What is Excellence?

Does everyone have to ability to be excellent? I believe so. Why is it that so often people who are students of Nobel Prize winners go on to become Nobel Prize winners? Why can almost anyone go to a great trumpet teacher and learn to play in ways that they never dreamed of? These teachers are teaching their students to be excellent -- excellence isn't the person; it's the philosophy.

How can we be excellent at what we do? After all, we don't have great teachers to show us the way. First of all, if you are reading this, you are already well on your way to excellence. You care enough to try to learn about it and do it. These are my thoughts on what I do differently than those around me -- especially people who view me as some sort of genius. I'm going to estimate out of 100 people that half will leave at each step of excellence.

First, you have to be demanding of yourself. You can't stop or give up when the going gets tough. Through your journey there will be ups and downs and ins and outs. Rejoice on the ups and ins, but use it and ride it forward. Out of the 100 people, 50 will be satisfied with their first couple of successes and stop there. People who demand excellence know that each success is a small step towards excellence. You must keep climbing. On the other hand, progress is not linear (or step-wise), you will fall on your journey. You will go backwards, not just leveling off but decreasing in ability. Recognize that this is also a step towards excellence. You must be the most demanding at this point. Do not stop just because you stopped improving. The dip in ability is the tear down before the build up. Ride it; it gives you momentum to overcome the next big hill. What happens when you work out at the gym? You must tear the muscle down before it can repair itself and become stronger. This will happen to anyone's abilities if they want to become excellent. Out of the 50, 25 will leave when they become discouraged from decreased abilities.

Let's say you're one of the 25 people who demand more from themselves. What now? You have to practice every single day. People who are excellent don't miss a day of practice, period. Vacation is not an excuse. Some things require days off -- like body building. On the days of physical rest, you read about it, you visualize yourself doing it well (better than you currently can), you go out and teach someone else, there are hundreds of things to keep you doing your activity on your day off (if the day off is truly required). But beware, be sure that you really should be taking the day off, rather than making an excuse not to do it. Also, it is even more important for those people to get back in and continue practicing on the days they should be. We will lose 13 more people, leaving us at 12 out of the original 100.

You must practice correctly! Practicing everyday is bad if you are practicing incorrectly. When you practice incorrectly, you reinforce bad habits. This can be the hardest step for most people -- especially without a teacher. Demand more than just consistent practice from yourself -- demand excellence! There are ways around the teacher issue, but finding a good teacher is always the best solution at this stage. If you are a body building, read about proper posture, and get a mirror and check your posture. If you are trying to learn music, get a tape recorder and record yourself. The recording does not lie. Listen for what is wrong. Does it sound good? Are you on pitch? Can you even tell? If you can't tell, then you know what the next step for improvement is. I want to say that 90% will fail at this step, but I'll stick to my estimate. Of the original 100, only 6 will practice correctly every day regardless of improvement or failure.

Identify your weakest ability, and work on that. Most people -- even the 6 who made it this far -- only like to work on things they are good at. Be critical every day, and keep a journal. Write down what went well and what went poorly. Analyze what you did that day. Then the next day, work on the thing that needs the most improvement. It is too easy to keep building up the skill that we are best at, and it causes a level off in overall ability. This level off will be permanent even following the above advice if you don't work on the things that need improvement. Of the original 100, only 3 will do this step along the above steps.

You must be intrinsically motivated. Be honest with yourself. Why do you want to be excellent at this thing? If it is for money, or power, or fame, or something external in the world, you will probably never become as good as you could be. You must have a desire, a passion, to be good at what you do. Without this, you cannot achieve excellence. I find it hard to believe people could do all the things above without some internal burning desire to be excellent, but this chops off 2 of the last 3 remaining people. Following the above advice, you can be the one excellent person for every hundred that try. Now stop reading and go out there and practice!

Using A Notepad

Carry a notepad and writing utencil with you everywhere! I can't believe the number of creative ideas that occur to me in a day, and I also can't believe how incredibly fast they disappear from my memory. It's been shown that writing down all your ideas -- including the bad ones, because they may be useful elsewhere -- increases the number of ideas you have! Writing it forces you to think about it and consider it further. It also encourages your subconscious to produce more of creative ideas because you are paying attention to them and putting them to use. Almost everything has a snowball effect in life. The more creative you are the more creative it makes you, and the notepad is a key step to starting to be creative. You will begin looking for inspiration in everything, and then jot it down, think about it, and remember it later.

