How do I motivate a child to play and learn chess? by Kyle Phoenix

Great question—-chess, taught at an early age teaches insight, foresight, planning behaviors, patience, thought control and critical thinking. I have never not known how to play chess because my parents deeply enjoyed the game, but broke up when I was about 2; they met in college (and got back together and married when I was 10). One of the first questions my father asked my mother when they reunited was if she’d taught me chess—she was like of course!

I must’ve learned it between 3–5. But to reinforce the learning, my mother and her brother pitted my cousin and I, a few months apart in age, against one another in chess (and boxing—-which my mother also taught me.) My cousin Chris—-who is—-let’s call it 45 mph in a 65 mph zone excelled at chess. But his sister, a few years younger, Kory was even better. We would have chess and boxing tournaments and then when I would visit for the summer play incessantly, all while under 12.

I would play my parents, never winning—-my father’s strategy of using the Queen’s Gambit was if I could defeat it, he would play me a second game—-if I couldn’t, he wouldn’t play me again for another 24 hours. It took me close to 20+ years before I was laying in a hospital staring at the ceiling, replaying chess games and strategies in my head, that I understood how to defeat the Queen’s Gambit.

Further I’d started working at a charter school and one of the things they were doing with the kindergarten children was teaching them chess. One day I went to help with a Saturday coverage of them and literally got hardcore trounced by a group of 9 year old's. The only saving grace is they hadn’t decided to hustle me for cash. But it was an infused part of their curriculum through middle school and high school because of all of the additives, mentally, it produces.

It’s one of the first questions I ask dates, children, parents, students, coworkers—-can you play chess? You like chess? It’s literally a mind map of their mentality and abilities to think. All of my students who can play, training at earlier ages (you generally can get to the Grandmaster levels the younger you learn, similar to Go).

What motivated me was one I got to do an adult activity that I saw they had great investment in. Then there was the competition with my cousins and the Thunderdome like atmosphere our parents created against pitting us against one another. I would say that later I enjoyed and eventually noticed that it improved not my thinking—-that would be metacognition—-but I could imagine things—-actions, tactics, etc. better because I’d learned the fundamentals of strategy and tactics through chess. What this also does is it helps to now, even in adulthood—-when irritated calm me down. It forces me to think. Not simply react. Because I was accustomed to thinking in a strategic way, I’ve normalized it so even now as an adult I’m constantly considering everything in two or three possibilities.

I’m able to rationalize reality a lot better. I might be upset at coworkers or at the processes at a job/work but then I can think about it—-detach from the emotional upset and instead consider if I will one, die if a job ends (no.) and then backtrack from here through other life scenarios or irritants and reconsider my emotional experiences.

Being able to articulate to a child that you can consider various responses and reactions enforces a sense of Agency and a lack of helplessness. I can be irritated or annoyed but I rarely feel helpless. Chess has taught me in a blunt way that there’s always another move, another option, to consider myself aside from the situation, to consider the situation aside from my direct self. While I see a personal effect sometimes I’m also able to see that affecting me is a side affect of the effect of something else.

When I talk to children and adults about learning chess, I also talk them about learning long term planning, seeing greater possibilities than one or two immediate actions. This is invaluable in helping with mathematical proficiency, reading, writing, etc. as well as social benefits.

One thing I often consider, is that aside from helplessness, I never feel wholly trapped by the vagaries of life—-I see my life in terms of a longer term timeline of moves and countermoves—-and from that, a sense of both autonomy and Grace. I’ve come to realize how much Life can’t harm me by learning to see, imagine, project, consider, strategize. That byproduct is that even when things seem dire, I’m able to project myself my thinking, the possibilities beyond myself. Talking to children about this in bite sized pieces, while teaching and practicing chess (and Go), I think are invaluable to building stronger teens/adults.

If you can, learn it; if you can, teach it to every child close to you. As a teacher, having observed those who know and those who don’t, it’s literally one of the deciding factors in cognitive abilities and mental strength.

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Are there cultures or professions where it's common to have mentors? by Kyle Phoenix

 

Yes, they are but in multiple forms.

All of your k to 12 teachers are mentors but most only listen to them on one level. Often when people reflect about meaningful teachers, they relate the teacher speaking more expansively. Any teacher who tells you more than the book is a mentor.

Books are encapsulated mentorship because generally they relay a lot of the thinking the person was using.

Sitting Bull then becomes your mentor.
Golda Meier shows you how to construct a society.

If you're smart , really smart you've got at least a hundred mentors sitting in your personal library. Ironically if you don't have a library, you probably need mentors. For the past 14 months Michael Gerber has been mentoring me through a business systems rehab. Inch by grueling inch. I expect it to be a two year process.

