The Road to Mastery

The following article is adapted from a previously published posting on Al Fin, the Next Level blog. It is part of an ongoing series on that blog dealing with the importance of raising dangerous children.

We talk a lot about competence in the dangerous child, and certainly competence is crucial when dealing with dangerous (and valuable) skills. But on the road to mastery, competence occurs somewhere near the half-way point.

In 1980, Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus described A FIVE-STAGE MODEL OF THE MENTAL ACTIVITIES INVOLVED IN DIRECTED SKILL ACQUISITION (PDF). In the document, they describe 5 steps, or stages, in the growth from beginner to master:

1. Novice
2. Competent
3. Proficient
4. Expert
5. Master

Since then, the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model has been altered so that the 5 stages are now:

Novice -- Advanced Beginner -- Competent -- Proficient -- Expert

When reduced to just 3 stages common to both ancient and modern guilds, we would describe the model as Apprentice -- Journeyman -- Master.

Slideshare presentation of the Dreyfus & Dreyfus model

The road to mastery is a long one, which modern western educational systems are reluctant to follow. The resistance to mastery learning among modern educators is extremely strong, perhaps due to the time and effort required of both teacher and learner.

Famed psychologist of expert learning, K. Anders Ericsson, says that world class mastery requires at least 10 years of directed practise by the most gifted, and more like 15 to 25 years of hard directed practise by the merely elite (PDF).

In Ericsson's view, it is the duration and quality of practise which determines who will master the skill, rather than innate talent or IQ. Perhaps it is best to adopt that view, and teach students to enjoy the hard effort required to achieve mastery, even if it is not entirely correct.

After all, even among the elite, there are those who are clearly superior, who took much less time and practise to achieve higher levels of mastery than the masses of those who are considered "expert" or "master." But again, perhaps it is best to focus on teaching students to enjoy mastering challenges, and solving difficult problem after difficult problem. Students who incorporate persistence and grit along with expertise, are more likely to succeed.

But each child is different, with different propensities and likelihood of achieving mastery, for a wide range of skills and practises. Some children are more likely to be happy as specialists, while others are more naturally generalists. Not only must we provide the child with a likely path to mastery in his general field of choice, we must also learn to gauge his optimal balance of depth vs breadth.

For students who wish a shallower level of mastery for a large number of different fields, the mastery of "heuristics" in each field is likely to be very important.

For those who wish to master a smaller number of fields, the utilisation of customised "mastery learning" should take them to a deeper level, as appropriate.

And for those who are compelled to take the field or profession beyond the level of its current masters -- to achieve creative innovation and genius level work -- a working through the entire 5 stage Dreyfus and Dreyfus model is required, plus just a little extra.

When a master is doing genius level revolutionary innovation, he is working at a hypothetical "level 6" or higher. He is devoting his entire being to the problem, over an extended period of time. This is something that is not easily taught -- if it can be taught at all.

Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow, illustrates some of the problems in making decisions and judgments at different stages from novice to expert.

Typically we think of the early stages of mastery as involving more conscious and deliberative thinking, while the more expert stages involve more automatic and intuitive types of thinking.

But if experts and masters cannot "keep their hand in" with the earlier skills of deliberative and conscious thinking and fact-checking, they may be at a loss when entirely new problems arise which do not succumb to their intuitions and learned automaticities.

Early stage learning -- before the ages of 12 or 16 -- will provide the child with a wide range of competencies and mid-level skills which fall far below mastery. But if sometime between the ages of 5, and 12 to 16, the child experiences a special affinity to and talent for one or more skills, he should be encouraged along a road that might lead to mastery of the special skill or skills. The more high quality directed development time the child can put in for a particular skill, the closer to world class mastery he can come.

Early stage learning focuses upon heuristics and rules of thumb. These are practical and easy to remember scaffolds of learning, for building more detailed structures of learning later.

Many people go through their entire lives without ever going beyond the early heuristic level of learning for any given field. And some do not even get that far.

For those who wish to raise truly dangerous children, it is important that you learn to provide the important heuristics which will keep the child safe even in a dangerous environment. And should the child show a marked preference for any particular dangerous environments, the child should not only be given the crucial heuristics to keep him safe, but should also be helped further along the road to mastery so that he can shape both himself, and the environment itself to his own advantage.

Finally, a caveat: IQ and innate ability do play an important part in the road to mastery along with innate inclinations -- despite what well-meaning experts such as KA Ericsson may claim publicly. Pay close attention to cues which may indicate an especially fulfilling direction of development for a particular child.

Children can become infatuated with a particular field without understanding the incredible amount of difficult work that is necessary for mastery of it. It is important that children be given a chance to prove themselves, but in a realistic -- not pampered or sheltered -- way. Force them to see what the thing really is, and what it will take to achieve it. Be brutally honest here, or you may do far more harm than you realise.

The child does not have time for a large number of abortive attempts at mastery, if it takes between 15 and 25 years for him to achieve top level mastery. And most parents don't have the time, patience, or the money to support multiple failed attempts.

