Most people, who don’t work in and study education, learning and IQ—-how the brain develops, grows throughout one’s lifetime—-literally don’t understand what they are doing or what they are seeing.
I was recently re-reading Anders Ericsson, the premiere scholar on cognitive improvement/athletic improvement—-expertise——and he summed up something perfectly that I then relayed to my students about Deliberate Practice—-”you are only seeing the result of what you would call a prodigy.”
Like Mozart or Prince or Coltrane or Einstein——Ericsson has dedicated the past 40 years and involved thousands of other scientists, educators and even the US military, into funding and hammering at his results with their own experiments—-and that’s his determination—-there are no spontaneous geniuses.
What does exist are people who develop into geniuses, by our, end result measurement.
Writing, Me.
At conferences and networkers and academic affairs and meetings and consulting at schools, people often ask me or have looked up my LinkedIn Profile, and ask, not simply what I do:
(which is a constant, more so than my name—-even more annoying when I answer—-”I teach.”—-wait for it—-you just thought the exact next question everyone asks me—-what is the automatic baseline follow up question? (Honestly, it is the way I am subtly pinging back, the way a radar does, what I’m pinging back for is are you talking to ME—-to Kyle—-or are you on automatic sociality pilot?)—-
then I evaluate how intelligent the questioner is from: What do you teach?
Ok, it’s a 50/50 dice roll now—-I simply have labelled it Adult Education—-and then they give me THEIR interpretation of it rather than ask me specifically what it is I teach. I generally smile politely or see the sort of stop/end gaze from them—-they’ve reached the edge of the precipice of THEIR thinking.
(I codify it as the advancement and acceleration of adults and teaching teachers how to teach better.)
I, Kyle, would see I was chatting with someone who thinks by the QUALITY of the questions they ask me. That series of thousands, tens of thousands of times repeated—-to the point of irritation within me—-shows me CHEAP thinking on another person’s part——because they haven’t asked a general question—-ok—-then taken in the answer and instead of knee jerk responding with the most basic follow up question—-they haven’t THOUGHT about a question to ask or follow up statement. Just knee jerked. What I see is that they are as fast, and, simply, lacking in any form of cognitive thinking or complexity put me into one of their small (I assume) mental boxes.
When I say that I have 100+ books published, thousands of articles, blogs, short stories, they sort of blank out, when I add that I have another 200+ in the pipeline to be out and published in the next few years—-100 of those on teaching-specific books—-they sort of titter oddly. Like birds who’ve just had a toothpick shoved up their asses. It’s a lot to take——and you were just standing there—-so the bird didn’t fear the toothpicks' at first.
No, I normally don’t blurt the above out for several reasons.
“I write books, I’ve written a lot of books, blah blah blah….”
(You’ve played the above game—-come on what is the next BASIC question?)
“About what? What do you write about?”
Having written so much over several decades, I write about a lot of stuff. Again unless we’re in a specific venue, can I narrow it down or have a short one sentence answer? (My preferred perfect world answer—-”Google me.” I would offer this is one of the ways you can measure if you’re talking to a high or general level of intelligence—-impatience at BASIC questions.)
200+ More Books. Why?
My writing goal is to complete these next 200+ books to get to what Voltaire marked as the “next stage” of mastery—-this would be my third stage, where one achieves some sort of public acclaim and financial profit but then in the 3rd Stage, chooses to start anew, chart new waters creatively, seek out new challenges. I want to start anew—-I am deeply interested in the works I create AFTER the hundreds of books in a few years are published, the stuff of the 2030s and then the next stage, the 2050s—-that will be my good stuff, my next mountain to climb.
Now when we break it down in class, when I have students, and we’re trying to determine of me, but FOR them, how they too can develop—-then it makes more sense.
- By 14 I’d written about 1000+ 5 page comic scripts, following the guidelines from the Marvel Try Out book and one long—-approximately 500+ page novel. I was also running a national amateur comic book company, Genesis, acting as Editor In Chief.
- By 18, after high school, I’d had 5 direct mentors of my prodigious writing and reading (ever advancing levels of complexity in the domain of literature—-Morrison, Sophocles) plus I’d written another 1000+ comic scripts, several more novels, a screenplay (which I directed an edited into a 2 hour movie) and say 200+ minor writing assignments for classes and publications in school.