To find adult mentors means you must edit your company. You must make the Wagon of Success you're pulling as empty of detrius people as possible because mentors take up a lot of space. They also won't be in easy to access places because they are learning, practicing so it's like you are parachuting onto a moving car. You have to be sure of your questions, interests, etc and stand out.

The Adult Education programs at Columbia fizzled out just as I arrived in 2009 so I thought how can I give into this situation, stay in the river while it reorients? I started teaching. At first for free and then I batted that out of the park then they said Brookfield comes to town twice a semester, his classes will fulfill. By his first class I had bought six of his 14 books. Day 2 the other 8 arrived. I then took his classes, the same ones at least four times each. He's that good. He then mentored me about teaching, consulting, publishing, writing, business and dying parents over the course of the past few years.

Undergraduate several moons before that I was a sophomore and a friend mentioned a professor Carlene Hatcher Polite that I might like who taught writing and literature classes. But one had to audition their work and it was only for Juniors and Seniors only. I dragged a five foot duffel page full of binders and notebooks, auditioned and got a special exception to get in. The next semester Carlene made me her first TA in fifteen years. There are no undergraduate TAs, a special waiver was created for me. She then introduced me to Raymond Federman who I became a TA for----he would leave me to teach his class when he was out of the country during Drop/Add.

Mentors are often eccentric by if you full court show up they will see you and draw you in closer because they know they gain more power from your enhancements. Your augmentation is proof of concept.

They exist in all cultures and professions, they tend to be odd to the system. Look for the ones who seem to have freedom and liberty that others don't. But there are millions. Then approach with a smile and a question and know the suggestion they give is a test to see if you're serious.

What’s your biggest learning from writing books? #KylePhoenix

 

What I have learned from 30+ years of writing full manuscripts, some published as books and for sale on Amazon (shameless plug) I’ve learned how to read and write, better. Several of my manuscripts from my teens, I have published, I’ve seen my own development. There was a time when I was tip toeing into ideas around sex, sexuality, race, politics, identity and then as the years pressed on and I went on to university, I began exploring more and more. The exploration was because my work began to blossom, to expand.

Most people who write, and go on and on and on about it—-the internet has opened the floodgate of people who watch too much tv, too many movies, read too much pulp fiction (vampires, the girl on the train, zombies, romance, dragons and bs)———are vomiting a redux of what they’ve read. Creating a glut. The other side of that is to be creative, innovative, to create Art.

There comes a point, there came a point, in my writing where it was no longer mimicry or fantasy or fan fiction or trying to write superhero scripts—-which I realized using Marvel and DC and Star Trek characters—-that they would never be mine—they were static, they would never change. I started creating my own characters, my own storylines. I had fun. But that step from the musings on other characters to my own, was the first level of growth.

I started writing a tawdry soap opera—-The Hemmingways—-about 700 handwritten pages that my middle school passed around. I then saw that I was doing One life to Live, All My Children, Dynasty, The Colbys with different names and drama. Again, growth to my own creations.

The World Today was my first long short story—-75 pages—-which was wholly original characters, that I worked on with my high school creative writing teacher. Then I wrote a court thriller, Court of Conscience. TWT (later published as a 700+ page novel retitled Hush) and CoC taught me, pressed me, I challenged me, teachers challenged me, about racial lead characters, sexuality, dramatic dynamics. I had danced around these issues before in The Hemmingways and comic book scripts but now I boldly went into them. Then a few years later at university, working on Hush, I started exploring short, intense short stories—-published in Escapades I and II.

I began to deeply explore race not from simplistically White to Black but to how Black people experience bigger ideas—-magic, the multiverse, power, money, wealth.

Then sex and sexuality—-and how people were different in my experience and imagination. And then how a dollop of drama or magic or fantasy or depth could transform a story, a full novel.

What I learned was that the world did not need me to try and recreate my favorite tales or books—-those had already been written. The world needed me to try and answer my own ideas and questions and thoughts, explore those. What I learned from there, surprisingly, was that my first books published were not my first books written. My first books published were non-fiction then I circled back to fiction. I discovered in writing, Art, that my characters were more complex, easier and more difficult to control. They had matured from archetypes, from stereotypes, from cardboard placeholders to people that I am not always sure I like. My writing began to parallel the stuff that I love that I read.

Sometimes I’ll pick up one of my books and just sit and read it, a chapter or two, and like good Art, I’m lost. There was a time in birthing this novel or story that I knew it frontwards and back, and now it takes me a minute, sometimes five, to remember who this person is, what this story is about. But I can move with it now, I can understand it as a reader.

