It is hardly possible to overrate the value … of placing human beings in contact with others dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar… Such communication has always been, and particularly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.
[quoted in The Social Origins Of Good Ideas by Ronald Burt]
I don't know if it was one of those weird association posts or just linkbait, But Rubel steams ahead into contentious waters, asserting that he's no polymath and it was the Internet what did it to him:
[from Micro Persuasion: What's the Future Like for a "Renaissance Man" in a Connected World?]I have seen this vividly in my own life. I used to read three newspapers a day. I also never missed the local 11 o'clock news every night. I excelled at current events quizzes in school. No more. Since I started living in my feed reader, I became blissfully ignorant about the world, facing an ever-pressing need to stay current in my domain of expertise.
News flash, Steve: Leonardo Da Vinci did not become a master of engineering, art, and architecture by reading newspapers. True mastery of any creative calling require a long, long period of study, practice and reflection (see The Costs Of Being A Creative), usually under the tutelage of others who have already attained mastery, not reading USA Today and People magazine.
Investing 10,000 hours into some skill -- like architecture, guitar, or karate -- is a general rule of thumb for mastery at the 'black belt' level. Being a polymath simply translates into someone who has invested 10,000 hours -- 3 hours per day, 333 days per year for 10 years -- into more than one discipline.
Reading the paper is just as likely as fooling on the internet to pull you away from writing code, painting, or trying to make the perfect chocolate mousse. In my experience, the biggest barrier to investing sufficient time in some activity is people: they are a much bigger diversion and time sink than the Web. Even including the porn sites.
Steve Baker makes an argument for breadth instead of the narrow focus that Rubel seems to call for:
Funny, I’m seeing the other side: the need for more Renaissance types. In a world of converging technologies, many exciting breakthroughs take place across disciplines, boundaries and borders.[...]
True, winners today need deep knowledge. They cannot be dilettantes. But they must also learn to communicate with and learn from people in other domains. They must venture out. Leonardo would fare just fine today. In fact, this world is made for people like him.
I agree. I am not suggesting that people work to acquire a superficial awareness of a wide variety of things, but that we should, each of us, become deeply invested in a number of disciplines. We should learn music, deeply, how to play an instrument or sing, not just passively listening to the radio. We should learn to cook, not simply to appreciate great food. We should learn foreign languages, not just marvel at those who are polyglots.
Certainly, we cannot learn everything, and we do not have the time to master every art, craft, and science. But we can certainly learn a few, deeply, and we can certainly commit ourselves to be creative in a world where creativity has become a necessary path to making deep contributions.
He loves my recent post: The Costs Of Being A Creative.
I was sitting here, at 6:45am PT, having just gotten off a conference call about the design of my greatest obsession, Workstreamr (about which more is forthcoming in a few weeks, I promise), and I happened upon a tweet from my dear friend, Hugh McLeod. Hugh has a written a post on the the costs of being a creative (which, no surprise, includes the backhanded appreciation of the benefits of such a life, as well).
Among other points, Hugh makes the case for the 10,000 hour rule: it takes 10,000 hours of practice to attain mastery of any human craft. In Hugh's case:
"Creativity" is extremely time consuming. My cartoons didn't get any good [to me, at least] until I had spent well over a decade working obsessively on them. Hell, I'm still not there yet.
Three hours per day, 330 days per year for ten years gets you to 10,000 hours.
I had the same sense that Hugh did about his cartoons about my writing after two decades of regular writing, particularly honed during a 5 year stint writing a monthly newsletter and then a few years of blogging.
He makes the point that this leads to having 'no life' during that period. That three hours comes after work, after studying and eating. It cuts into the contemporary norms of life: television viewing for example, or keeping up with the Braves, or weekend camping trips.
It eats away at the dividing line between personal and work life:
When you get into the "creative" zone, the lines between "work time" and "off time" start getting blurry. And the deeper you get into that zone, the blurrier the lines get. I often work from seven in the morning till midnight and think nothing of it. A very smart friend of mine who works over at Blip.tv once told me, "I only work 3 or 4 hours a week,. The rest of the time, I'm playing." Working eighty hour weeks is much easier when seventy six of those hours is playtime for you.
It's only work if you have to make yourself do it. If you have to hold yourself back, it's play.
This life calls us, we don't pick it. And it has an austerity to it, since the majority of the time spent practicing our craft, perfecting the art, is time spent alone. In Hugh's case, feverishly drawing cartoon after cartoon, or a young software developer designing better abstractions, or a writer grappling with grammar and intention. Being creative entails a great deal of solitude.
(As a result, creatives can overdo when they are not off sharpening their skills and working their magic, but that's another post.)
Hugh points out that creativity comes from the work:
A sense of purpose only comes your way usually because you've been working your ass off over a long period of time, intensely cultivating it. And yeah, sometimes that will appear to more mainstream people as "Having no life". To hell with them. They don't know or care about you. Successful people get that way by doing the stuff unsuccessful people aren't willing to do. Harsh but true.
Paderewski, the physicist Polish creative, once said, "Before I was a genius, I was a drudge." There is a lot of slogging involved. And others, generally, will not understand: especially before you have invested the full ten years. "You'll never sell a book!" "You call that music?" "That's the dumbest design I have ever seen!" "Keep your day job."
Another good reason to work apart from others, so you don't have to hear all that negativity. Close the door, and sharpen your pencil.
Like making a fire from rubbing sticks together, creativity's heat comes from work. Work requires dedication. Dedication involves sacrifice, specifically of time and the absence of what might have been done instead.
Lurking behind Hugh's words is the implicit message that it is worth it, that the time spent apart in pursuit of purpose and the outcome of that pursuit -- in cartoons, writing, music, or working software -- balance the costs, that the juice is worth the squeeze.
It is for me, anyway. And obviously, for Hugh. How about you?