Triggering Neurons

I don't know if I've mentioned this, but the way you learn something is not by forming new physical connections in the brain. Learning is done by reinforcing connections that are already there. Reinforcement happens when you associate one thing with another, and the brain fires "electric currents" through those neurons. So every time you think of something, you reinforce it. That makes perfect sense when you actually think about how people learn -- they usually have to go over things many times. Anyway, here is an interesting article on when happens to the surrounding neurons when you activate one. Keeping Up With The Neurons Surprisingly, those surrounding guys fire too. This goes to show you that it is a good thing to warm up or get in the mood to do something before starting to do it. You will learn better when you get the neurons associated with it fired up first. Also, every time you think about something, you are helping yourself in the learning process. So don't completely take breaks over school breaks -- it will be a horrible waste. Do something fun, but make sure you take some time to think or do something fun relating to your subject.

The Food Thing Again

So I've got more to say on this issue of being hungry, since I left it so unresolved before. In my post on 11/14/2007, entitled "Food!", I mentioned that the research evidence points to being hungry helps learning. Something I can't believe I didn't think about because it's brought up so often in Honors is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. So Abraham Maslow created this pyramid structure of needs. You must fulfill lower order needs before higher order. Here's the structure:

1. Physiological -- you need food, water, oxygen, etc. in order to survive. These needs must be filled before any other needs can be addressed.

2. Safety and Physical Security -- shelter from weather, protection from predators, etc. Clearly if your house was inaccessible and your oxygen supply was inaccessible, you would try to regain your air supply before your house. So you need to fulfill 1 before 2.

3. Love and Belongingness -- companionship, affection, acceptance from others, etc. Now we have needs that are satisfied through interaction with other people. Clearly the first two needs are more important to survival than this third one, but Maslow claims that you must fill those needs before you are able to competently fill this one.

4. Esteem -- need for a sense of mastery and power and a sense of appreciation from others. Let me clarify why this one is different than 3. Esteem needs are evaluative (and self-evaluative). Appreciation requires evaluation while acceptance or affection do not. Thus appreciation is more elaborate than acceptance and is a higher order need.

5. Self-Actualization -- this is the tendency to become whatever you're capable of becoming, or to extend yourself to the limits of your capabilities. See research by Carl Rogers to gain a better understanding of this.

So Maslow's main assumption was that the needs that are lower on the scale are more demanding, meaning that if we are hungry, we cannot have a strong need for achievement (something less demanding that food).

Dark Matter

Just so people who follow this aren't too bored waiting for a new post, here's a quick rundown on dark matter. It's a pretty cool and fun explanation.

Food!

Back to my usual theme of ways to enhance learning. One thing to consider is food. Eating healthily is definitely beneficial in many more ways than learning. There are things like: Vitamin B (specifically Niacin, I believe) is linked to increased mental performance. That's actually not what I want to get in to right now. The thing is, I've got a pretty busy schedule, and sometimes I don't eat very well during the day -- such as lunch.

The research evidence shows that being hungry helps learning. This is very counter-intuitive to me since I do horribly when I'm hungry. I can't think of anything else until I've eaten. Still, there is a reason why being hungry helps and the data supports it. The reason is that when you become hungry (as a primitive animal) your awareness heightens. You are in more need of food, and you need to do a better job getting it otherwise you die. So you take in more and remember it better for the future. This also seems to indicate that right after a big meal you will learn less and be more lethargic. I can easily agree with this one, not personally, but from watching people in class right after lunch time. Personally, I do much better on a full stomach. Perhaps being hungry helps when taken to a small extent, but hurts when overdone. I'm sure that's true of most things.

I encourage anyone who reads this to post a comment on what their personal experience with this has been.

Beer Helps Memory?

