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!

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.

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.