We get letters. So far, and it’s only been a few weeks that my book has been out, the letters have been pretty nice. No one, yet, has told me they took my advice and bankrupted their company, disinherited their kids, or run off with the circus. But it’s only Thursday. There’s still time.
A letter arrived last weekend (okay, officially it was an ‘email’ but it was so carfefully composed it seemed like an old-fashioned handwritten note from a previous era) that thanked me for having helped the letter-writer achieve an epiphany regarding a thorny problem her consulting company had been working through for a year. It seems that, among other things, what made it possible for my book to be genuinely helpful was that I had taken care to get myself out of the way of the message.
I have helped a lot of smart people become successful authors and leaders, and one of my first rules for my clients is: you must tell your audience as quickly as possible who you are. Say it on the flap. Say it on the back cover. Say it in the intro. Because, if an author tries to keep themselves in the background, the reader will be unable to hear your message until they feel that they know where you’re coming from.
Naturally, when it came to writing my own book, I took my own advice. Right in the introduction I explain the importance of getting yourself out of the way, and then I explain as well as I can why I wrote this book. The reader is then free to ask for their money back, throw down the book in despair, or continue reading.
Here’s the funny part about this letter. My reader wrote to me:
“First, I always start reading from the back of the book. I have done this since I was a child and now that many authors are placing their acknowledgements in the back, it is even more meaningful for me. You see, I need to know something about the writer and about where the book is going before I can settle in to the process of accepting it and reading it in a linear fashion.
“So, you might imagine my delight/eerie sense of exposure when I finally started the book at the beginning and read your explanation of how most readers need to understand the author. Golly - how did you know?”
I’m not sure how to make my get-yourself-out-of-the-way theory work for those contrarian readers who start at the back. I suppose I could put my Introduction upside down at the end of the book so the book would have only one way in. But I might get some pushback on that from my publisher.
What counts is, in all important communication, whether we’re giving a keynote to people who don’t know us well, writing a book, or meeting a prospective client for the first time, the faster we can communicate who we really are and what we stand for, the faster we both can decide whether we want to work together, or think together, or spend more time with each other. Then our listener or reader won’t need to be distracted by wondering, “Who is the person who is telling me this?” as we explain our ideas or product or services. We will have become transparent to our listener, in the best sense of the word. They will be able to see the value of our offering without any distractions. When we can achieve that transparency, I consider that the ideal state of communication. We disappear, and our value offering is liberated.
Delighted as I was to be greeted Friday morning by David Brooks’sbook reviewish column headlined Genius: The Modern View, and as much as Iadmire Mr. Brooks, I was surprised to discover that he wasn’t writingsatirically when he described the path to genius. According to the two newbooks he was discussing, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle and Talent isOverrated by Geoff Colvin, you can develop your children into geniuses. All ittakes is 10,000 hours of focused practice at an early age, plus ia dash offamily tragedy and toss in some neighborhood inspiration. Get the ingredientsright and, ta—dah! Instant Mozart.
I must beg to disagree. I was privileged to have grown upalongside thousands of “geniuses” of the 10,000 hour class. I went to theInterlochen summer camp for the arts as a youth (Slogan — Home of the GiftedYouth of America — weren’t we special!) and two of my children went to the yearround arts academy there. By now almost a hundred thousand gifted youth fromall over the world have gone through Interlochen, and they provide some 10% ofthe personnel of all the leading American orchestras. Interlochen alumni areprominent in all fields, including Larry Page founder of Google, the composerGeorge Crumb, opera stars Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Jessye Norman. Many ofthese young people were the bright and often brilliant ones who put in their10,000 hours. But only a very, very few of them have a certain level of giftthat is completely beyond anything 10,000 or even a million hours of focusedwork can give you. These are the geniuses. And their gift came from inside, notfrom a parent dying at 12. Not from the good fortune of having a novelistliving down the street.
Where did this 10,000 hour belief come from, this notion that alarge numbers of hours of focused work will make little Sally over here into agenius? Brooks says Mozart was a good musician at an early age but would notstand out among today’s child performers. I don’t think you could find aserious musician who would agree. Mozart was not only one of the most giftedpianists and violinists of his era, but his compositions by the age of ten weremasterful. By the time he wrote his ninth opera, the delightful and stillfrequently performed Finta Giardiniera, he was just eighteen.