Here is an interesting article explaining how drinking a beer or two a day could help memory: Beer Article. I would say that the mechanism sounds all right, which is usually the hardest part in these learning and memory studies. They usually just have data and cool results and propose a strange mechanism. But, hey, results are results whether anyone can explain why or not. Obviously this is not a good reason to get drunk every night.

I'm Still Alive!

Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted. Just an update for those who actually read this (i.e. no one). It is November, and that means it's National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short?). Essentially it's a sprint to get to 50,000 words on a new work you start this month. Anyone can do it, and it isn't that hard (this is me speaking, having gotten nowhere so far AND having never done it before). What I mean is, this is a perfect example of my previous post on how a little bit every day adds up to a huge accomplishment. You don't realize how much you are doing as you are doing it because it is so easy to do just a little bit every day. Well, check it out! National Novel Writing Month

How To Do Anything

Have you ever wanted to be able to do something? It is very simple actually. We often forget that everything that is accomplished is done in baby steps. There are many saying that go along with this, but none really emphasize the action that needs to take place, they emphasize the patience that needs to take place: "Rome wasn't built in a day." Do you understand the immense power of spending 10 minutes a day on something? We so often feel that we don't have time to do something because it requires us to put aside some chunk of the day. If you could write 275 words per day, you would write 100,000 word novel in a year. This is really nothing -- easily accomplishable in 10 minutes a day. The average reader reads 200 wpm. For 10 minutes a day, that is 730,000 words per year. True that isn't much, but say for the sake of argument that you read for a half an hour a day, and you are slightly above average (as I'm sure anyone reading this is -- or you will get there rather quickly by doing this), then you can read 25 books a year (which is 2 books a month).

I'm really more interested in acquiring skills right now than how much can be accomplished in a year for something ridiculously small as 10 minutes a day. I've already mentioned that spaced practice yields much better results than massed practice. This is a very natural extension of that idea. What do you want to do? Set aside 10 minutes a day, and you can do it rather quickly. I've picked up enough Korean for 10 minutes a day (not even every day) to listen, speak, and comprehend simple things, greet people, say goodbye, and I learn new vocabulary every day. (By the way this is over the 275 word mark for those interested -- in fact, writing to the beginning of the parenthesis every day, it would only take 11 months to write the novel.) The key is to do something every single day, not to do something a lot once a week. The benefits stack up so much when done every day as opposed to 2 hours on Wednesday every week. This is something hard to understand until you've experienced it. I recommend just trying it with something, and you will then understand. If it doesn't work, then stop, but there is no harm in spending 10 minutes on something just to see what the possibilities are.

http://lifehacker.com/software/motivation/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret-281626.php
http://dontbreakthechain.com/

Confidence is Important

If there is one thing that I've learned from playing tennis, it's that confidence is one of the most important aspects to performing well. You have to trust that what are doing is correct, and then do it. There are many learning and memory studies that address this, and in that context the advice would be: when frustrated, do problems you know how to do. This could simply meaning going back and resolving stuff you've already done. The process solidifies your knowledge and reviews things you've previously done. That, and we've seen in the creativity section that difficult problems work themselves out by focusing on something else first. The act if solving something else could spark what you need in the current problem.

There is more to it than just this stuff. Confidence in your abilities play a big role on tests and performance in general. I find that anyone who can start a math proof can also finish it. Even I fall into the trap of trying to see the whole proof before writing anything down. I am completely unable to solve the problem when I try to do that. If I start writing down what I know, the rest usually just follows easily. Doing problems you know you can do will help build confidence and keep you on track, realizing that you can actually accomplish things in this field. Just take it one step at a time.

Creative Traits

Donald MacKinnon studied the characteristics of creative architects. There is a hidden assumption here that if you want to become a certain type of person, you can adopt their habits, traits, characteristics, and become that type of person. So here are the traits of presumably creative people:
(1) Aggression - They tend to express their dislike for what others are doing
(2) Autonomy - They are very self-governed. It doesn't matter what others or the administration want, they will do their own thing.
(3) Low on socialization - If you socialize, you don't have time to be creative and let ideas manifest themselves.
(4) High on expressed desire to control others.
(5) Belong to fewer social groups - see (3).
(6) Independence - see (2). They don't follow the norms or trends set by others.
(7) Value some artistic standard of excellence and have a sensitive appreciation of the fittingness of architectural solutions to that standard - from personal experience, this may cause the other ones. When you have a standard and are extremely sensitive to it, it will be hard not to express this in some way listed above. This may also be one that uncreative people have the hardest time understanding.
(8) Not preoccupied with the impression they make on others
(9) Guided by aesthetic values and ethical standards which they have set for themselves - It is very important that they set these standards themselves. There is a list of traits uncreative architects have, and it is very much the opposite of this one. The difference in this point (in the uncreative list) is that they follow preset standards.

