31–40 of 477 posts
Just raise your kid the best you can, if you are trying to purposely craft a genius you'll probably just instead make someone with serious performance anxiety and neurosis.
> Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind. Actually the claim is the other way around - that the people at the top got there through focused effort of the right kind. Finding "gifted" children does not contradict this. Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius. Gifted…
So you believe in the 10 000 hours empirical rule based on "outliers" with very little evidence to support it?
> Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind. Actually the claim is the other way around - that the people at the top got there through focused effort of the right kind. Finding "gifted" children does not contradict this. Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius. Gifted…
I think you are right about laser focus. Doesn't matter too much what I do, I can learn it, but I very much enjoy my line of work. Its no wonder after having a baby a few months ago I got the calculus book out to start reading to him.
> Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind. Actually the claim is the other way around - that the people at the top got there through focused effort of the right kind. Finding "gifted" children does not contradict this. Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius. Gifted…
Gifted children have the gift of being interested in things that are useful, that can give them money or high status like art, math, chess, technology...
A child who has an obsessive interest with candy or playing tag or watching TV (or just normal stuff that normal children do) will have to work harder to resist more temptations and focus on schoolwork and useful things.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinat...
Most of these are not achieved if you're kid is "super smart". Being the father of Einstein is probably very good for the ego, but "being Einstein" is a curse. (Same with pop or movie stars: people that get a lot of attention are less happy.)
> Pioneering mathematicians Terence Tao and Lenhard Ng were one-percenters, as were Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and musician Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga), who all passed through the Hopkins centre. Didn't expect Lady Gaga to be listed although it confirms one of my pet theories. It has long been my opinion that success in STEM fields correlates with general high intelligence which will…
Competitiveness is worth nothing, if you compete to just get the best grades for the exam. Most of the exams have close to no value in real life and do not force you to think by yourself but to rehash hundred times what you have seen before. The opposite of creative thought.
> Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind. Actually the claim is the other way around - that the people at the top got there through focused effort of the right kind. Finding "gifted" children does not contradict this. Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius. Gifted…
Plenty of people spend hours drawing and still suck at it. My sister spent hours with a coloring book as a kid, and now has a growing IMDB page.* Sure, she went to a great art school, but not because of some single minded focus as she had ~10 AP classes and ended up High school Valedictorian. Even this did not take her full attention as she had a wide circle of friends, was very popular, and spent a lot of time on ma…
>has an IMDB page
is a funny metric for success.
I get quite depressed when I read articles like this. I'm resentful of the fact that my early academic performance was merely above average, rather than exceptional. Some days I feel confident in my abilities and my plans for the future; other days, I fear that it's already too late for me to accomplish anything of note.
Don't fret; everyone in our generation was raised to believe we were the 1 in 10,000. That simply can't be true 99.99% of the time. We're a generation that needs therapy to realize that a stable, six-figure job as a mid-level engineer at 30 isn't failure. Our expectations (some might say entitlement) were set so unreasonably high that most of us have no chance of meeting them.
> Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind. Actually the claim is the other way around - that the people at the top got there through focused effort of the right kind. Finding "gifted" children does not contradict this. Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius. Gifted…
Plenty of people spend hours drawing and still suck at it. My sister spent hours with a coloring book as a kid, and now has a growing IMDB page.* Sure, she went to a great art school, but not because of some single minded focus as she had ~10 AP classes and ended up High school Valedictorian. Even this did not take her full attention as she had a wide circle of friends, was very popular, and spent a lot of time on ma…
Definitely, but people don't get good at drawing without spending hours at it.
You may be stuck at a local maximum, and it may take a good or different coach to get you around it, but generally you can always improve.
But just trying harder is ineffective. You have to diagnose your problem, and how to fix it. Maybe you need a coach.
I remember having to "invent" all kinds of ways of looking at my drawings to get better. To get them to the next level. After a while you can't look at them objectively ... so you look at them in a mirror. You squint, to get a better sense of the balance. Upside down. You get the idea. It's problem solving.
I think of drawing as learning to see.