Yes, you want the child to aim high. But: Do not pamper. Do not shelter. Do not encourage fantasy dreams which are without realistic possibility. Make the child prove himself each step of the way, but be sure to provide the opportunity for him to do so.

More: We have pointed out in previous articles that dangerous children should be able to support themselves economically -- in multiple ways -- by the time he or she is 18. This is due to the multiple skills and competencies which the child will have learned on the path to becoming dangerous.

This is a very good thing for parents, who will no doubt have their own uses for their hard-earned wages. A widely-competent dangerous child should be able to finance his own long experimentation into mastery over the decades of early to middle adulthood.

Dangerous children typically remain dangerous over entire lifetimes. They are far less likely to sink deeply into time-killing entertainments and mind-wasting amusements and intoxicants. Parents give dangerous children their start, but it is the children themselves who must find their own way.

“Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For thir souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. _Kahlil Gibran _ quoted in Goodreads

Human existence is passing through a phase change, although very few are aware of the crucial transition. Only a relatively small proportion of those who are presently alive are likely to transit the treacherous narrows ahead, successfully. Most of those fortunate few are only wee children now.

It is not survival which is in question, but rather it is the quality of human life and the human future which hangs in the balance.

Everything you think you know, just ain't so.

We will be expanding on this topic on alfin2101.blogspot.com

The Insular Brain of a Champion

Hidden behind the temporal lobe, lies a portion of the cerebral cortex known as the insular cortex, or the insula. The insula serves several functions, but one of the more recently discovered roles of this island of gray matter is to anticipate the future of the person's "body sense." Brains which can do this more quickly and efficiently are able to perform skilled motor functions -- such as Olympic sports -- more skillfully.

Insular Cortex

Recent studies indicate that the brain's insular cortex may help a sprinter drive his body forward just a little more efficiently than his competitors. This region may prepare a boxer to better fend off a punch his opponent is beginning to throw as well as assist a diver as she calculates her spinning body's position so she hits the water with barely a splash. The insula, as it is commonly called, may help a marksman retain a sharp focus on the bull's-eye as his finger pulls back on the trigger and help a basketball player at the free-throw line block out the distracting screams and arm-waving of fans seated behind the backboard.

The insula does all this by anticipating an athlete's future feelings, according to a new theory. Researchers at the OptiBrain Center, a consortium based at the University of California, San Diego, and the Naval Health Research Center, suggest that an athlete possesses a hyper-attuned insula that can generate strikingly accurate predictions of how the body will feel in the next moment. That model of the body's future condition instructs other brain areas to initiate actions that are more tailored to coming demands than those of also-rans and couch potatoes.

This heightened awareness could allow Olympians to activate their muscles more resourcefully to swim faster, run farther and leap higher than mere mortals. In experiments published in 2012, brain scans of elite athletes appeared to differ most dramatically from ordinary subjects in the functioning of their insulas. Emerging evidence now also suggests that this brain area can be trained using a meditation technique called mindfulness—good news for Olympians and weekend warriors alike.

... The motor cortex and memory systems, for example, encode years of practice. Nerve fibers become ensconced in extra layers of a protective sheath that speeds up communication between neurons, producing lightning-fast reflexes. Understanding the brain at its athletic best is the goal of psychiatrist Martin Paulus and his colleagues at the OptiBrain Center. They propose that the insula may serve as the critical hub that merges high-level cognition with a measure of the body's state, to insure proper functioning of the muscles and bones that throw javelins and land twirling dismounts from the high bar. "The key idea we're after is how somebody responds when they get a cue that predicts something bad will happen," Paulus says. "The folks that are performing more optimally are the ones who are able to use that anticipatory cue to adjust themselves and return to equilibrium."

...The insula generates this sense by maintaining a map of all your far-flung organs and tissues. Certain neurons in the insula respond to rumblings in the intestines, for example, whereas others fire to reflect a toothache. To manage the influx of messages bombarding it from throughout the body, the insula collaborates closely with the anterior cingulate cortex, an area crucial for decision-making, to evaluate and prioritize those stimuli. This raw representation of bodily signals has been hypothesized for more than a century to be the origin of emotions.

...Taken together, the studies indicate that men and women who have extreme physical abilities show greater insula activation when anticipating a change to their internal feelings, whether emotional or physical.

...the insula does not live in the present, but the future. "We're responding to information incorporated from physiology, cognition, our surroundings," Simmons says. "By the time we've integrated all that, it's part of the past." The ability to forecast can also backfire, producing disorders such as anorexia nervosa, which combines lapses in bodily awareness with a concern for how food consumption now will alter body image in the future. "It's the anticipation that's getting in your way," Simmons says. Indeed, brain scans of individuals with eating disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder show that insula activity diverges from that seen in healthy subjects, suggesting impairments in this area.

Train your interoception

For aspiring athletes or individuals who suffer insular dysfunction, there are reasons to hope interoception is trainable. A meditation technique called mindfulness encourages people to tune into their present thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations. _SciAm

Of course the insula does not merely serve in anticipation of moment-to-moment changes in body sense accompanying motor activity. Insular activity is incorporated in virtually all conscious and subconscious mental activity. In fact, without this "body sense," the human mind would go likely go insane, with nothing to ground and integrate the external senses.

