…Because I set off on a think about nature vs nurture last couple posts, and then stopped to smell the cupcakes and CDOs along the way…
“President Bartlet: Did you know that Mozart’s father believed his son to be a miracle from God? He was so convinced of this, he forced young Wolfgang to play all over Europe. His father felt it was his duty, in a world where no on believes in miracles anymore, to show them God’s latest.
Debbie Fiderer (President’s Personal Secretary): And how did young Wolfgang feel about being hauled about like a trained monkey?
President Bartlet: It pretty much screwed him up for life.”
– excerpt from West Wing, the multi-award winning drama I started off watching solely for work in order to flesh out my understanding of US markets and policy setting (derivatives were most commonly quoted in USD)… and which then kept me hooked for its idealistic undercurrent – an underlying theme is smart people with good intentions trying to run a very large country… The character of United States President Bartlet as created by writer Aaron Sorkin (my hero!) is also portrayed as a devout Catholic egghead Economics professor married to medical surgeon wife struggling to maintain her own career, and with whom he has 3 daughters… and yes, he struggles as a dad who has… issues with most of the men his daughters date and marry 🙂
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is probably one of the most well-known child prodigies in history, a highest-of-the-high achiever in an incredibly challenging field. Peak – How All Of Us Can Achieve Extraordinary Things, written by Ericsson & Pool, identifies music as the field which most demands technical excellence and gruelling practice alongside relatively limitless creative opportunity. (Hence the choice of Mozart, to talk about re giftedness.)
Young Wolfgang was described rather breathlessly in historic accounts as exhibiting the incredibly rare – only about 1 in 10,000 people has it – musical gift of “perfect pitch,” to the extent that he could identify notes from practically any instrument even when he wasn’t in the same room.
As a child, Mozart picked out chords before the age of 4, toured the countryside performing from the age of 6, composed his first symphony at 8 (largely transcribed by dad Leopold, a fairly successful musician who largely gave up creating and performing in order to tutor his kids.) Sometimes Mozart, his older sister Nannerl, and their dad were on the road performing for over 3 years at a time. The tours were “often in primitive conditions,” and fraught with “near-fatal illnesses far from home”. Dad himself was not exempt from the life threatening risks of travel sicknesses, falling deathly ill at least once while on the road. They must have believed with every fibre of their being in what they saw as a calling to share their “blessing” with the world.
“In a world where no one believes in miracles anymore”, I charge that
- we just need to know where and how to look, and
2. even Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s parents were judged. (Yup, parenting’s hard.)
While Mozart easily comes to mind when you think “gifted child”, as implied by Sorkin’s writings and my choice of excerpt above, “gifted” is a loaded, misleading word that implies wild, raw talent without much work. Besides, as someone who watched several friends’ struggles to get pregnant and/or adopt – and lemme tell you, every single one of their stories was something – having children is the blessing, the “miracle” we never see because of all the “other” problems and anxieties we create for ourselves in parenting. (We as a people do this to ourselves. Uh… why?)
It was Amitai Etzioni who said “Education, particularly character formation, is the essential family task.” Raise a headcase, risk causing pain and ruining the lives of other human beings. Ask anyone who has a dysfunctional human in their lives. This is why I take voyeuristic delight in spoiling our pets 😛
This is one of ’em “re-arranging” Rockstar’s hair, and the other trying to take apart HN’s Lego pieces. Wow did these two get bold in a hurry – now we have two feathered @ssholes flapping about the house, chirping their lungs out when we try to hold a conversation.
Anyway. I believe what practically any parent can do with their child can be special (look at my kids turning birds into brats! Someday, I just know NASA’s gonna wanna talk to us!) and well, if as a society we’re going to prize the crazy “perfect pitch” level of performance excellence (well, some of us), then books like Peak talk about how it’s more achievable to erm, “normal people” than we previously thought. Or really, that “gifted” boils down to technique and gruelling hard work.