Intrinsic motivation is what allows creativity to foster. Image being a writer, publishing these amazing books. Then suddenly, someone pays you thousands of dollars to continue writing brilliant books. They feel like they are doing you a favor by giving you subsistence, but the motivational orientation has shifted, and now there is pressure externally to create. It will be much harder to write as well.

Creativity

A while ago, I discussed some of the characteristics of someone high in need for achievement. Those 4 things were fairly straightforward to understand why.
(1) If the risk is too high, probably won't achieve anything; too low and you don't achieve enough.
(2) Feedback is extremely useful in learning (as we will eventually discuss!) and improving at what you are doing.
(3) Personal control and direct responsibility: people who need to achieve things (or at least feel they do) must be the ones achieving things! Maybe I'll get around to talking about need for power -- people high in need for power delegate to accomplish things rather than being directly in control. The responsibility part puts a fear of failure into the achiever which creates more motivation to do things.
(4) Research and experts gives the achiever a tremendous advantage in what they do. They want things done well and right and fast.

Today I want to talk about creativity. This is based off of Eliot Hutchinson's How To Think Creatively. There are four stages to attaining creative insight. Creative insight is that spark of genius that makes people go 'wow'. Given a problem with no known solution, creative insight is the thing that solves it. Let me explain:

(1) Stage of Preparation:
Superabundance of hypotheses -- you just have hundreds of ideas and false starts. Creative people tend to have the trouble of sorting through their ideas to find the best ones, rather than a lack of ideas.
Logical attack of the problem using every known method -- no matter what you try, nothing will work.
Resort to trial and error -- before creative insight, you usually end up doing useless repetition.

(2) Stage of Frustration
Melancholy, anxiety, possible breakdown of the personality, feelings of inferiority. Creative people are tormented by their problems until the problems get solved. There is regression, solace in fantasy, negativistic attitude, stubbornness, negligence in personal habits.
Hutchinson recommends that if you find yourself in this stage, consciously renounce the problem you are working on. Because eventually there is:

(3) Stage of Achievement
Often times this is brought on by an accidental stimulus. There are countless stories about how famous scientists came up with their big insight in a dream, or watching an opera, or something completely and utterly random. Theories speculate that our subconscious works on our problems when we are not focusing on it -- but this is still far from being proven (we know unconscious thought exists, but how intelligent is it?).

(4) Stage of Verification
This is the hardest part! It requires a shift in mental attitude. We are often unable to see the faults in our own reasoning and creations -- perhaps it isn't such a miraculous discovery after all. An example of this is the tires that caused SUVs to roll over a couple of years back (there was a massive recall). The new design was so revolutionary that the engineers could find no fault in it. Don't get lost in your own glory only to find that it kills people.

Soon, I will go into the characteristics of creative people. Then I will try to get back on track with the efficient learning habits.

Software Freedom Day

Thought it would be worth noting that today is "Software Freedom Day." This is pretty important in trying to get the world to understand that there is more out there than Windows and Microsoft programs. I've survived 4 years of college using only Linux, and it has come a long way since when I started. Linux is very user friendly these days, although there is still not an ideal desktop operating system. Both Linux and Windows have many drawbacks that result from their production process -- for desktop environments (as opposed to servers). See here for more information: http://softwarefreedomday.org/ . You can seriously do everything you want (most of the time better and easier) for free on your computer. There is no need to pay for software. The cool part from a computer science perspective is that you can go into the code and implement any features that you are interested in yourself and re-release it back into the public.