How did this 10,000 hour concept evolve from being a requirementfor competence into a false promise for the achievement of genius? You cantrace some of this to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, from which too many peopletake away that Bill Gates became a programming genius because he had theopportunity to get his 10,000 hours on a computer early on in his life. ButGladwell didn’t discover this 10,000 hour rule, he just popularized it,acknowledging the source as Daniel Levitan, who wrote, This is Your Brain onMusic. But Levitan didn’t claim that 10,000 of focused work would make anyone agenius either. All he says is that it will make you a virtuoso. Are virtuososthe same as genius? I gotta tell you, after having spentmy own 10,000 hours and more atInterlochen, virtuosos are a dime a dozen.
Where did Levitan get the 10,000 hour genius concept from? Thatwould be K. Anders Ericsson, who did the actual pioneering work. Ericsson isquoted, in an essay about him on his home university website, Florida State,“How, then, does Ericsson account for standouts such as Mozart, Michael Jordanand Tiger Woods? Surely their prowess is evidence that they are beneficiariesof random gifts of greatness. Not so, says Ericsson, whose landmark findingsattribute the expertise of such phenoms not to their inherent talents but to,in a word, practice.”
There you have it, theall-that-makes-Mozart-special-is-10,000-hours meme started here, with Ericssonanswering his own rhetorical question, and sweeping Mozart into the same hopperas two high-performing athletes. I could see how Ericsson might be able to saythat his research actually included Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. But unlessEricsson is a couple of hundred years older than his bio indicates, he can’thave much of a clue about how Mozart became a genius.
I believe that thinking is all about making distinctions. When wefail to make distinctions, or even worse, sweep ideas that ought to be keptdistinct into one larger idea that now automatically loses its validity, thenwe really aren’t helping move things forward. No Mr. Ericsson, I respect Mr.Woods for his hard work and great achievement. But I know Herr Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart after a fashion, and I can tell you that Tiger Woods, virtuoso that he is,is no Mozart.
So unless little Louie was born a genius, all the work in theworld is not going to make him one.
This year is the 50th anniversary of one of the two essential resource books for anyone who wants to write well — E.B.White and William Strunk’s Manual of Style. The other is William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Zinsser was a student of White’s and later taught thousands of students using The Manual of Style as a guide. When Zinsser began to write his own book, he was careful to make sure what he wanted to create was distinct from his mentors’, and it is.
When I began The Genius Machine,I found myself in the shadow of both books. I was especially concerned that everything I thought I wanted to say about clear thinking wasn’t already covered by Zinsser. So I took a close look at On Writing Well, searching for one sentence in particular. After several decades, I wondered, “Would it be the same as I remembered it?”
I eventually found the page and the sentence that had stayed with me all those years. “It is impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English.” What I didn’t find, much to my surprise, was anything about what comprised clear thinking. It turns out that Zinsser had left that endeavor for others.
One of my biggest surprises in getting my book in print was that I had joined a new peer group — the Secret Society of Published Authors. One would think I would have been aware of this group, since I had midwifed so many authors. But they had kept this little secret from me. It has been only in the last month or so that I realized I was having a different kind of conversation with this group of people called authors, since I was now one of them. I could even call up people like William Zinsser now, which I wouldn’t have done before.
And so I did. Mr. Zinsser lives and teaches in Manhattan, affiliated with Columbia but also teaching ESL students at the New School, helping all hard-working young people get their senior papers polished. I sent Bill (it’s a Secret Society of Published Authors thing — we’re Bill and Gerry now) a copy of The Genius Machine, hoping he would enjoy it. We spoke this week as he started reading my book.
Zinsser said that there is a crises right now with the generation that he's working with — people who are in high school and college at the moment. He says they’re as bright as any generation, but there’s something seriously wrong. He said he’s never seen anything like it. He believes that he is seeing a generation that doesn’t know how to think.
Is it possible? Could that be the result from ten years of general dumbing down of the populace? Has the media achieved its final triumph, intended or otherwise? Are we seeing the tail of Generation Y, or is this the edge of something new?
We were at the Netroots Nation New MediaSummit this afternoon in San Francisco, welcomed by Nancy Pelosi — looking and sounding very much as if she’s getting used to being on top of the world — and followed by a panel of media revolutionaries, who also seem to be getting used to being on the inside after years of being the bleeding edge. Markos Moulitsas summed it up with an off-hand closing remark, “We’re just the soundtrack for what’s going on.” Actually, the panel was both the soundtrack, the movie, and coming attractions. No one claimed to know where the new media was headed, except that newspapers were getting deader by the moment.
