I always enjoy stories of late bloomers not named Michael Jordan, and this one from Scriptorium Daily is worth repeating:
Intellectual pursuit demands diligence and responsibility. A couple of years ago world class pediatric neurosurgeon Fred J. Epstein died. What makes his story remarkable is that he had dyslexia. He was told he was told that he was stupid and would be unable to ever make it into medical school. Because he refused to quit and was loved by his family he became a leader in pediatric neurosurgery. He pioneered a surgical technique that enabled doctors to remove tumors from spinal cords and brain stems that before his innovations were considered to be inoperable. Clearly, he was anything but gifted, and, yet, without this determined man many children would not have survived these life threatening conditions.
My own journey is not nearly as exciting and likely will not end in any new surgical techniques, but I do like to tell my students when I teach that, although I read Continental philosophy (Hegel and Heidegger and Derrida and such) as often as I can now, I found it entirely impenetrable until I was about 29 years old.? That might not seem like much of a story, but the semester that it clicked was my last semester of graduate coursework (unless events transpire that land me back in the graduate classroom, but that’s another story for another day).? I dig the fact that Paul Spears of the Torrey Honors Institute takes this stand against a strong determinism of “talent” in favor of a humanism that holds excellence to be habitus rather than some biological given:
We need to instill in ourselves and our children that understanding is a result of mining the intellectual subject until our hands bleed from digging into the subject. There is no quick fix, intellectual giftedness or computer program that will replace a refusal to admit intellectual defeat and tenaciously pursue mastery of an idea. It is the only responsible thing for us to attend to.
I don’t often send an unqualified bravo to the Torrey boys, but this post certainly deserves one.
Same with me. It is as if good philosophical texts are like seeds that sprout years after they have been planted. But that is only if we plant those seeds so deep in our intellect that our “hands bleed from the digging.” Of course it helped me to have some good cronies to help me do the digging and planting.
For me, the main philosopher that began to make sense years after I had read, and reread him was Wittgenstein.
I want to go back and revisit Ludwig some time soon. Perhaps the occasion will arise after I make it through the end of Being and Time.
A musician friend of mine said he read that it takes 10,000 hours working at something to become essentially an expert. That’s not the word he used, but it is the best I could come up with before my first cup of coffee this morning. Maybe it was “virtuoso”.
But then I wonder, too, about people like Chet Baker. Couldn’t read a lick of music, couldn’t tell you a chord or play a chord for anything. One of his musician friends said he would ask what “note” they were starting on and take it from there, playing every change precisely by feel. No musician would tell you this is the norm, it is the rarest of exceptions. I guess that still doesn’t mean he didn’t spend 10,000 hours playing that way to get that good.
Anyway. Thanks for turning me on to “Scriptorium”. Great blog.
Joe
You anticipated my answer there at the end, Joe. Doing things without a practice’s standard notation is one thing–I’ve known very good chess players who never wrote down a single game in algebraic notation. And I’ve never risen above mediocrity, having written down dozens of games. But that’s not the same thing as saying that the good players without algebraic notation lacked any sort of systematic practice.