Your work takes a quantum leap when you not just move from mimicry to Art, from writing to being a writer but when you become interested in your writing, interested in a scene, a character a point——that yes, you wrote—-like a reader.

That’s what I’ve learned. It’s not a self congratulatory thing, it’s more of a wandering into this forest and suddenly seeing each tree that you yourself carved, shaped and planted. You realize that one root goes back to another and to another and that they all form of a novel. And you can sort of smell in it which book it reminds you of, from your favorite writer, or a twinkle of an idea you turned hybrid for your own work.

That’s what you get from reading—-seeds for a forest of your own.

#KylePhoenix

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For those of you with an IQ in the top 0.01% (profoundly gifted) what has your educational path looked like? Answered by Kyle Phoenix

For those of you with an IQ in the top 0.01% (profoundly gifted) what has your educational path looked like?

Kyle Phoenix, Writer and student & Instructor at Columbia University

Updated Sep 15

I can't remember specifics before 6 because of childhood abuse but there's a pic of my intently focused on one of my mothers college text books at 3-4. I remember playing rhyming word games in preschool in a big yellow room and when we did get, let, bet, I yelled out debt upsetting the lesson because the teacher then had to do a mini economics lesson and explain the b in the word.

I can’t remember when she taught me, but by at least 4 I’ve known how to play chess, taught by my mother and then years later reinforced lessons from my father. My mother and uncle used to pit myself and my cousin against each other in chess and boxing tournaments.

Third grade, school, across the street I was truant from for months, forging letters of illness and faking my stepfathers voice. Insanely I produced homework every night for months on end and multiple projects. I did an essay on Russia. I got busted and had to explain how I was doing the classwork of my grade and higher, who was feeding me info? Lol

4th grade was a short bus ride away to Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn and you could leave the building at lunch and buy your own. I had discovered comic books and a full hobby store—-my fondest memory of elementary school.
Catholic school after that where I pointed out years later in a high school science class , 9th grade, that the book was the same as my fifth grade one. They didn't believe me.

My parents divorced in a cataclysm in October of 7th grade, we left town and returned in May. I'd been testing 12th grade reading and 11th grade math since 4th grade so they just graduated me to 8th grade. Mathematically this hampered me as I missed out on algebraic transition but I remember being deeply fascinated by probability theory, further exampled in years of RPG campaigns.

I started drawing comics at about 6 and writing scripts at 12. By 7 I'd started my first business. By 13 my first national one. By 13 I'd written several novels.
In high school I had several mentors. Two in writing and one in advanced literature who enforced that he hadn't gotten to college until 21 and had a doctorate . I stayed in high school until March of my senior year for a boyfriend and all of those writing classes, they would extort my other classes against the writing ones. At 16 I wrote a two hour full screenplay for our soap opera club and began directing it which got me into an advanced program at Long Island university. I was in the Mock Trial team though it was only for Juniors and Seniors, as a Freshman and allowed to compete as a Sophomore because I knew the rules, case, etc so well.

Rather than graduate high school I took the GED and scored 3 short of a perfect score---I would have had to stay another semester to collect ten credits to graduate on time. I still have confused dreams about whether I'm still trapped in high school.

I worked for a couple of years then got to a state school where I TAed as an undergrad, displayed a dozen manuscripts and wrote and published more around the country. Won some writing awards, got hired for performances, wrote for chapbooks, newspaper and magazine all at once, pissing folk off.

Five years and I was done. Corporate America for a few years, a dozen computer certifications, real estate almost license, MBA, then I went into education/teaching , taught thousands------sexuality , relationships, finance, entrepreneurship, taught all ages, then started consulting to DOE to repair schools, professional development, and decided on masters in education, jd in education policy, doctorate. Started a TV show series and began book publishing business on Columbia professors advice.

A couple hundred books in, still another hundred to come out in the next few years. It sounds like a prodigious amount but the first wave of a hundred are from years of workshops and salvageable manuscripts and dozens of short stories .

When I finish this phase, I'd like to pursue film, music, physics and psychology as masters degrees over the next 20 years. I want to write some more films and create music that I dream but have never heard anywhere. I'm considering a clinical medical technology training program so that I can potentially teach it as I have computers, ged classes , college classes in nearly all subjects. I want a thick CV.

I like school when I am paced, pushed. Outside life always imbalances me away from interests so for now I'm just selfishly writing, school, work. No other distractions. I stopped my IQ test in the high 160s, I could see it was really going higher. I think its spiritually unhealthy to know the exact number. I fully expect to be "discovered" after death so I'm quite happy to create a swath of work, make a little money and enjoy the exploration rather than seek adoration. Sometimes I think there will be this mass thing one day of students and friends talking about me, trying to piece together their experiences of me to my work. The internet, my videos. TV show, books, blog, even this fascinates me as time capsule of sorts.