The panel split into two camps about what should and will happen to investigative reporters. And here’s where one of the most interesting comments I’ve heard about a reporter’s role was made. I suddenly realized why I could read the entire NY Times every day in 30 minutes or less.
Clara Jeffery, Co-Editor of Mother Jones, and one smart lady, described what might be lost if all those professional reporters no longer had a paying newspaper or magazine job. She said long-form reporters have two responsibilities: One — be a check on government power run amok. Two — be a check on corporate power run amok.
She said it as if she’d said it not-infrequently before. But it made me wonder if that’s really why I read a paper or a magazine. I’m kinda sorta interested in keeping those two groups in check, but isn’t there a huge other area of our world that needs reporting on? I’m talking about the stuff that actually makes me want to get up in the morning and feel good about the world. I want to know if we’re making any progress. Is civilization moving forward or backward today? Did someone discover something important, or create something beautiful? I want to know what’s happening in the human story that tells me it’s all going to be okay someday.
But when Ms. Jeffery said that with such a sense of completeness, I really began to wonder if I should be reading a paper at all. They want to do a ‘get’ on the bad guys. But I want to know what the good guys are doing. Maybe that’s why all the big stories are the ones I barely glance at, and the tiny ones, even the great obituaries (I can’t believe I never heard of this person before — what a life!) are where the important stuff is. As an example of the big stories, the ones I don’t read, Karl Frisch of Media Matters (by the way, please give this guy his own show — he’s smart and sneaky clever) cited the David Barstow NY Times story that ran for two days and used up about twenty-five thousand barrels of ink to tell us that the Pentagon had been running a media shop before and during the Iraq war, puttinga lot of guys with medals on the talk shows. Frisch was pointing out that the story got zilch traction and was wondering why. Maybe it’s because anyone who could fog a mirror already knew the story years before the huge expose went live just by watching TV and noticing there were a whole lot of guys in medals spinning the war and singing from the same hymnal.
The future of the “New Media”? If you’re reading this, you're already part of it.
Is it possible for a book to make you smarter? Most of us recognize that books can teach you something new, give you information about anything and everything. But the part of you that thinks is in you, isn’t it? Can a book change the way your mind works?
Seems highly unlikely.
Ever think about how you approach a problem that needs to be solved, or a project that needs to be created out of whole cloth? Most of us don’t have a system, or a process for thinking. Thinking is just like walking or running: we just know how to do it. When we learn something as a child, we just keep doing it, automatically. When we get to pre-school, we’re supposed to start learning how to recognize letters. A little later we might get to take music lessons, or learn some other skill. And the more we work at it, the better we get. We don't think about about how we think. We just do it. Wait a second. Just do it. Hmmm. Maybe a slogan in there. Or maybe a problem.
What about that part of us we use to solve complex problems? By the time we get through college, most of our work has been to learn, to develop some decent writing skills, and maybe started on the path to becoming expert at something.
Then we get into the ‘real’ world. Maybe we’re like President Obama and we wanted to be a community organizer. We start a big project to help tenants get better treatment from their landlords. We get the tenants organized, we set up a meeting with the landlords, and instead of being a productive meeting, people lose their tempers, the meeting goes into meltdown mode, and although we intended well, we’ve achieved the unintended consequence of making a bad situation worse.
Here’s the problem. Most of us can only think about one or two or maybe three things at the same time, like what's for dinner tonight, sex, final four, do I need a new dress (yes — need), people at work, when's that report due? If I give you five problems to solve at once in your head, and if each of those solutions changes every ten seconds and affects the inputs of the other problems, you’re going to have a hard time keeping all that afloat in your head. Complex problems in the real world are like that. The tenants are all individuals, with their own needs, attitudes, problems and histories. The landlord has a number of issues — making a profit, maintaining the property, keeping a safe environment, paying his mortgage, payroll, and other bills. And there's the community, the police, the schools and the city to dial in. Each of these constituencies is complex. Blend them all together and the problem will be way too difficult for even the smartest person to manage just by having a feeling about how it should go.
I have figured out that a brilliant thinker will need to consider any problem from at least eleven different perspectives, beginning with an understanding of what we see, precisely. I call that making our own distinctions, in this instance about each of the people and forces we are dealing with. Next we will need to understand ourselves, our strengths, weaknesses, blindspots, so that we can understand how we are going to be most effective. Then we will need to take the third view — implications — and ask ourselves what is the meaning of the problem we’re trying to solve and what kind of success we’re trying to achieve. We really need to ask, what happens if we're successful? What good and bad things might come out of our good intentions? And we will continue through the eleven steps until we get to the last one, which is advocacy. Now that we’ve really thought this challenge through, how can we be most persuasive to all the participants so our solution can make friends and bring everyone together?