If you saw the whole picture, the cost-benefit though, you m-ight not still want your child to have that kind of “gift”. Or you might. <shrugs> Best part of being a parent today is we have more choices than ever before I guess…
(Btw tangent alert – I found some old pics of Rockstar in his last short haircut 😀 –
The hairstory (sorry) is, we have a longer-running… “social adventure” going, about books and covers and misconceptions, and in outspoken HK it’s especially entertaining. When Rockstar was a toddler I’d shave his head, and both Chinese and Caucasian women would ask me, “Are you his mother?” (Apparently when shaven he looks “very Chinese” …while I don’t :D)
With HN, no one asks if I’m her mother, but people look at her and then ask me, “Are you Phillippino/ Burmese/ Eurasian?” (I’m Malaysian Straits-born Chinese and her dad is Malaysian Chinese; neither of us is even literate in Chinese, though my hub can certainly speak it better than I can.) At work, I would get “Those are definitely not fully Chinese features. Someone in your ancestry messed around” (uh.. I. Said. Straits-born Chinese.) …And then in Kings’ case people just speak to him in Putonghua without asking 😀
(No, none of this ever offends us, we find it hilarious. Rockstar recently responded to a girl who politely introduced herself to him at Orientation, “I’m Rockstar, and I’m actually a boy.” So now he the transgender dude haha. (I told him to enjoy the jokes and that porcelain skin while he can, because puberty’s gonna kick in soon 🙂 ). Another time when Rockstar asked a new friend (who of course had never seen him pre-long hair) “Were you so obviously avoiding the word ‘gay’ around me in the beginning because you weren’t sure if I was?” to which the friend replied, “Yeah mate, in case – I dunno, ya might be.” That was quite nice, right?)
So now we’ve gotten a few kicks out of it, it seemed a good time to share – firstly, let’s get it out of the way – No question. Like. An. Arrow. ‘Kay? The reason Kings and I were particularly supportive of Rockstar’s hair un-style choice for almost 2 years (bearing in mind that’s a lotta camps and activity groups and therefore, I trust, sufficient anonymity) is because of this – at one point Rockstar was one of very few boys…somewhere, who talked to this other boy. This friend of Rockstar’s is an incredibly good ballet dancer and gymnast.
Now, however much the world is changing, still we have some of “those” stereotypes. Just look at say, the status of most girl footballers in professional soccer, and what boy professional models are to the world of fashion. I’ve had one male friend who took his ballet semi-pro, and he said the boy-girl ratio in ballet is so heavily skewed that the few boys who stick with it are hugely in demand. They also need to be physically strong and have good control, because they have to be able to lift the girl dancers and well, not kill drop them… So anyway, this boy who was an accomplished dancer got on very well with many girls…… and Rockstar. 🙂
So when the kids came of age and started learning about gay, trans etc etc and more boys started cutting their long hair, we asked Rockstar if he would like his old cut back, maybe nix some chatter, to which he said “Uh, I talk to (this friend) because he’s a really nice person. I don’t need to cut my hair for it just so people don’t talk – they know it’s not true, they’re just being jerks about it, and I’m always going to talk to him anyway. He’s nice <end of inspirational background music :D> even if… sometimes I don’t have much to say about… bracelets. Or fashion. AND this is why I don’t talk much to <mild yuck face> girls.“
After that, Kings never questioned his son having the longest hair in our family (:D) Ironically, two years ago when Rockstar had that little “tough guy” cut above, he wasn’t so tough on the inside – and that was why I made sure to get him a “fierce” cut. When he was much younger he’d get upset if people remarked how tiny he was for eg. So it was a personal milestone that he’s gotten to a point where it doesn’t bother him what other kids might say about his hair, size… or perceived orientation. (Not… to be confused with nixing hygiene. He is allowed to go longer between cuts as long as it’s not breaking any rules, but I draw the line at him looking like a homeless person 😀 )
(On a further aside, “cross-dressing” can save you real money – I wear a US Size 8 shoe, quite common in the women’s department – which means the good stuff sells out much faster and without many further reductions… but I have my pick of the most fabulous sneakers and boots at 10-20% original price in the men’s department. Can we say Dolce!)
End of tangent, back to original point – how peak performance of the “gifted” sort (“nature”) is more achievable than we thought (“nurture” trumps “nature”) but it might come at a price you may choose not to pay, at least in full… You might prefer… “moderately gifted” at the end of this 😉
One of my old friends, now relocated to Singapore for many years, struggled with tumours and eventually decided to adopt. Both she and her husband are in the hi-risk category due to family history of serious illness on both sides – and their adopted daughter is blessedly not. They are relative eggheads, formerly trained as quants in the bank, but obviously their adopted daughter does not share those genes either. This the thing –absolutely delighted at finally having a child, mum stayed home, and the new parents poured many, many hours into reading and talking to her, cooking with her etc…. Their daughter and Rockstar are just 6 weeks apart in age, and while Rockstar is no slouch today, back when they were toddlers and I worked long hours thinking he was in good hands, our friends’ adopted daughter was developmentally far ahead of him in terms of speech, literacy, etc.