Some Motivation

I've been talking a bit, but I haven't given anyone a good reason to listen to what I have to say. It's true that I don't believe I am very smart, and maybe you shouldn't either. I am probably what psychologists would call high in achievement motivation. People high in achievement motivation have high correlation to these 4 behaviors:
1) Preference for moderate, calculated risk
2) Preference for concrete, immediate feedback
3) Preference for personal control and direct responsibility
4) Tendency to research the environment and seek the advice of experts

These are the type of people who accomplish great things such as winning Nobel Prizes (or equivalent awards). This is a narrow view though since you can be very motivated and achieve a lot without receiving awards such as in business, agriculture, or carpentry to name a few. These people become very passionate about what they do and find as many ways to improve the process as possible.

I should mention that achievement motivation is naturally occurring in people who were raised a certain way, but anyone can learn it and learn to take advantage of it to their own benefit. You may want to read references by David McClelland to learn more.

A Common Problem

One thing I notice quite frequently in students is that they are unwilling to put significant individual effort into problems. When solution manuals are available, my suggestion is to not even get one. The act of checking answers and discussing discrepancies with another human leads to much greater insight and understanding of the subject matter than checking the answer in a book. If you must get a solution manual, seriously attempt problems before looking at the answer. I have a feeling that many people learn some things well enough to pass a test when they study or do homework with the solution manual open right in front of them, but they do not pick up any new skills or retain the information. The act of putting the mental strain on a certain type of problem helps it stick in your memory, plus if you do solve it on your own, you are learning crucial problem solving skills. What happens in the future when you must solve problems that do not have a predefined answer? You must rely on the problem solving skills you have trained yourself in. I do admit needing help on problems though. I know this is inevitable in everyone's college career and in life, but whatever trick or technique is necessary to solve your problem you will remember much better in the future after having struggled with it. Don't fall for the temptation to save some time now because it will inevitably cause much greater wasted time in the future.

Notice, I am not saying feedback is unimportant. In fact, it is quite important, and I will get into that at a later date. I'm only saying that there is a lot to learn in the struggle. To support this, I will cite Eliot Hutchinson in his book "How to Think Creatively." He states that once you reach that stage of frustration where you've tried everything you know, just stop. Do something else, take a break, do another problem, anything to get your mind off of it. When you return to the problem, your subconscious will have continued working, and this is when you achieve "creative insight." There are countless stories throughout history of Nobel Prize winners and such who claim this is precisely how they came up with their big idea that brought them fame. Looking at the solution manual during this stage of frustration would thus stifle this creative process and you are no longer learning how to do this. You are in fact teaching yourself how not to think creatively. And thinking creatively is necessary in even the most rigorous and strict disciplines.

Order Matters

When studying, it has been shown that you will retain what you start with and what you end with much better than the stuff in the middle. So, practice in a random order. I say practice because, what if you are learning how to play an instrument? If you always start with the same scales, you will certainly learn the first scale better than the rest. You will also learn scales better than whatever else you practice, since you begin to fatigue after a some amount of practice. Rotate the order in which you practice things, and you will learn the material rather than the order the material is presented. The same goes for subjects in school and for problems within the subjects.

What to do with this

Hopefully, I'll be adding new information every day (hopefully). My recommended course of action is to read it if you like, but only try to start doing it once you have mastered the previous one. It's hard enough to start forming one good habit without another thing to think about and interfere. If you try to implement everything before the previous is firmly ingrained, it is likely that you will do none of them. Of course, it isn't impossible to start doing all of them regularly all at once, but I'm just giving a word of warning about human tendencies -- myself included.

Time Allocation

The biggest secret of all is how to allocate your time. It's not actually a secret, but not very many people use this technique. This is well studied, and the results come out the way they do for many different reasons. Let me just emphasize here that this one thing will greatly increase your efficiency of learning and retention.

First, let me explain. Study in small chunks spaced far apart. The best way to understand what this means and why it works is to exaggerate an example. Suppose you studied something 5 times in one minute. This is like studying only once. The extra 4 times do not add much, if anything, in the course of a day or week or month. If those 5 times were spaced throughout the day, it would be like seeing it fresh 5 times, and becoming reacquainted with it 5 times.

