I’m sure David Brooks works very hard. In fact, I’m sure he has spent the Gladwell-ian 10,000 hours practicing his craft. Which is why he should look to himself as an example before he starts peddling this kind of twaddle:

"Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness — Dante, Mozart, Einstein — whose talents far exceeded normal comprehension…"

In their constant rush to figure out a way to elevate the ordinary– which must naturally include themselves– writers like Brooks fall into exactly the trap I was describing a few days ago… making a straw man argument of "genius is all" instead of the common (and rather obvious) argument that "genius is necessary." Genius in this context has nothing to do with IQ, of course, and everything to do with what a person can ultimately create and do.

I’m in no way diminishing the necessity for long hours of practice that the studies Brooks and others refer to accurately point out. But is this news? After all, what’s the secret to getting to Carnegie Hall? Of course those at the top of their field and craft have spent an enormous amount of time working to get there. That’s not in question. What’s at issue is whether others could get there if they just practiced as much and with the same effort and deliberation.

Without a gift one can practice any number of hours and he or she will never reach a particularly high level. And without an immense gift, they will never be an Einstein or a Tiger Woods. Call it what you want– genius, talent, innate ability, aptitude, but it exists– as easily evidenced by the masses of the average and the mediocre who nonetheless pursue their goal with admirable persistence. And as much as we might wish it to be so, these gifts aren’t subject to the best selling (and rather sad) democratization the self-help industry tries to impose.

If you took Brooks’s hypothetical young woman who "possessed a slightly above average verbal ability" that was "just enough so that she might gain some sense of distinction" and followed the prescription he outlines you would end up with a slightly above average writer who had maximized her talent through hard work. If fortune were in your favor you might have a mid-list novelist, or one of the many unknown academics who haunt the fringes of the annual MLA conference. Perhaps you would even end up with a New York Times op-ed columnist famous for her wrong-headed political predictions and deceit. But what you wouldn’t have on your hands is Jane Austen.

The necessity of talent to become the next Shakespeare or Michelangelo shouldn’t be discouraging. The reason books denying the necessity of talent sell so well is natural. And what this means for education is important. I’ll discuss each of those in future posts.

Apparently there’s a cottage industry built on the premise that the existence of predecessors, colleagues and context proves that individual genius and creation is an inconvenient myth. I’d read Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker column "In the Air" when it first appeared, and it rubbed me wrong even then, but I’ve since had occasion to browse around a bit more and discovered even more illogical, confusing writing on the subject. For example, Keith Sawyer’s book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (here’s a representative excerpt) and bits and pieces from Jack Stillinger’s Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. Approximately 1.2 gazillion more in this strange genre can be found by invoking Google…

Some fundamental flaws inform almost everything I’ve read on the subject, most significantly a consistent lack of logic. That no creative individual works in total isolation, that creative acts occur in a context and ultimately as part of a tradition, that artists have friends, colleagues and competitors, that the best and most creative steal and stand on the shoulders of giants is both unquestionably true and essentially irrelevant to the existence of individual, solitary genius in any realistic sense of the adjectives. Only in the flimsiest straw-man arguments would anyone maintain otherwise and, in case case, the rather easy task of proving that the aforementioned exist and occur does nothing to disprove the latter.

It’s certainly true that the Romantics forcefully drew our attention to the activity of solitary creative genius, just as the industrial revolution shifted a large part of the Western focus from agrarianism to the power of mechanical devices and analytics. But no one uses the latter as an argument that calculating machines and factory production don’t really exist. We aren’t talking about flat-earthers or failed cosmologies, but simple, observable phenomenon. Coleridge and Wordsworth may have corresponded about– and deeply discussed– their work, but this doesn’t change the fact that, in the end, they spent untold hours facing the empty page alone before, during and after those conversations.