It’s safe to say I’d achieved my 10,000+ hours—-Gladwell's misnomered truncation of Ericsson’s studies of expertise/mastery timeframe. Note though that this is what 4 years of college and 2–3 years of graduate school—-to a Masters degree—-would look like approximately in “time” spent and more importantly it, college education (perhaps the best advocacy for it but one would then have to understand the advancing through Practice to understand the value of college level concerted cultivation), has a level of all of the elements of Deliberate Practice infused to it.
- Undergrad I had Three more mentors, all of them world acclaimed/awarded writers and very good, mastery level teachers, in college, as deep, close friends/teachers plus at least another dozen influential professors, to my reading and writing in all forms—-including playwrighting and poetry classes (I won a poetry award though I don’t prefer it as a medium—-and it was my first paid reading gig of $125 by the Buffalo Yacht Club), another half dozen manuscripts written/expanded and sent to a publisher—-who published the short stories and sent back a novella (which I turned into a novel and published), plus at least 100+ short stories written, most published in the school newspaper, magazine or chapbook, but also republished in magazines and such around the world.
- On top of that I was a Teacher’s Assistant for three professors and regularly not only got teaching experience but I was also a registered student and fully participated and did all of the writing assignments (generally 30 to 50 typed original pages a semester). Great lessons in feedback, given and received from hundreds of classmates as we read our projects aloud.
- Let’s say I got another solid 10,000 hours after those 4–5 years.
20,000 focused on writing, reading and the sub-skill of teaching by 25 years old.
I didn’t directly go into teaching, I thought about it but have an interest in business/entrepreneurship so I went into corporate America for close to a decade before going into education——which is where my IQ and abilities come in.
Yes, I’ve taken IQ tests and have a rough idea of what it is, higher than 130, because I understood how the test was graded. But I stopped before completion, thinking it was spiritually unsound to know such a number, especially a number that is only a measurement of the ability to do well on an IQ test.
It is application that shows ability.
(I would also offer in here that most people, the general public—-200+ million adults in America measure themselves constantly, unconsciously and consciously and there live by those measurements and assume two things—-that everything in life is measurable and casualty form measurements or that everyone next to them is measuring with the exact same metrics they are.
IQ and Money-Work
When I was starting out after college, I shot up from $7.25 an hour that June to $52,000 a year by that February. Then I went from 50k to 80k.
But I was single, no kids.
I am different from a married person or single person with children. The money is quantitatively and qualitatively different, as I’ve also taken advanced HR Block and IRS tax classes so I control my taxes.
So then a counterpart, a friend, who was also Black—-we briefly were roommates was making $10 an hour and then $15—-roughly 30k a year at the same time (I remember because of the renting allocations and the office explaining to me that we were getting the apartment on the strength of my income, not theirs.
Did however being “smarter”, measured against my counterpart friend whom I helped get employment in NYC, eventually rising to near my level—pay off years later. Bluntly, do I still make more than them?
Yes. Mainly from my ability to learn and apply that learning as marketable skills. (With my adult students, we often talk and demand lack of generalities and specificity, another trait of good learners and those with high IQs.)
I took MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook classes at a computer school on 34th street—-$99 a class—-Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced—-I took all three for all of the software.
I also took HTML, JavaScript, Java, C++—$399 per class.
Then I took Desktop Support Technician—-which is a hybrid of A+ and the Hardware work of assembling and dismantling repair computers. $399
I then took Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Quark and PageMaker (now InDesign), $399 per class.
A Wall Street agency was looking to Mastery level integrate training for firms—-Lehman Bros. and Goldman Sachs who needed high end graphic designers—-the training was free but they took me to a whole other level with PowerPoint and Excel, integration and then I worked overnights for Goldman—-while working full time at another company.
Then I spotted NYU Stern Finance classes and started taking those—-eventually becoming a very highly paid financial analyst.
Then I pivoted and went into paralegal work—-first using a paralegal manual that I carried with me—-as I’d carried the MS Office manual with me—-until I had enough skill from paralegal assignments to take longer jobs specializing in Sarbanes Oxley securities work—-there were only a handful of us in the city doing that level of work as paralegals so we got farmed around a lot.
Though I hadn’t started out in IT, I learned a lot about it on my own dime and often was the de facto IT person in a corporate office (increasing my indispensability)
When I was deciding to go back to school, Columbia specifically for law school/education, what sidetracked me and then enhanced me for it was my resume—-based upon the certifications I was tapped to teach certifications at corporations and then at the university FROM those trainings I took and paid for myself to simply be better at what I was sitting in front of temp job screens.