I have another mum friend who went to Yale, but eventually shelved plans of becoming an English Professor in favour of raising her daughter (they relocated at the time to DC – Mum of Cherub, you getting this? HN still has your stuffed anteater baby gift 🙂 ) – in the 1.5 years she was one of our neighbours in Bel-air, the family never got round to setting up the tv. (No live-in helper either, just a regular cleaner… also a large Portuguese water dog who occasionally snuck a swim off the Waterfront Park pier if you weren’t watching, AND a baby who so wasn’t sleeping through the night that they were consulting sleep therapists…) What she did bemoan, besides Keeper’s unplanned dips in the ocean, was their 100 cardboard boxes of books that had to remain in storage while the family moved around. (Yes. 100 boxes of books. Not 100 books.) We haven’t seen them in awhile, from being half a world away, but I’m willing to bet that “Cherub” today can almost take Tina Fey.
I say this to remind myself as much as anyone – when did we come to expect that “this” didn’t take a helluva lotta “work”? RAISING LITTLE PEOPLE IS A HELLUVA LOTTA WORK. Next time you pass some little kid going batshit on the floor in public because the parent said “no more candy,” respect that parent ok… It’s much harder to Keep To The ‘No’ in the face of Squalling Snot-covered Wildcat than smile and look all put together because little kid is drugged to the eyeballs with screens and sugar..
I have one of my former RMs to thank, for helping me stick it out: “Listen – my son once insisted I buy him this huge toy one weekend in the mall. When I said no, he completely lost it and started bawling loudly. I told him if he didn’t stop we were going home immediately. I was back then the branch manager of (the bank in that same mall). When he didn’t stop, I wrestled him kicking and screaming through that whole mall to the taxi stand. I even had to stuff him in, flailing limbs and all. Dyou have any idea how hard I was praying that none of my staff saw me that day? You just really, really cannot cave when they do that.”
How hard you work depends heavily on how you approach and execute the hand you are dealt – but make no bones about it, everyone, even young Wolfgang, worked. In fact, experts concluded that as a child he probably worked way harder at music lessons than much older kids did today. Also, that their dad, in keeping with the thinking of the time, focussed greatly on educating his son over his daughter, though Nannerl did also exhibit talent and did also perform for an audience. This of course implies that with the right kind and amount of work, Mozart’s “gift” is not quite as much a gene lottery as we might otherwise believe – plus, he was trained differently than his sister.
There are also quite a few highly accomplished musicians in history who don’t have perfect pitch. And re this particular “gift,” the following correlations are even more interesting: 1) the only people who seem to have been “born” with perfect pitch also all received extensive music training very early in their life, and 2) the people who have perfect pitch are much more likely to also speak a “tonal language.” (NOT to be confused with being born Asian or African, simply whether they speak the languages.)
More than the final product, the ability to learn and achieve excellence in a chosen field is a “gift”… Chess masters and London cabbies (who must take The Knowledge, a test requiring years-long preparation of 25,000 routes as reported in the NYTimes) perform similar feats when they commit numerous strategies and city routes to memory.
Love this Black Cabs On The Brain illustration in the NYT
How you practice, what you get out of a set number of hours, also greatly determines your results – musicians who used “mental representation”, ie had a rough idea of what a piece should sound like before attempting it, produced markedly quicker results with the same amount of practice.
Now that we’ve established that some relatively amazing “gifts” are achievable with lots of hard work and can be magnified with the right learning technique, here’s the “catch”…
Mozart was also known for an at times baffling scatological humour which some psychologists attributed to numerous psychiatric conditions. Intuitively, it makes sense – while incredibly advanced in music, he was developmentally behind in social and other aspects because well, however bright, he was still human. A child, when he began the kind of career many adults dream of – he was performing for royalty from the age of 7. There are only so many hours in a day. There are limits to what the most capable humans can achieve – and the whole fuss over “gifted” can distract from the fact this is a child. If you devote practically every waking hour to one aspect of development, it’s going to be at the expense of others. Wild talent alone cannot long survive without also resilience. Strength of character. Street smarts.
