Continuing my work towards genius today.....

This is so simple and yet complex. It is seductive to think that becoming really good at something just "happens" to some. In his book The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk, he examines those who are considered in the genius category. It is not about luck rather passion, determination and practice.

"For those on their way to greatness [in intellectual or physical endeavors],
several themes regarding practice consistently come to light:

1. Practice changes your body. Researchers have recorded a constellation of physical changes (occurring in direct response to practice) in the muscles, nerves, hearts, lungs, and brains of those showing profound increases in skill level in any domain.
2. Skills are specific. Individuals becoming great at one particular skill do not serendipitously become great at other skills. Chess champions can remember hundreds of intricate chess positions in sequence but can have a perfectly ordinary memory for everything else. Physical and intellectual changes are ultraspecific responses to particular skill requirements.
3. The brain drives the brawn. Even among athletes, changes in the brain are arguably the most profound, with a vast increase in precise task knowledge, a shift from conscious analysis to intuitive thinking (saving time and energy), and elaborate self-monitoring mechanisms that allow for constant adjustments in real time.
4. Practice style is crucial. Ordinary practice, where your current skill level is simply being reinforced, is not enough to get better. It takes a special kind of practice to force your mind and body into the kind of change necessary to improve.
5. Short-term intensity cannot replace long-term commitment. Many crucial changes take place over long periods of time. Physiologically, it's impossible to become great overnight.

"Across the board, these last two variables - practice style and practice
time - emerged as universal and critical. From Scrabble players to dart players to soccer players to violin players, it was observed that the uppermost achievers not only spent significantly more time in solitary study and drills,
but also exhibited a consistent (and persistent) style of preparation that K. Anders Ericsson came to call 'deliberate practice.' First introduced in a 1993 Psychological Review article, the notion of deliberate practice went far beyond
the simple idea of hard work. It conveyed a method of continual skill improvement. 'Deliberate practice is a very special form of activity that differs
from mere experience and mindless drill,' explains Ericsson. 'Unlike playful
engagement with peers, deliberate practice is not inherently enjoyable. It ...
does not involve a mere execution or repetition of already attained skills but
repeated attempts to reach beyond one's current level which is associated with
frequent failures.' ...

"In other words, it is practice that doesn't take no for an answer; practice that perseveres; the type of practice where the individual keeps raising the
bar of what he or she considers success. ...

"[Take] Eleanor Maguire's 1999 brain scans of London cabbies, which revealed greatly enlarged representation in the brain region that controls spatial awareness. The same holds for any specific task being honed; the relevant
brain regions adapt accordingly. ...

"[This type of practice] requires a constant self-critique, a pathological restlessness, a passion to aim consistently just beyond one's capability so that daily disappointment and failure is actually desired, and a never-ending resolve to dust oneself off and try again and again and again. ...

"The physiology of this process also requires extraordinary amounts of
elapsed time - not just hours and hours of deliberate practice each day,
Ericsson found, but also thousands of hours over the course of many years. Interestingly, a number of separate studies have turned up the same common
number, concluding that truly outstanding skill in any domain is rarely achieved in less than ten thousand hours of practice over ten years' time (which comes to an average of three hours per day). From sublime pianists to unusually profound physicists, researchers have been very hard-pressed to find any examples of truly extraordinary performers in any field who reached the top of their game before that ten-thousand-hour mark."
Author: David Shenk
Title: The Genius in All of Us
Publisher: Doubleday
Date: Copyright 2010 by David Shenk
Pages: 53-57
First seen in the Delancey Place http://www.delanceyplace.com/

Your Own Time and Place

We all are in our own space and time and should not compare ourselves to others. Robert Altman was the creator of M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Player, Prêt-à-Porter, and Gosford Park.

Robert Altman

"It all depends on when you're placed into the river, and where that
river takes you - it couldn't happen the same way a week earlier or a
week later. You're in your time and space in the river. Now, you can
swim over toward the bank where the current isn't as fast, but basically
from that point you're going down the river. You can swim upstream.
But just for a little bit. If you swim up against the current a lot, by the
time you die you have only covered a short distance along the bank. If
you go over to the edge and go with the mainstream, you cover a lot
more territory, but you're not exercising. I don't think you ever have
the energy to beat the river. The river is always going faster than you
can swim against it. The reason I think you fight against something is
simply because it's there to fight against.

"I think I go upstream because it's the easiest place for me to go. But
I'm over at the edge, not in the center of it. In other words, I'm not out
there making the long-distance swim across the channel. I take the easiest path upstream. ...

"I don't think anybody remembers the truth, the facts. You remember impressions."

Mitchell Zuckoff, Robert Altman, Knopf, Copyright 2009 by the Estate of Robert Altman and Mitchell Zuckoff, pp. ix, 20.
First seen in The Delancy Place: http://www.delanceyplace.com/

They're Made Out of Meat

They're Made
Out of Meat
From the collection
Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories
by Terry Bisson

“They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”
“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”
“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”
“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”
“Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take long. Do you have any idea what’s the life span of meat?”
“Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”
“Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They’re meat all the way through.”
“No brain?”
“Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“So . . . what does the thinking?”
“You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”
“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”
“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?”
“Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.”
“Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they’ve been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years.”
“Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?”
“First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual.”
“We’re supposed to talk to meat.”
“That’s the idea. That’s the message they’re sending out by radio. ‘Hello. Anyone out there? Anybody home?’ That sort of thing.”
“They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?”
“Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat.”
“I thought you just told me they used radio.”
“They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.”
“Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?”
“Officially or unofficially?”
“Both.”
“Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing.”
“I was hoping you would say that.”
“It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?”
“I agree one hundred percent. What’s there to say? ‘Hello, meat. How’s it going?’ But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?”
“Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can’t live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact.”
“So we just pretend there’s no one home in the Universe.”
“That’s it.”
“Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You’re sure they won’t remember?”
“They’ll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we’re just a dream to them.”
“A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat’s dream.”
“And we marked the entire sector unoccupied.”
“Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?”
“Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen-core cluster intelligence in a class-nine star in G445 zone was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again.”
“They always come around.”
“And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone . . . ”