David Brooks: No Genius
I’m sure David Brooks works very hard. In fact, I’m sure he has spent the Gladwell-ian 10,000 hours practicing his craft. Which is why he should look to himself as an example before he starts peddling this kind of twaddle:
"Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness — Dante, Mozart, Einstein — whose talents far exceeded normal comprehension…"
In their constant rush to figure out a way to elevate the ordinary– which must naturally include themselves– writers like Brooks fall into exactly the trap I was describing a few days ago… making a straw man argument of "genius is all" instead of the common (and rather obvious) argument that "genius is necessary." Genius in this context has nothing to do with IQ, of course, and everything to do with what a person can ultimately create and do.
I’m in no way diminishing the necessity for long hours of practice that the studies Brooks and others refer to accurately point out. But is this news? After all, what’s the secret to getting to Carnegie Hall? Of course those at the top of their field and craft have spent an enormous amount of time working to get there. That’s not in question. What’s at issue is whether others could get there if they just practiced as much and with the same effort and deliberation.
Without a gift one can practice any number of hours and he or she will never reach a particularly high level. And without an immense gift, they will never be an Einstein or a Tiger Woods. Call it what you want– genius, talent, innate ability, aptitude, but it exists– as easily evidenced by the masses of the average and the mediocre who nonetheless pursue their goal with admirable persistence. And as much as we might wish it to be so, these gifts aren’t subject to the best selling (and rather sad) democratization the self-help industry tries to impose.
If you took Brooks’s hypothetical young woman who "possessed a slightly above average verbal ability" that was "just enough so that she might gain some sense of distinction" and followed the prescription he outlines you would end up with a slightly above average writer who had maximized her talent through hard work. If fortune were in your favor you might have a mid-list novelist, or one of the many unknown academics who haunt the fringes of the annual MLA conference. Perhaps you would even end up with a New York Times op-ed columnist famous for her wrong-headed political predictions and deceit. But what you wouldn’t have on your hands is Jane Austen.
The necessity of talent to become the next Shakespeare or Michelangelo shouldn’t be discouraging. The reason books denying the necessity of talent sell so well is natural. And what this means for education is important. I’ll discuss each of those in future posts.