Guest Post: I am so excited for todays guest post because it's my long time friend Robin Weeks, who is shopping a fabulous book that I'm over the moon about. But today she's sharing her notes (with permission from the presenter) on a class at LDStorymakers that I was SO bummed I missed. So without further ado, Robin.
I met
Shelly waaaay back at BYU when she auditioned for my Mask Club class project.
She played Elle in the Theatre of the Absurd play The Dialogues of Il and Elle. (I know you’re all shocked that
Shelly was perfect for an absurd theatre piece.) Then came the long, dark
period of my life when we fell out of touch. There was less laughter. A dearth
of absurdity. Not enough Shelly by half. Then, then came the happy day when I ran into her at last year’s
LDStorymakers conference. I was smart enough to get her contact info and my
life has been better ever since.
This
year’s LDStorymakers theme was Building Better Writers—inspired, no doubt, by
the “under construction” lobby we had to pass through to get from one end of
the conference center to the other. Shelly and I ran into each other while
crossing through this lobby Friday night, and it was the perfect place for a
photo-op.
During
the conference, since I’ve recently realized that it’s high time I learned to
outline, I attended almost every class on plotting I could find. But there was
one class that wasn’t on plotting that I am very glad I made time for: Howard
Tayler’s class on How to Practice: An Exercise in Rendering Talent Irrelevant. When I mentioned it to Shelly, she asked
(pretty please) that I blog about that class for our little blog swap today.
I’m happy to oblige, but I gotta say: this is going to be mostly quotes, since
Howard provided some excellent links to his sources and they’re all online.
I’ll give you the sources, too. (Shelly says Howard gave blanket permission for
anyone to disseminate the content of his class, so I’m trusting her on this.)
Editors note: Exhibit A
Intelligence
vs. Effort
Howard started by telling us about a study that
sought to find out if it was better to be smart or to work hard. This blew my
mind (I did all the bolding below):
[Carol] Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York
fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the
classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles
easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished
the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single
line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence.
They were told, “You must be smart at
this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”
Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how
sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might
be enough to see an effect.”
Then the students were given a choice of test for the second
round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but
the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the
puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like
the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set
of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test.
The “smart” kids took the cop-out.
Why did this happen? “When we praise children for their
intelligence,” Dweck wrote in her study summary, “we tell them that this is the
name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” And that’s what the
fifth-graders had done: They’d chosen to
look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.
In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice.
The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level.
Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at
random at the study’s start, responded differently. Those praised for their
effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn’t focused hard enough on this
test. “They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,”
Dweck recalled. “Many of them remarked, unprovoked, ‘This is my favorite test.’ ” Not so
for those praised for their smarts. They
assumed their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all.
“Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and
miserable.”
Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s
researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were
engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on
their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart
did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.
The
take-away from this? As Howard said, it’s 5 words: You Worked Hard On This. Memorize it. Use it. Tell it to your kids.
Save the future.
Free Practice Beats Paid Involvement
First,
the graph:
Howard
used the example of cooking. When you first start learning to cook, you learn a
few basics very quickly, but your skills (performance) aren’t all that
terrific. Then you start to practice cooking and, during Domain II, your skills
increase for a while and then plateau. You’ve gone as far as practice can take
you. Then, you get a job as a chef (Domain III) and your skills take another
jump, because you’re doing it full-time. But then you plateau again.
Why do
you plateau again? Because you’re not
getting paid to improve: you’re getting paid to produce. And because you
get paid the same amount for doing less than your absolute best.
If you
want to improve again, you need to regress back to the practice domain. For
example, Howard was making good money drawing his Schlock Mercenary comic
strip. He’d taught himself how to draw over several years and had reached the
point where he could draw just about anything with a high level of competence.
His drawn hands, though, weren’t really all that terrific. One day, he decided
to improve his drawing of hands, so he sat down and drew hand after hand after
hand—hundreds of hands that he wouldn’t get paid for. Eventually, his hands
improved so much that he was asked to illustrate a card tricks how-to book.
(!!!)
Then he
asked us if we thought he was now drawing hundreds of free knees and feet… and
no, he’s not. He’s not getting paid for that. (Tee-hee.)
The
take-away for writers: If You Want To
Improve, Do It For Free. For instance, instead of writing the one plot
required by my WIP, I should outline six plots—then I’ll have one good plot and
five plots that taught me how to plot.
(This, incidentally, was eerily similar to the advice I got from the plotting class
with J. Scott Savage, Robison Wells, and James Dashner.)
Don’t Force Creativity…
Except When Necessary
Howard’s
final point came from Jonah Lehrer’s work on creativity. Specifically, this article on How to Be Creative.
Howard
summed this up as follows: Relax. Concentrate. Repeat.
The
longer summary is a lot more complicated, but it relates to Lehrer’s studies of
how creativity works better when we aren’t trying to force it. Which is why we
can make connections between random things when we’re focusing on something
else.
On the
other hand, as Howard pointed out, sometimes we just have to sit down at the
computer and bang away: we can’t always wait for inspiration to strike.
Still, if
you have the time, the article has a lovely list of creativity boosters:
1.
Blue calming
paint for creative insights, red paint for analytic problems
2.
Get groggy—you’ll
score up to 50% better on creative tests.
3.
Daydream
4.
Imagine yourself
as a 7-year-old to enhance divergent thinking
5.
Watching stand-up
comedy enhances insight
6.
If you imagine a
puzzle came from far away (like Greece), you’ll have more insight
7.
Use general verbs
when describing problems (“moving” instead of “driving”) to avoid limiting your
options
8.
Work in an open
space instead of a cubical
9.
Travel to other
countries to boost creative insight
1. Move to a bigger
city
Howard
ended with the following take-aways:
·
Efforts
to improve will make a different in performance
·
Failure
does not mean the absence of ability
·
Find
an expert to help you focus your practice
·
Pay
it forward: be the expert for someone else
·
Save
the future: tell a child “you worked
hard on this”
Also,
instead of telling our children that everything they do is wonderful and
perfect (even when it’s pretty darn good), that it’s okay to point out that the
hand they just drew in their fantastic picture didn’t really look like a hand.
Kids don’t need to believe they are talented—they just have to be told “You Worked Hard At This.” And you can
work harder to get even better results—especially if you have an artist father
who can show you how to draw awesome hands.
I’ve
already changed the way I talk to my own children . . . and I’m starting to
train myself to think of myself as a hard worker instead of someone who is
“smart” or “talented.” I can’t control my intelligence or my children’s
intelligence—but we can control how hard we work with what we have.
Also,
Shelly rocks. Just sayin’.
Aww thanks :)