My former roommate stopped learning, though intelligent and potentially very smart, took a permanent job at the same payrate as temping and got stuck in that kind of assistant quagmire until being laid off twice and is back at an assistant job, almost 20 years later. I didn’t do so in an acquisitional way but I was always wiling to not only learn, but pay for it from schools, classes, books, teachers—-even when teaching IT getting my systems administrator licenses and such—-using my ability to learn to put another tool in my toolbelt, even if I wasn’t using it directly then for a direct dollar.
(What I’ve noted over the years is people learn to the LIP edge of what their job requires. I learn as much as I can form what everyone AROUND me in the office is doing.)
Years later consulting and teaching—-one always takes a hit from corporate America to teaching—-I was working a hybrid, managing a program/teaching and back down to $54k but then back up to 80k.
Now consider my TIME—-at the corporate jobs I worked very hard, long hours, enjoyed it, learned a tremendous amount but was pretty much “actively” working for the companies I worked for at least 2/3s of the time I was physically there.
Contrast that to education making over time the same entry and then high end salaries—-I have very specific teaching times, consulting at companies/school times and other time that is understood to be my writing, typing, curriculum/school design time and correction of students work.
I calculate my physical “work” time at about 10 hours from a 50 hour week, the rest of the time I’m thinking or typing. If you bundled together all of my typing—-say another 3 hours.
I have inverted the corporate formula by getting paid for 2/3s of my time when I’m not physically teaching” because my working/billable time is now more thinning than doing.
During COVID I literally had no income disruption and in fact made more money because Ione, live in Manhattan so it made me accessible to the sites I was at/teaching and two, for years with a TV show and videos—-I’d been doing educational videos—-so I was already set up in my home and the television studio to send off video lessons (that I mayhap have taped in the middle of the night—-I’m a night owl—-in my shorts with a shirt and tie on. To push this to the IQ question, I would say that I have learned how to work—-seeing work as a necessary but mutable/malleable concept. For instance for the past 8 to 10 years I haven’t worked anywhere for 5 weekdays of the week. Generally I do 3 1/2 because I have learned systems of other places—-universities, corporations and simply suggested a more efficient use of my time to fit their needs—-because I have considered their needs. All of my coworkers see the work, the job through their personalized needs—-which means they (guiltily?) default to the system’s paradigm of 5 days a week.
Years ago when I suggested to my boss, coming in with a copy of everyone’s schedule and the master schedule, this change for me and what it would give to the company/university—-his only concern was could I maintain doing longer days for a shorter week? Years later, he left but pointed out that I never faltered—which of course means that strengthened our working bond because I was focused on how to do better for him, get him promoted, ease the weight of his position—-which I’ve always done, which translate back down to making me a valued, indispensable employee—-who is able to negotiate for my own minor alterations and needs. A high IQ in action is not only the ability to learn but to learn from the opposite side of the table AND negotiate.)
Into education I went and I was really, really really good at it———to the observation and feedback from workshop participants, students, supervisors, evaluators——so I kept in that train for a handful of years but began to feel that I was like Luke Skywalker at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. had great ability btu I didn’t know how to exactly harness it, what it was, but I was getting paid upwards of 80k a year for it. Which is why I focused and started taking classes and then was invited to teach, at Columbia.
Am I a genius? Prodigious? What did my childhood look like?
My great grandparents, grandparents and parents, were all college+, high school completion, post graduate educated, pointedly when it was unusual for Native, Black, mixed folk, to be so. This meant that I’ve grown up with multiple generations invested in education, surrounded by books; I was taught chess at about 3 by my mother, I’ve been reading since then, as well, and they had the resources, to give me pads and paper and pens and crayons for me to practice mimicry of comics for years and then their own entrepreneurial wherewithal to assist me in my early teens at starting an amateur comic book business with dozens around the country.
The resources that a family, community has to give to a child or teen or adult to practice, to experiment, to buy in my case, comic books—-thousands, magazines, books, rent movies (adult fare—-I’ve never liked kid fare even as one) and even having cable since I was a child—-I’ve had a broader palette to experiment on and learn from.
All of the above is infused into me, in my capacity to learn and understand and see patterns, and hypothesize and have oodles and oodles of information in my head about a lot of stuff that might stump or stymie other children/adults. I also, most importantly, learned how to learn——which directly answers this question.
I know how to learn. How to think.
I used to joke before I got back into education and was working in corporate world, that I just needed to be trained by someone who knew what they were doing and most importantly allowed me to ask questions—-now my questions are rarely beginner or basic level——generally I’m asking Advanced to Mastery level questions.