Go read some of his other writings. If you couldn’t help flinching, you’re not alone – former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is on record as flat out refusing to accept it – it was “inconceivable,” she said, that a man who wrote “such exquisite and elegant music” could be so foul-mouthed.
We cherish, elevate, maybe even idolise some forms of creative genius without truly recognising it sometimes comes at a very high price.
Possibly Mozart didn’t even think it was that foul, it wasn’t like he had much of a social life with which to develop people skills. I think a good sense of humour is underrated – in order to make people laugh, you have to be able to understand them enough to know what they would find funny. That requires some people skill, and I first noticed that back in university when one of my close friends who has serious quant skills – he wasn’t just getting As in engineering math classes he was scoring 100% – declared what he really would be proud of someday was being able to do standup. Think about it – you’d need to be up to date on current affairs, you’d have to read your audience… people do not all laugh at the same thing, you’d have to figure very quickly from watching other comedians etc what would make these guys laugh. At graduation, that guy became the first Asian valedictorian to speak at Illinois Institute of Technology. I hope he killed it… 🙂
Some accounts portray Mozart as emotionally fragile. Preyed upon. Also, many of those letters the family had likely expected to remain relatively private. Which would bring me to another “price” of fame and genius. Nothing is going to stay private if you’re famous and a genius.
In Richard Dawkins’ original Selfish Gene, he writes how genes are innately selfish in order to perpetuate themselves and well, this leads also to selfish human behaviour. Examples of husbands “wired to cheat” because it perpetuates their genes etc were met with indignation and uproar. Yet that isn’t the whole story – “ultra-selfish” genes work against the interests of the rest of the genome. BUT –
“Selfishness” yet recognises the need for cooperation, for mutual survival. (I still haven’t figured why the people who got so upset about Dawkins’ “cheating husband” analogy re selfish genes didn’t then consider that the selfish husband would then lose the chance to enhance his genes with those of an intelligent wife who ain’t putting up with no nonsense from him. Evolved and “selfish” genes are surely not stupid ones 😀 or they’d be extinct soon/ already. They who think everyone else can’t do the math and only they can don’t sound like the next step up the evolutionary ladder, do they?
No matter how “strong” a “creative genius,” a person stills needs people skills and teamwork. A “gene” that hasn’t recognised the need for symbiosis, learned to identify good partners or team mates, or “give and take,” to attract the best partners, is still “weaker,” for all it exhibits immense individual ability. If a “selfish” gene recognises the need for mutual cooperation, the next step is picking the best to cooperate with so they both go the furthest. So how come we don’t hear more about people striving to be the best partner? Team mate? To burn a bridge on one tiny little project is just stupid near-sighted, and a terrible waste. Why would anyone ever do it? (On the other hand, they’re doing everyone else a favour by stuffing them in one immediate project for instant gratification – because there are so many more to come and everyone now knows not to work with them.) There are always. Many more projects to come. Because life is an endurance race…
Yes, “Black Spiderman” is out! (pic from IMDB)
POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT:
Venom is an alien life form who, depending on your point of view, is either “selfish gene”, or “ultra-selfish gene” – lucky for his human host…
Venom decides (selfishly and partially at the detriment of his own kind – I say partially because it doesn’t say that his own kind is going extinct from not eating all the humans) that he likes Earth the way it is. He chooses not to overrun it by alerting the rest of the aliens to come over, which would completely destroy what it currently is (pic from NoMoreMutants Tumblr)
This is not “Venom.” This is “Riot,” in another human host, the scientist in charge of the whole program. Human scientist is also either “selfish” or “ultra-selfish” depending how you look at it, because for some reason he’s fine with Riot bringing the alien horde over to overrun Earth, he has become so consumed by his fascination with the aliens, their potential to cure cancer… but also the power they offer… that he forgets the cost: that many more people will die, who are not chosen as hosts. (pic from MovieWeb)
In fact, it’s also iffy whether the hosts eventually survive long term, though the aliens do appear to be able to cure cancer – hence Venom and his own host’s constant debate over their “symbiotic” vs “parasitic” relationship. Moral of the story is: If you do not have the discipline to check your own ambition, if you prize success at the cost of everything else, it is an easily exploitable ‘weakness’ or flaw that’s gonna eat you up. In this particular case, quite literally 😛
