12 Feb
2010
12 Feb
'10
10:13 p.m.
1) most of us don't know what are talents are
2) "genius is 90% perspiration, 10% inspiration"
3) some recent estimates are that it takes about 10,000 hours (*) of
just about anything to master it. this is said to be independent of
"talent".
Could be entirely true. There's insights from cognitive neuroscience
that suggests expertise involves a change in representation in the
expert's field. It could be that you can only learn at a certain
rate. It may mean thousands or so hours or it may mean just to live
or work in the right environment.
I grew up around a machine shop, the family business. My grandfather
was supposedly quite the mechanical genius, and Pop's a doctor of
aerospace. Naturally, I got used to using the tools and machines, and
I worked in the machine shop as a teenager. It sucked... oh, man...
it sucked.... but out of college, with no engineering job, I went back
to it and worked for two years. I even managed to make an artificial
mechanical flower that opens up under thermal stresses. Now, you can
see that I got the talent, but you couldn't have expected me to learn
a thing about it if I grew up in a different environment. So, there's
got to be an element of opportunity that's involved.