There’s something special about doing what you like most. Energy never fades away when you enjoy what you are doing while you experience a limitless desire to constantly know and learn more. Freddie Mercury and Jimmy Hendrix were bonded to music; Einstein was devoted to physics and cosmology; Hemingway to literature, Maradona was one with the football and Leonardo da Vinci, well… Leonardo seems to have been one with almost every discipline on Earth. All this high achievers share something in common, something that is present in each and everyone of us. A passion for what they do, a primal emotion that is present in every person of every culture. And yet, for most of us, that oceanic feeling is something elusive that may not be felt very often, if ever (to some).
Underachieving child or dormant genius
During the 1930′s, Gillian was a below-par student; she was eight. Gillian was distracted and disruptive in class and her grades left a lot to be desired. Her school concluded that Gillian had a learning disorder and that she would better be served in a school for kids with special needs. She wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder) because the condition “hadn’t been invented yet”.
Her parents, terrified at the idea of having to send her daughter to that type of school, scrambled to a professional for an assessment. As the psychiatrist asked Gillian’s mother about her problems, the girl sat, unflinching, in a chair at the back of the room for 20 minutes. At one point, the doctor stood up, and after praising Gillian for being so patient, he told her that he would still need some more time in private with her mother.
The doctor turned on the music on the radio, walked out the door with Gillian’s mother and stood where Gillian could not see them. Almost immediately after they left the room, Gillian went on her feet graciously moving around the room to the music.
The psychiatrist turned around and told Gillian’s mother: “You know, Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick. She’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school”.
Years later, Gillian was accepted to the Royal Ballet School in London, formed her own music theater company and produced some of the most successful shows in history, such as Cats and The Phantom of the Opera”. Gillian Lynne, who almost ended up in a school for kids with special needs, became on the most renowned choreographers of our time.
The story of Gillian Lynne is a testament to how our culture and the expectations that society puts on us are not just way out of line with our true selves, but even worse, they can be completely detrimental to the development of our potential.
The fallacy of intelligence
Our intelligence is measured according to standards that not even experts agree on. The Stanford-Binet test, currently through its 5th iteration, is the standard for IQ tests. Its use is so ubiquitous that even matters of life or death are resolved by it.
As IQ scores rise over the course of a generation by as much as 25 points, the validity of its results are altered depending whether you are being evaluated at the beginning, middle or end of a cycle. By the way, according to the theory that backs this test, the IQ of a person does not change over time.
In some US states, an individual with an IQ lower than 70 (the median is 100) is not subject to death penalty. Some years ago, a death row inmate who had spent 10 years in jail on a life sentence took some courses during his incarceration. When he was retested his IQ had risen more than 10 points, making him elegible for execution. That is the power that numbers exert on us.
What’s even more surprising is that Binet’s test is based on the belief that there’s a general factor of intelligence (called the g factor) but the general consensus among scientists nowadays is that there are multiple intelligences. Some, like Howard Gardner, believe that there are 7 different types of intelligence: linguistic, musical, mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal and intra-personal. Gardner postulates that these intelligences are independent and that some are dormant and some are dominant depending on the individual.
I think that intelligences are independent and interdependent, merging to compose a fingerprint that is unique to each one of us and not a number between zero and 170 (give or take).
If you have read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, you may remember that a civilization developed a super-computer, “Deep Thought“, that after tens of thousands 7.5 million years of meditation found the answer to “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything”. The answer is 42. That’s the same thing we do when we attempt to measure intelligence. We are trying to grasp an incredibly complex and multifaceted concept (intelligence) and translate it to a number. Simple to understand; yup. Accurate? Nah…
There’s something unfair to the fact that the way we are “classified” depends on standards; which means, the consensus among a given community (scientific, educational, governmental): educational curriculums are not tailored to suit our individual needs (and wants), intelligence or aptitude tests (GPA, SAT, WAIS, etc.) are not developed to assess or predict our individuality or potential. It’s a one-size-fits-all formula.
Being accepted to Harvard is a matter of adhering to this “educational guidelines” and being proficient at only one type of intelligence (the one used to complete standardized tests, analytic intelligence ). This reminds me of an individual that my girlfriend used to work with. This guy is Asperger’s, his social skills are non-existant but he can go through a 250 question multiple choice exam in les than 5 minutes and get a perfect score. He says that just by looking at the question sheet, he can instantly tell the correct answer from the wrong ones. When my girlfriend asked him how he did it, he replied that there is something about the way the questions and statements are written that make the answers obvious… I should’ve learned to do that years ago while I was still in college.
The external woes
The result of being educated, of being tagged and labeled throughout our lives puts us in a collision course with lack of motivation, unhappiness and wasted potential. What saddens me the most, is that these ways of doing things are so deep rooted in many of our societies, that eradicating them is like attempting to cure a grade-4 sarcoma in its latest stage.
This does not mean that there’s nothing to be done. We, as educators, professionals, parents or friends can still make a difference (if tiny) to our lives and the ones of those around us.
Finding that thing that makes us feel butterflies in our bellies is usually within arms reach but for some reason we stick to those things that provide us with little to no satisfaction… well, sometimes they may not provide that but they put food on our tables.
Our inner demons
There are two things that often sway us from our path to self fulfillment. The first one is loss aversion. We always try to minimize our losses and maximize our gains. The threat of losing can trigger irrational behaviors that would dig us deeper into our own graves. Think about gambling. You are in a casino playing Blackjack. You’ve been having a good night, you’ve made $1000 so far; but suddenly, your luck turns around and you realize you now have $500. And you say, “okay, as soon as I get my $1000 back I’m calling it a night”. But you lose again and now you are at $250, so once again you tell yourself “well, $1000 is a long shot now, so I’m calling it quits when I get to $500″. That’s called chasing the loss and it’s one of the two reasons for us not taking the road to (personal) success.
The second one is commitment. Sometimes, we are so invested into something that bailing out requires a tremendous amount of energy, for the simple fact that we have already invested too much of it. For instance, have you ever been in a doomed relationship where you just can’t let go even when you know that there’s no future? Combined, loss aversion and commitment erect a wall that makes it difficult for us to follow our guts.
You have a dormant Einstein within yourself, go find it
To summarize, our formal education and the yardstick by which our cultures classify us, build walls around our potential and vocation that prevents us from becoming “geniuses” at that one thing we are passionate about (whether we consciously know it or not). Since genetically, there’s nothing that differentiates Einstein from you. To this external factors, add the internal ones, such as loss aversion and commitment, and you have a strong combo that hinders our creativity and imagination. Thanks to this factors, finding our element sometimes requires energy, luck, or a witty psychiatrist who could see who we really are.
If you’ve been patient enough (and I appreciate it) to stick around in (I think) the longest article (so far) of this blog I’d like to leave this anecdote which illustrates how a child’s untamed mind knows no limitations.
It was arts class and and the 1st grade kids were engaged in a free drawing activity. The teacher approached one of the students, who was covering her work with her arm and asked her what she was drawing. “A picture of God”, she replied. The teacher told her “but nobody knows how God looks like”. “They will in a minute” said the little girl without taking her gaze out of her drawing.
Image credit, LIBlog
Article by Fernando
The guy in charge of this blog - husband, Psychologist, former Manager, Blogger, Job Coach, Recruiter and Information Junkie. Yes, I am all that.
Fernando has written 237 awesome articles for us at FT Careers Blog
| Blog → Careers Blog
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
areally good article!.loved it very much.enjoyed it very much!
areally good article!.loved it very much.enjoyed it very much!
when the person has personal interest then he will do that work and i think forcefully cannot increase the interest of the person
{ 2 trackbacks }