Sunday, July 8, 2018

Kyle Phoenix Answers: Is being a genius a matter of education?




Yes. But it would have to be deliberate. There is no such thing as spontaneous genius. What there is is practiced genius. Humans have applied this misnomer to genius because It rarefies the intelligent and lets the lazy off the hook. 


"Oh, I'm not smart enough"

No, you have not applied yourself and then designed a strategy to ever improve or kaizen, CANI (constant and never-ending improvement.)

To become a genius one would need access to a breadth of information that scales in complexity, a teacher-coach that is either at mastery level in the subject itself or in the art of teaching and time, time to absorb, reconsider, postulate, get feedback, repeat.

People often site people like Mozart but his father was a composer (teacher-coach) who basically whored his children out across Europe as prodigies, however their skill was rote, just unusual for children at that time. Consider children now on YouTube, who have focused exposure to a specific skill, they will be able to perform it but genius requires time-----time to master a domain (absorb) and learn the basics, rules, constraints and levels. Then true, first level creativity begins.
First level needs thousands of hours of coached practice, still possible for a child getting 2000 hours a year. But what would a child of 5 look like to an adult if that child had 2000-6000 hours of practice, exposure by age 6? Most adults largest time to skill exposure is k-12 (180 x 8 hours x 13 years)---18,720 and it's in a scattered generalized curriculum. Ergo , anyone who could example roughly 2000 in a single skill/area would appear to be a genius to 2/3s of just the American population where only 1/3 are educated past high school level.
Imagine meeting someone who just spent 2000 more hours absorbed in math or literature or learning Spanish than you have?

Now imagine it gets ever more complex. You spent a total of maybe your entire basic education, 1800 hours and they spent twice as much in 18 years or more jarring by the time they were 6. They'd appear geniuslike to you.

Consider this: What else did Mozart, Prince, Michael Jackson have to do as children/teenagers but work on music, learn music, perform----all of them raised by demanding musically proficient fathers----what else were they allowed to become?


Genius is then only genius in novel, creative usage once domain absorption has taken place, hence Mozart's lackluster in-between years and later explosion of talented pieces. Generally the first creative explosion is late teens to 30s. There are less new thoughts in certain domains like math, science, computers because you can't skip, you must learn/master a regimen of fundamentals to graduate to the next levels. Art, literature, music, film allows more genius because it allows you to jump and gather through multiple skill levels. You can study schlock, basic, repetitive and experimental without having to master film-making to understand the differences.

I'm running a side project to align to my work in how to accelerate students, the side project is what became of all the geniuses in my writing classes undergraduate? In tracking them down and in getting them to answer questions what I've learned is that only a handful of us passed through those writing classes as writers. By that I mean I was writing at an advanced level for ten solid years before undergrad in all genres, several others as well. The vast majority of my writing classes classmates wrote primarily for the classes, newspaper, magazines then petered out. The very exposure of the class and teachers and literature and time taught them to break some boundaries to example moments (short projects) of creativity. But without the coaches, time and intrinsic pressure-ambition to keep writing, they petered out.

However several others like me had been writing, wrote all through undergraduate and continued the same grind afterwards seeking out more mentors, ever more complicated work, became some form of teachers themselves----the teaching practices like a multiplicity of hours 1 equals 3 because of exposure and review of fundamentals.
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Voltaire posited that the first burst happens after 10-15 years of studying a domain and then you get 10 years minimum to mastery your first level of Mastery. Then you have to start again, anew. This is at approximately 20,000 hours because you have feedback from the domain itself.
Then you have to learn anew which is often the most difficult, you can't do what you're good at to get to the next level if you keep producing Level 1. This is how some people seem to do the same kind of work again and again and again. The advice from Voltaire and others Is when celebrated to step away and master a domain neighbors to your skill.

Voltaire pointed out that this is why people who aren't geniuses fail because we as humans have such a short life span. You get maybe three of these Mastery stages and you can get stuck at Level 1 because it is so intoxicating to finally be recognized, you don't want to become the apprentice again. So you coast.

Genius then is when practice, ever increasing complexity, time, coaching and self reflective challenging converge continuously.

But most people won't work for that.

Smile, Kyle
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com




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