Creative Class

There have been a series of articles lately about the relative values of “intelligence,” creative thinking, and sustained effort. Two of the pieces are from David Brooks, who is becoming my favorite columnist because of his wide-ranging subjects.

It occurred to me that this relates directly to Richard’s goal of making every job creative. I don’t have answers, but this raises questions like, “What do we need to be teaching?” and “What do we need to be doing as a society?” to birth the creative economy. It may be something entirely different than the organizing that helped make manufacturing jobs pay middle class wages.

Brooks wrote about the Harlem Children’s Zone charter school, which offers stability and high expectations. Harvard economist Roland Fryer studied the school and…

They found that the Harlem Children’s Zone schools produced “enormous” gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.

In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.

Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap. “The results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes,” Fryer wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder and president, has done is “the equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so many of our kids are dying – literally and figuratively.”

In another recent column, Brooks talks about genius or extraordinarily high achievers. He says that the scientific view is moving from the idea that people are born with great talent to the idea that they earn it (maybe they’re born with the ability to practice).

In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.

What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had – the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

The issue of the value of I.Q. struck me because of a good friend who had an I.Q. of 170. She took three languages and college classes in high school, and cruised through Berkeley while working and raising two kids. Not only smart but social, good people skills. She died broke last year, never having translated that potential into success. Interestingly, in our group of hippies, she was the Ayn Rand devotee. What she may have lacked was concentration.

The relative value of intelligence and effort is borne out in all sorts of quotes and examples we see and forget:

• “If you have a 150 I.Q., sell 30 points to someone else. You need to be smart, but not a genius.” Warren Buffet on investing at this year’s annual Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting.
• “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” –Thomas Edison
• “Golf is a game of luck. The harder I work, the luckier I get.” — Ben Hogan (legendary golfer)
• In Positively Fifth Street, a book about the world series of poker, James McManus says that to get good at Texas Hold ‘Em you need to play 10,000 hands (or hours, I forget).

In the current New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has an article called “How David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules.” It moves from junior high basketball to warfare to computer modeling, but the main idea is that creatively changing the game gives an advantage to the underdog who is willing to work harder, and includes this gem:

“We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability because relentless effort is in fact something rarer that the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination” (a basketball reference.)

So how do we change the game in the new economy?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Talent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.