Similarly, the existence of independent, parallel discoveries– Newton and Leibniz discovering calculus– does nothing to render individual genius a myth. If anything, it reinforces it because, again, only a fictional argument exists that individual creative genius means sole creative genius. Leibniz and Newton possessed intellects of the highest order and only the fact that they independently and individually executed their profound work makes their story of any interest at all!

Gladwell and Sawyer should sit down and talk because together they could get at the whole truth. Sawyer makes great hay of the fact that stellar moments of creativity occur in jazz in group settings, where musicians are feeding off one another. This can’t be explained by the focus on the individual, Sawyer maintains. Gladwell has become (in)famous with his theory in Outliers that genius comes not from innate ability but from context and practice– 10,000 hours of practice, to be exact. Recognizing that the source of genius (nature, nurture, innate, learned) isn’t actually relevant– I’ll come back to that shortly– it is useful to consider two things about the example of jazz performance. First, as noted earlier, there is always a context for the creative act. Johnny Hodges’ mournful, goose-bump inciting "Blood Count" solo couldn’t exist as it does without Duke Ellington and the rest of the musicians, not to mention Strayhorn’s composition and recent, early passing. But does this lessen Hodges’ individual brilliance? And could this unforgettable moment of undeniable synergy have happened if Hodges (and Ellington, and Strayhorn) hadn’t spent the necessary, lonely, individual hours in the woodshed practicing their craft with no one but their own fears and frustrations and excitement to keep them company? You know they did their 10,000 hours and then some.

My suspicions– given the preponderance of these attempts to debunk the importance, even the existence, of individual creative accomplishment– is that most of this activity stems from natural desire (to accomplish great things), insecurity (that one may not be able to accomplish those great things), and an– I think uniquely American– ethos of bootstrap-pulling self-help and social leveling. This conception of accomplishment maintains that no one is born with any innate advantage over another, or at least none that can’t be matched with enough hard work. In an important way, this framing is an important counterbalance to the tendency for people to give up on their own endeavors and/or not grant a proper amount of respect to the hard work necessarily involved in creation regardless of how talented the creator might be.

Carrying this happy illusion consistently to the extreme, denying the existence of– and so entailing no obligation to facilitating or providing for– the hard, lonely individual work of genius, is dangerous… and perhaps never more so than now, when the insistent, overriding focus is on the (undeniably valuable, but not sole) characteristics of groups, social networks, collaboration (which will have to be the subject of another post; I value collaboration, but am suspicious of its very existence when it comes to creation and have yet to see an instance where it exists as anything more than turn-taking, no matter how refined) and collective intelligence. Individual creatives have always worked, to some degree, in opposition to the machinery of the everyday, but I fear the loss of the very capability to create the most beautiful things and make the largest leaps of invention if the machine becomes all and we, necessarily, live only inside it.

[photo by robotgraphy]

Sometimes connections can come at the most unexpected times. Today, while walking to the coffee shop and pondering my TTIX keynote^*, the Genius playlist on OwenMeany (my iTouch) played "Drive" by Incubus, with some very apt lines:

Sometimes, I feel the fear of uncertainty stinging clear
And I can’t help but ask myself how much I let the fear
Take the wheel and steer

It’s driven me before
And it seems to have a vague, haunting mass appeal
But lately I’m beginning to find that I
Should be the one behind the wheel

So if I decide to waiver my chance to be one of the hive
Will I choose water over wine and hold my own and drive?

It’s driven me before
And it seems to be the way that everyone else gets around
But lately I’m beginning to find that
When I drive myself my light is found

And yes, this isn’t just me being maudlin, it actually connects to my talk…

^*Incidentally, I’m still waiting for that moment when the chaos in my subconscious comes into focus and becomes something real to talk about… which makes me nervous given my august keynote company. On the other hand, this clarification almost never happens until the night before I’m on stage (which is why being the "closer" is so painful– I’ll be agitated and nervous about my part for the duration of the conference), so I’m hoping that– at the very least– that trend continues.