At first, this seems like it would require spending more time studying and working rather than less, but the truth is that it actually saves a lot of time! Not only do you learn faster, but you will retain it a lot longer. The same is true for practicing some skill. You will acquire the skill much faster if you spend an hour in the morning, an hour in the day, and an hour in the night rather than a 3 hour block in the day. In fact, after a certain point, you are almost just wasting your time. You have less focus, you are tired, you've been seeing the same thing over and over again, etc. Doing something else for a couple of hours will refresh your desire, energy, and focus for that one particular thing you were doing. And we'll soon learn that any mistakes you make are being learned, and they are only countering your efforts.

New habits are incredibly hard to form, and this one seems to be unusually resistant for people. There is something about needing to spend multiple times a day doing something that gives people a mental block. Do the research if you have to convince yourself it is worth it; this topic is usually classified as "spaced vs. massed practice."

A Cautionary Word

Let me say a few quick things before I get into the bulk of this genius stuff. There are many people out there who get all A's in school and who do not learn very much. What they do is an entirely different process than what I would like to talk about in the coming weeks. Perhaps I'll reread this post and remember to talk about it in the future. I would like to talk about truly learning something in the sense that you maximize the retention time after learning it and maximize the speed by which you acquire this long lasting knowledge. I will be citing people that have done scientific studies into the human mind that demonstrate what I have to say about the subject, so that it is easy to check the facts. And finally, since I am interested in being a true learner, what I have to say will generalize to as many things as I can make it. Learning should not be about school; it should be about life and skills. Memorizing facts is great, but learning new skills is extremely gratifying.

The Curse of Learning

What is a good measure of a person's potential? Is it how smart they are? Or is it how well they do in school? These second two questions seem to be completely unrelated. A low intelligence person can be motivated and responsible and do well in school. A high intelligence person can be of low motivation and low responsibility and do poorly. These things tend to be confused amongst the common people, but it is well accepted amongst behavior psychologists and anyone researching the area. I think one of the best things that can be done is to educate the public about these matters. I am commonly referred to as 'smart' or 'genius', when in fact I am a very slow learner and forget things quite easily. I overcome this by studying actual methods (textbooks and scientific articles) to become a more successful, efficient learner. In conjunction with this, I do all of my work on time and go to class. These simple ingredients can allow anyone to score mostly all A's in their class work. Part of the curse of modern learning is that it is not taught to be enjoyable and useful; it is used to weed people out and force facts down young people's throats. Everyone learns the same things whether interesting to them or not, and everyone must learn it at the same pace as the rest of the class. Learning and Memory techniques are never taught to children (in fact, bogus methods that have no evidence for working are taught such as visual, kinesthetic, and audio learners). Only in college can one begin to choose to study things they are interested in, and by then it is far too late to easily instill proper methods of learning and a love of learning in people. Nonetheless, some people (particularly college students) find the need to become good at learning and memory even if they do not enjoy it; and some people learn to enjoy it once they realize what it is all about. It is my unprofessional opinion that anyone can become a genius by developing the proper habits, regardless of actual mental capabilities. I will attempt to outline how over the next few weeks (supposing that my train of thought remains on this topic). I love to learn and love to learn how to learn, and that is the reason people think I am smart, not because I have a naturally superior mind (which I don't).

Uses for my blog

I thought that this would be fun to try out, but as I think about it I do have a good use for it. This blog will be my creative burst for the day. As a mathematician, I must hone my creative ability and continue to practice the art of insight. Using some space like this, to let my thoughts out is a perfect way to continue to improve my creativity. As many of us know, it is difficult to become good at something if we do not practice it daily and creativity is no exception.

Thought on Blogs

As my first post, I thought it would be appropriate to comment on blogs. At first, they were quite the novelty, but now they are a dime a dozen. Everyone has at least one and is posting daily. I'm not sure what the appeal is, except that now I've decided to try it out. If it is to become famous or have many people read your thoughts, it just is not likely. You have to be someone who is already famous, or someone who is extraordinary for people to regularly read your blogs. Even then, the extraordinary person needs a great deal of luck to be read by many. It just isn't likely that they will be found in the massive amounts of garbage out there. I think that I am safe in my anonymity of the crowd of bloggers out there. People will not find this and will not read this.