That facility—-Mastery of Learning is really my ancillary, entangled ability, to reading, writing, teaching, presentation. Maybe 15 years ago I was wandering around NYC and I was simply looking at things, ideas, signage, people, etc. and I realized that there was nothing beyond my ability to understand. That everything I was looking at—-cars, buses, human bodies, airplanes, etc.—-I understood some to advanced ideas of the mechanics of.
I then started testing myself—-deep science stuff—-and here’s a wild trick I do online——say someone mentions something or someone I’m unfamiliar with——a poster recently did so on Facebook about a John Updike novel——so not having read the novel, I looked it and him up, and got the gist of it so I could participate in the discussion.
That’s what I think the internet is for. To fill in gaps. I did the same with figuring out, when I was an LGBTSGL coordinator, how to cure AIDS, what that would look like, and therefore the timespan the agency had to be dependent on CDC funding—-I gave them a modest 8–10 years—-they went out of business 10 years from that meeting where I’d presented my theory, 10 years prior. I could see where the agency was going, from the inside, in terms of external ideas—-funding, the CDC, medical advancements—-and the internal lack of motivation to not be dependent on CDC funding.
Yes, my business experience, owning a business, was invaluable to that evaluation——how I could simply stand somewhere and understand it.
As a teacher for over 20 years I can honestly tell you, most people cannot, do not, are out of practice, of thinking. The actual act of stopping, silencing their thoughts and focusing their cognitive ability at an idea, a problem, a mechanical object.
Could I have done this faster, the same if I was married in the beginning, had children in my 20s?
Yes, probably, I would’ve been even more focused to learn and advance more. By my own estimations I’ve moved slower than I could because of so many competing interests and less pressure.
Why Has This Social Lag Occurred In Learning?
One, TV took away the social habit of reading. Reading is like constant aerobics for the brain. Unfortunately mass paperback reading/text messages, internet reading——you know the hits about vampires and magical little White boys and heroines who are the only ones' who can save the world—-dumb people down too. I watch in Facebook groups—-this is really funny—-as women describe gay fiction they want to read and give a recipe/laundry list for what it should include, down to characterizations—-so that they can read it and often compare it to the previous book they've read. Which means, qualitatively, they’re reading the same book—-over and over and over.
The guy posting about the Updike novel couldn’t fathom how it was award winning literature vs. the casual fiction he was used to. I don’t doubt he’s intelligent and smart (the application of intelligence) but as he went on and on—-his reading habits don’t involve the challenge of literature. So when confronted by it, as I gently suggested, it wouldn’t be palatable. He doesn’t understand the distinction. He doesn’t understand there is a New York because he’s stayed in his small (mental) town.
I say this because 16, 17 years old in high school, and in an AP class and English class, I was pressed to read Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth—-the first 100+ pages I detested—-because my diet was more pulp fiction—-but then I got into it—-crying at the end. The same with Sophocles and Morrison’s Tar Baby and Song of Solomon. What I discovered then, and then further in college, is that some books are well, deep, and need patience and focus, and sometimes even a guide to navigate-appreciate the depths.
What allows me to learn—-I am not too far digressing—-is that I know there will be a frustration period in learning something, unveiling a puzzle, where I know there’s more to it but I don’t completely understand it. But I, like most learners, who learn well, have learned to ride out that uncomfortable time—-deal with it, reread the passages and chapters, look stuff up, talk to someone, go to classes. Most people stop at difficult and instead relegate themselves back down, to easy.
I’m rereading The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. And Tolstoy and several other BIG literature names for a writing project on teaching. Dostoevsky, this round, has taught me about economy in his writing as he illuminates characters and history while moving the plot along—-I see his sewing, his work, his ability at writing at work now, differently than I did even a decade ago as a writer. I walked into the heavy ass book willing to not know, to find both content and structural understanding and illumination, and here we are.
So, we, who have done the work—-Ericsson has narrowed it down to specific parts of the brain, including the hippocampi that enlarge with reading and writing and other activities—-also other areas for athletes and musicians—-know that it is, that yes, my number IQ is higher than 130. I don’t necessary feel it because it is my habit to think this way—-sometimes yes, in discussion and even in teaching, I find that I can do—-have mental models and representations—-for a thousand things those around me don’t have at their immediate disposal.