I own about 5000 books.

I’ve read probably 10,000 books.

I’ve owned and read about 30,000 comic books which might fall into high and lowbrow, I drastically improved my reading comprehension and understanding of narrative structure as a child. As a teacher, I would recommend that parents inundate their children with comic books at an early age.

I used to consume magazines at an insane rate until just the sheer moving of them got ridiculous. Maybe 2500 of them.

I don’t watch TV or movies regularly because of limited narrative structures, I find it predictable. That has to do with an eidetic memory so the suspension of disbelief is difficult for me to achieve. It also promotes false values and morals and reinforces hegemony. I’m very selective as an adult, in the past 15–20 years what I consciously allow into my mind.

I regularly read about 5 books a week in a wide range of areas. I would say 80% of my reading in the past 20 years is non-fiction, it used to be reversed but I found fiction repetitive.

I go to the movies maybe two or three times a year now with Netflix and Hulu and I haven’t watched cable in years, a waste of money too have so much available but unable to consume.

I write a lot, 10,000,000 words a year.

I’m often taking not only in person but online courses. My lottery dream would involve winning the lottery and then being able to travel to classes all over the world constantly. My second educational dream is three or four more Masters degrees in film/media, math, physics and finance/business.

I can’t remember ever being “bored”.

www.kylephoenix.com

Smile, Kyle
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com

#KylePhoenix
Kyle Phoenix Answers

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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.

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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Kyle Phoenix Answers: What is it like to have achieved 10000 hours mastery of skills and looking back, how was the journey like?

I think many are overcomplicating this and not mixing in other elements that 10k would bring. I've been writing stories since I was 6, long drawn out comics with stick figures and byzantine plots. By 12 I started journaling regularly. By 14 I had a small amateur comic company that was national. By sixteen I'd written half a dozen novels. At 22 I dragged a duffel bag of binders into a creative writing class begging to get in as a freshman. I did. I became Carlene Hatcher Polite's Ta, the year I added on Raymond Federman, the experimental writer.

I estimate I have about 40k hours of writing/teaching hours, which includes reading ever increasing in complexity texts, writing in nearly every form from novels to screenplays to directing a movie to plays to poetry to articles to essays to fan fix to blogs to grants to brochures to newsletters to case management reports to resumes to letters to erotica to online rants to marketing campaigns to school/program curriculum to business development process (from Michael Gerber).

Mastery by Robert Greene and several books by Howard Gardner plus the talent code and talent explained quantify this better.

You need a minimum of 10k hours but then you need accomplished mentors, unbiased feedback and ever increasing and diverse challenges to the skill to achieve mastery.

I got those from professors from sending work out and getting published from writing classes where my rule was to never submit the same piece twice, even for different classes, so I was forced to do new things every assignment, being published by my teens so I got over that thrill and returned to the work itself and then the myriad of ways I've used that base skill, including teaching.

So now I've written over 125 with the final plan including up to 500 books and published them. I see the first 125 as rough drafts of my lifetime canvas. I expect 499 to be an inch more or different than 125 or 307. Some pieces and books are great, others mediocre, a few the feeling the idea and the execution got too jumbled to be good. But a few, a psychic promised me 7-8 , will be my lifetime classics. But you have to be willing to learn how to cook for 10k practice hours then put in another 100,000 making stuff.

Incidentally a 40 week is about 2080 hours a year, undergrad about 4-5 years, masters 2 more....about 10k. It's only 4 years really l, maybe five or seven. What I've noticed is people want great skill without significant investment. Only one other writing classmate has seriously published and is a professional teacher writer and in retrospect she was as much of a zealot as I was about our art. Others not so much. They have mundane jobs, tweet a bit, blog a bit, have a dusty manuscript that they wont just self publications to get feedback and more important get on, evolve to the next good or bad idea.

That's the 10k success key---train, practice, mentors, feedback, increased complexity, repeat, repeat, repeat.

If you think expertise is 10k, you're narrowly complexifying expertise, expertise is hearing about the theory and doing a back coin on approximate time invested and come up with 40,000 plus hours, turning to your class at Columbia University, one of five, and realizing, oh, shit, that's the summation equation of how I got here and being thousands of hours past the line with no intention of slowing down. I'm sure ill clock at least two thousand more a year on average reading, writing creating for another twenty to fifty years. Now consider THAT number. Lol

Kyle Phoenix

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