Tonight I'm watching a National Geographic special about people with brilliant brains. One woman is a leading chess champion who was trained by her father to use mental skills to develop mastery. One man is a savant who can tell what day of the week any date will fall on, past or present. Another man had a brain injury and now paints obsessively and beautifully.
I was most interested in the woman who is ordinary -- like me -- and yet has an extraordinary ability -- like I wish I had! She was raised to be a chess champion by a father who knew a little about chess, and had some strong theories about phsychological training and education. She was raised surrounded by chess books, analyzing different games and plays, studying past masters, experimenting with moves and ideas, developing tricks for memorization.
She spent hours and hours learning about chess. She fits the mold described by Malcolm Gladwell. Author of "The Tipping Point" and "Outlier: The Story of Success", Gladwell studied successful people and concluded: a person needs to invest 10,000 hours of concentrated and reflective practice to achieve mastery—this amounts to about 10 years.
I've seen this prescription applied to the success of Tiger Woods.(As you know, one of my favorites.) I also saw a recent documentary about T. Woods that explained that he no longer thinks about his golf swing. Through practice and exercise and analysis, he's gotten to where he just swings. His mind can quickly analyze conditions and strokes. He isn't "thinking" about golf, he is "intuiting" about golf.
In the National Geographic special, they also featured a firefighter who is an expert with a specific type of lethal fire experience. He doesn't "think" about fighting fires. He's spent a lot of time studying fires and experiencing them first hand. When in fire situations, he doesn't "think", he "intuits". He already knows clues and possible results of certain actions. He is successful because he has moved way beyond "thinking".
Why am I writing about this? Because I wish, with all my heart, that I could quit "thinking" about writing stories, and start "intuiting" them. I want to be like Tiger Woods and like the firefighter and the chess player: a person who simply writes very well intuitively.
But right now, I'm analyzing everything, studying plot structure, studying character development, sketching people and places with words, networking with others to learn from their ideas. Keeping this crazy blog. Geesh! I'm in class. And it's hard. And it takes a lot of work. And a lot of days I don't want to attend.
Then I'm back again. Again and again. This is how I know that I am breaking the Best Beginner mold.
Are you in class? What for? For how long? (Sounds like a prison term, eh?)
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