Ironically, it was a great tool in communicating with my mother who’d had several strokes—-and to re-teach her how to communicate——because I understand mental maps/representations by listening to people-students and meeting them there and then enhancing it. I go around now simply laying those mental maps onto things, people, events, the news, history, everything and it’s like I’ve built these bridges to understanding things. I can pretty much look at smoothing and understand it, ask a question or two, use the internet as an informational source and jump right into a discussion minutes later. I was also able to use it several other times communicating with a man in jail whom LSD had warped his perception of reality but he was still cognitively functioning—-everything was simply backwards. After it had flushed out of his system, he thanked me for so calmly talking to him, gently correcting his wrong view of reality—he thought he was going insane because when he tried to communicate, the others shunned him in confusion. I’ve also had several other students who decompensated, mentally went sideways and I had to sit, be patient with them, listen to their construct. There’s some great work and works by Stanislav Grof about this kind of mediation.
Not everyone has developed those kinds of mental models so they don’t have connectors to connect faster, deeper, more thoroughly, to what they see or experience. Which is a long way of yes, expanding what some of what a standardized IQ test is. Which is why I use other evaluation assessments and measurements to “see” the intellectual ability of folk.
The argument or undermining argument of why people see IQ or ability to think as so concretized and fixed, is because they weren’t assisted in getting past the first hump—-I would say about 2000 hours of focusing on a singular idea, topic, domain, sport, etc.. They hit a wall and figure—-”I guess I simply don’t know math, will never get it.” People of higher ability/IQ think instead—-”I do not understand this but it is understandable—-it is me, this vessel, which I must alter, be patient with, reapply, focus.”
As an aside, yes one’s head can hurt—-it’s actually dendrites and myelin and such, growing, expanding in your brain as you learn—-which is why systems like Pomodoro—-timed focus, rest, timed focus, rest done consecutively, is so effective.
The wrong people are asking the wrong questions about intelligence and learning and education and neuroscience. Deliberate Practice—-pretty much outlined in my childhood—-teens—-adult years—-and even now with a rereading of Dostoevsky—-is possible for everyone. Everyone. EVERYONE. It’s that resources in materials, time and motivation are scattered throughout lives and people and sexes and nations and so on.
I understand subjects without knowing a single thing about them, I’m reading a book on How Not To Be Wrong, The Power of Mathematical Thinking—-he just went through calculus——and I somewhat understand what he’s saying even as he writes all of these formulas.
I just had a discussion with a sprinkler pipe Mastery level manager, because I can see the pipes and understand the basic duties of cutting, fitting, testing, that he and others are doing—- I ask him my first question, which he was surprised by but answered affirmatively——aside from the blueprints can he see the network of pipes behind walls in his mind’s eye?
Yes. He could even tell when the blueprints were misleading because that person——an architect was thinking of the building and not the pipe system So he could see where to make adjustments, changes, amendments.
Could he also see water—-the pressure, the flow, the origination and how it should end?
Yes, he could tell by air, water, droplets or gushes, where it was coming from, why it was coming from, if it was adequate or not, what to fix or amend. Then he started telling me all about the inner workings—-because I had asked him advanced questions.
That’s how people of higher IQs, a misnomer, but word placeholder, can understand things——we are simply overlaying a flexible mental map to everything—-even when I’m writing—-I have a grammar mind map—-and can’t understand the heavy reliance on Grammarly—-weren't you paying attention like I was, in school?
But I was also practicing grammar for thousands of more hours in reading (absorption) and then creative and business writing. (Most people don’t write well.) So of course I make errors but my ideas are clearer, cleaner, and I can even come on here as I do, for random questions, and answer them in one shot, one sitting, one writing, as an exercise in understanding a question and writing out an answer from my own knowledge and experience.
Most people who read my stuff think I’m espousing for the thrill of it—-but what I’m really doing—-this is my “gym” workout, so that I can go finish so many novels and books. I’ll do a rough spelling check on this, then give it 24 hours (waving 24 hours later as I’ve cleaned it up from it’s first posted form! Hi!) and clean it up a bit more but I let this run its course—-this is like a cross country jog for me—-I’m not trying to beat a time, just do the jog.
Most people think because of IQ, a number, that they can’t “jog” mentally as fast as a higher number can, but the real reason why you don’t have a higher IQ number is because you don’t jog, mentally, regularly—-which makes it easier to understand……how to jog properly…and then track running and then skiing and then swimming….understand similar related systems and movements. Which is yes, swinging from one domain to another but not having to start at square one.
But I can tell you as a teacher, most people think they’re far smarter than they appear and most really smart people, including myself, don’t think constantly that we’re smart, because we’ve also embraced the one thing that people who aren’t very smart run away from——”I don’t know.”
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