So can we get smarter? I think so. That's what I'm trying to achieve for people in my new book, The Genius Machine that's coming out in early May. I believe that if we use a system of thinking that works for us time and again, eventually we will internalize it. We will be the same person, but we will be different. We will truly be able to think brilliantly, to solve complex problems, and be wonderfully creative on demand.
On May 1, 2009, you will be able to purchase a copy of The Genius Machine: The Eleven Steps That Turn Raw Ideas Into Brilliance. A few months ago Jason Gardner, my wonderful editor at New World Library, asked me if I thought about processes in the book as being a real machine. That got me thinking. Where is the genius in The Genius Machine? Is it in the book? Or is the genius latent in the user, and the book works to bring it out somehow? Or maybe the genius is to be found in the space in between the user and the book.
In George Soros's recent book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, he tries to explain his concept of reflexivity, the idea that there is an interplay between people and the markets that most market analysts can't even see. (I say "tries" since Soros would have been greatly helped by a Jason Gardner.) Difficult as it may be to understand Soros's theory, its validity is easily found in the billions that Soros makes in the markets using his insights, and the fact that others, who don't understand reflexivity, are losing those billions to him. I think reflexivity might also explain how The Genius Machine will work with readers. They will act on the book, and the book will act on them.
The Genius Machine is intended to be a real machine — you take your notion, work it through the eleven steps and, Bingo! — out comes your idea brilliantly thought through and ready for prime time.
But there’s another side to The Genius Machine. And that’s while you’re using the machine to change your ideas into pure brilliance, the machine is doing something to you, too.That’s right! While you’re cranking The Genius Machine, The Genius Machine is cranking you. Use it a few times to develop your ideas, and you’ll discover that the machine is beginning to turn you into a brilliant thinker. You won’t need to think about any of the eleven steps, such as Distinctions or Testing or Connecting. You’ll be thinking that way all the time, automatically.
What might be different about you after the Machine has been cranking you for awhile?
The Genius Machine will turn you into a noticer!
You’ll start to realize that you see things no one else does. And those are the very things that are important to you. You might notice really subtle things, like how the wind blows a leaf, or you might notice the various ways an airplane flying overhead sounds to you depending on the cloud cover, or you might notice how your sister kind of rolls her eyes when she has something important she’s about to say.
Also, The Genius Machine will make you into a better listener. Now that you are paying closer attention to the differences you are seeing all the time, you will become much more acute in your sensitivity to what other’s are seeing and saying. You’ll be listening carefully for new distinctions that other people are making. And you’ll be on the hunt for new and important ideas.
You’ll neverbe bored again.
Now that you’ve got this eleven-step thingy with gears and belts and steamwhistles running somewhere inside your head, you’ll find that everything is grist for your mill. You’ll find yourself always asking if something is really true or not, and if so, what are the Implications of everything. You’ll be Testing, and making surprising connections, and noticing stuff you never noticed before. You’ll find that nothing is boring because everything fits into the big picture in some way — so there’s something to learn from virtually everything. Someday you’ll find yourself stuck in an airport for three hours, and you’ll suddenly realize that watching how that person goes about mopping the floor tells you tons about what clean might mean. And then you start thinking about clean, and you speculate about what a microscope might tell you about that salad bar over there, and… well, you get the picture.
You will be able to think things through and develop your ideas so that they will be valuable to others.
All of us have mastery at something. We’re really good at fixing things, or playing a game, or teaching children how to draw what they see. And for most of us, that’s about as far as we take our special gifts. We use them, be we only share them with a close circle. When we’ve been using The Genius Machine for awhile (and it’s been using us) we will begin too understand that we now have a way to figure out exactly how our gift works. We’ll be able to take it apart and put it together, refine it, complete it, and best of all, teach others how to do what we do. We will now be able to share our knowledge.
A friend of mine is a Swiss economist, who has been an early test case for The Genius Machine. He started cranking it about six months ago, and he’s already starting to feel the effects. He sent me a note recently saying he realized that the new Distinctions he had seen were driving him crazy, and he knew that he had no choice now but to start his second book.
So you need to be careful when you start using The Genius Machine. If you start turning that crank you could find yourself upside down before too long! And you’ll never be the same.
