose to spend endless hours there? The Beatles might have been given a shot in Hamburg, but why didn't they turn down an offer to play dives in Deutschland? Not a seaside gig in Barcelona or the Riviera in the summertime, but GERMANY. The home of hamburgers, Hitler and Hasselhoff.

It's been said that it isn't what you do; it's what you don't do. I happen to be close personal friends with several NBA players. (Okay fine. If you really want to get technical here, I'm following them on Twitter. No more questions!). Those boys seem to love their video games. Was Jordan an Atari owner in the early 80's? What if he had become obsessed with becoming the greatest Frogger player on the planet and smoking blunts? Would he have been traded to the Clippers after his third year for Benoit Benjamin and some cash? People who achieve greatness either consciously or intuitively figure something out which the rest of us struggle to grasp: video games suck, TV sucks, and the Internet sucks. By endlessly practicing a skill, they really aren't missing too much.

But it can't be just that. I wonder if the high achievers and geniuses among us are less narcissistic than the rest of us. (At least while they're still climbing the ladder). I know that sounds completely counter-intuitive but maybe it isn't. Think of the myth of Narcissus himself. He drowned after spending endless hours admiring his own reflection in the river. What wasn't Narcissus doing by that river? He wasn't practicing the butterfly, the breast stroke--or any other skill for that matter. I wonder if there is an inverse relationship between success and self-absorption. When you are spending all your time in a computer lab, playing and practicing in Hamburg, or practicing free throw shooting alone in a gym at midnight, you can't possibly be staring in the mirror or discussing your lousy childhood. High achievers must be a real nightmare for psychiatrists, therapist, and Pfizer Corporation execs because they are so busy engaging themselves in activities they don't have time to get a prescription filled.

But that's it. A narcissist is a person who wants to make the world a reflection of themselves. A genius is someone who want to make themselves a reflection of the world. Working to become a "genius" is an act of self-abandonment. It may be true that "we" are unique and our fingerprints and DNA are all unlike anyone else's, but surrendering oneself to work is learning to immerse ourselves in the river of life not using the water to reflect ourselves. (The Pretentious Pseudo-Intellectual Meter just went to 11 on that last sentence). Michael Jordan immersed himself in a game he didn't invent. He really never did an "original" thing in his career. He was still playing the game James Naismith designed to help his boys at Springfield College pass the time in the cold New England winter. The Beatles played the same chords and scales and rhythms that had been invented long before they were born. They just found slightly new combinations--although I'm sure you can find many songs with matching chord progressions to plenty of Beatles songs, so even that may not be true. But they plugged themselves into things that were already there. I think that's all creativity really is: finding what was already there but was hidden. Geniuses are miners and hunters, not magicians or demi-gods. Darwin "created" a radical new theory but it didn't come out of thin air, it came from what the evidence on the Galapagos Islands told him was the existing truth long before he found it. He didn't impose his fingerprints on anything, he just connected his mind to the existing fingerprints of nature. (Pretentious Meter just blew up).

Maybe people who choose to put in 10,000 hours to become great musicians, chess masters, computer designers, scientists, brain surgeons, etc. are people who want to plug into the world rather than show the world their fingerprints all the time. Maybe we value "uniqueness" far too much. I don't have kids of my own but from what I hear, this has become an epidemic in schools. Every kid is special. Graduation ceremonies are held after kindergarten, elementary school, and middle school as well as high school. I'm all for instilling kids with self-esteem, but I wonder if endlessly teaching "uniqueness" is so good. What happens when those unique kids start taking math and science classes and realize numbers and elements have rules of their own which have no concern with their unique selves? Do they lose interest? And is our culture of uniqueness one reason we aren't so great at math and science? Is it why we have to import so many doctors and engineers? George Bush said illegal immigrants are doing work Americans won't do. (He forgot to add we won't works those jobs for sub-minimum wage). But I wonder if many legal immigrants are doing the (highly skilled) work Americans won't do--because they're just too unique and special to jump through the hoops to do for such work. Then again.....legal immigrants are Americans so I guess it doesn't matter in the end.

To recap..............uh, I'm not sure. I have no idea what I'm talking about. Kids, plug into life, but keep your fingerprints to yourself. Thank you.