In your bloodstream: Bradybury, Melville, and the 10,000 hours
I continue to be crotchety about generalism and the speed with which people think they can learn to be something (see crotchety posts here, here, and here. Here too. Oh, and here. God, do I ever stop? Well, no, but this one here isn’t grumpy.). Listening to Studio 360’s podcast about Moby-Dick today (while I was engaged in the years-long journey of becoming a better cook — in this moment by trying to improve my chicken stock and mushroom barley soup), there was a surprisingly great interview with Ray Bradbury. Why surprising? First, because, despite my love of SF and other genre fiction, I tend not to expect profundity from SF writers. Second, having never read Bradbury, I assumed whatever acclaim he gets is because of the ideas behind and the clever titling of Fahrenheit 451, not for any skill as a writer. (I need to make that right and at least buy, if not actually read, something of his on my Kindle.) Third, it’s just such a nice way of putting something I and the voices in my head are often on about that my head snapped up and I almost cut off the tip of my left index finger when he said it.
Anyway, I spend lots of time trying to convince people to respect craft and the time it takes and the value behind going deep in subject areas. But I see lots of people assuming they’re experts in things after they’ve done something once, or read a couple articles and books about it, or memorized a couple catchy phrases. Malcolm Gladwell recently helped highlight the fallacy that conversancy == expertise or that once is enough to be a guru when he highlighted the thinking that indicates you need 10,000 hours to get really good at something. But that factoid alone doesn’t quite get it across, because it’s not 10,000 accretive hours only that get you there. It’s 10,000 accretive and repetitive hours, with an emphasis on repetitive — you don’t learn new things so much as you learn more about the richness of the things you know. Describing this process and helping people understand it is challenging.
So, Bradbury wrote the screenplay/adaptation for the Gregory Peck film version of Moby Dick. (I didn’t know that, so already I’m happily smarter as I chop my leeks — working on getting more rhythm and precision and speed with my 8″ knife.) He apparently rather famously talked about being Herman Melville for a day during the writing of the screenplay and the Studio 360 host asked him to explain the why and the how of that:
what you try to do is get it into your bloodstream, get it into your unconscious. You can’t intellectualize it, that won’t work. But if you read a book 80 or 90 times, which I did, some sections I read 120 times, and you put that all into your bloodstream . . . and then you ignore it and let it come to the surface, emotionally, passionately . . . then you become the chaser and chased.
I like the image of getting it into you bloodstream and waiting for it to surface. Even more, though, I like the idea of ignoring the material and letting it sit in your unconscious.
[…] A couple hours a week for 8 weeks. The course can hardly make anyone an expert (see my friend’s diatribes about how long it takes to get really good at/knowledgable about something), but it provides a meaningful context of the challenges ahead of anyone who wants to launch a farm-related enterprise. Neat! […]
Interesting TEDxKent talk (a fine recovery from tech issues); in effect, as Aristotle noted, some years since now, we become excellent at what we practice. One author wrote how he eschewed inspiration, making sure he was damned well inspired at 9am every morning…
… interesting differences between this crafted, honed product and the current milieu of instant messaging, tweeting, writing without thinking, editing and the like; all for wild heretical stances, but there’s a tension between the two.
Hi Kip
I really enjoyed your talk at TedXKent yesterday. When I spoke with you I had difficulty recalling the title of a book - it’s called “rethinking Expertise”, by Harry Collins and Robert Evans. It doesn’t look to be available for the Kindle.
http://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-Expertise-Harry-Collins/dp/product-description/0226113612
I’ll need to go back and reread it (perhaps not 120 times), but I think it bridges the gap between Teach yourself in 21 days and Gladwell’s 10,000hrs. Essentially the professors from Cardiff argue that many people can get by with “interactional expertise” - a proficiency in the language of a specialism - rather than contributional expertise. It seems a short step to conclude that one can gather this expertise more quickly than true contributional capability.
It’s a relatively short book ~140pp, with an interesting “periodic table of expertises” - though as a chemist, I’m not completely convinced by that analogy. In essence, the book discusses the concept that there’s more than one type of expertise to aspire to acquire - and with this wider variety of names for “experts”, perhaps you’ll be a little less grumpy!
have a good trip back to NYC
hah… now I’ve explored our blog, I realise you’ve come across Harry Collins before - http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2008/09/05/reclaiming-and-reconfiguring-expertise/
but I think you might have to read it yourself!
Collins’s book is not available on Kindle, so, while I am going to read it for myself (!), it’ll have to wait till I get back to the states. Thanks for reminder about a book that clearly grabbed my attention and might just make me a nicer person!