This is, in fact, one of the challenges for achieving human level artificial intelligence -- although most researchers in the field have not discovered it yet.

It is true that the insula is not the only part of the brain involved in body mapping or anticipation of body configuration after an imagined movement. But the insula -- due to its particular connections, functions at a higher level of automatic control, which may mean that it is particularly well trained at elite levels of brain-body coordination. As skills training progresses, the insula likely changes in size, connectivity, and its cytoarchitecture is most probably modified.

Current tools for studying changes in small modular areas of the brain which occur with training, are still relatively primitive and cumbersome. But they will get better.

Teaching Self-Esteem Backfires! Teach a Child to Enjoy a Challenge, Instead

Parents and teachers have been misled for many years--lured by the siren song of "self-esteem" to ruin a child's chances for success. Stop doing that!

...more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.

The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

Praising children’s innate abilities, as Jonathan’s parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.

...the most persistent students do not ruminate about their own failure much at all but instead think of mistakes as problems to be solved. At the University of Illinois in the 1970s I, along with my then graduate student Carol Diener, asked 60 fifth graders to think out loud while they solved very difficult pattern-recognition problems. Some students reacted defensively to mistakes, denigrating their skills with comments such as “I never did have a good rememory,” and their problem-solving strategies deteriorated.

Others, meanwhile, focused on fixing errors and honing their skills. One advised himself: “I should slow down and try to figure this out.” Two schoolchildren were particularly inspiring. One, in the wake of difficulty, pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips and said, “I love a challenge!” The other, also confronting the hard problems, looked up at the experimenter and approvingly declared, “I was hoping this would be informative!” Predictably, the students with this attitude outperformed their cohorts in these studies.

...The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that’s that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they can be remedied by more effort. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.

SciAmMind

The author of the SciAm Mind article may have her terminology a bit confused, but the underlying idea is sound: ability--competence--is malleable and can be developed through hard work and training. Intelligence is the component behind the capacity for competence. Intelligence was always there, waiting to be trained. It is safe to say that no children are trained to use their intelligence to its fullest.

In fact, with the abysmal performance of schools--still teaching self-esteem, thus teaching failure--it is safe to say that the disconnect between intelligence and performance can be vast indeed.

Psychological neoteny is lifelong incompetence--the learned helplessness of an incompetent adolescent that persists throughout the person's lifetime. But no one needs to be incompetent. Each person capable of basic schooling contains a core of competence that can be trained and developed. Government schools appear designed to create and permanently instill psychological neoteny.

If government school methods of teaching are worse than worthless, you might think that the methods could be changed. But you would be wrong to think that. Few things are as impervious to improvement as government schools. Much better to scrap the system entirely--at least the poorest performing 40%--and hand over the responsibility to outside groups more in contact with the last few decades' findings in the neuroscience of learning.

We are spending a lot of money to ruin our children. How stupid is that?

Discipline, and Talent

Genes vs. the Environment. Websites like Gene Expression and Steve Sailer perform a valuable service by describing research that shows how important genetics and heredity are in the success of individuals and nations. Statistically, intelligence correlates well with success--and intelligence is between 50% and 70% hereditable.

Inherited talent can certainly make the difference between success and mediocrity. But talent without disciplined training can be worse than worthless. A society that lapses into decadent sloth, where hard work is disdained and avoided, is likely to fail eventually.

Quotes on SELF-DISCIPLINE

"The first and best victory is to conquer self."
— Plato
Greek Philosopher

"You can never conquer the mountain. You can only conquer yourself."
— Jim Whittaker


"Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways."
— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Author

"It is not enough to have great qualities; We should also have the management of them."
— La Rochefoucauld


"A man without decision of character can never be said to belong to himself . . . . He belongs to whatever can make captive of him."
— John Foster
Author

"It is necessary to try to surpass one's self always: this occupation ought to last as long as life."
— Queen Christina of Sweden


"I think the guys who are really controlling their emotions ... are going to win."
— Tiger Woods


"Let me . . . ; remind you that it is only by working with an energy which is almost superhuman and which looks to uninterested spectators like insanity that we can accomplish anything worth the achievement. Work is the keystone of a perfect life. Work and trust in God."
— Woodrow Wilson


"We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act, but a habit."
— Aristotle


"Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound. The man who does not shrink from self-crucifixion can never fail to accomplish the object upon which his heart is set. This is true of earthly as of heavenly things. Even the man whose object is to acquire wealth must be prepared to make great personal sacrifices before he can accomplish his object; and how much more so he who would realize a strong and well-poised life."
— James Allen


"Nothing is more harmful to the service, than the neglect of discipline; for that discipline, more than numbers, gives one army superiority over another."
— George Washington


"Mental toughness is many things and rather difficult to explain. Its qualities are sacrifice and self-denial. Also, most importantly, it is combined with a perfectly disciplined will that refuses to give in. It's a state of mind-you could call it character in action."
— Vince Lombardi


"There are no short cuts to any place worth going."
— Beverly Sills


"Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself-and be lenient to everybody else."
— Henry Ward Beecher


"Keep away from people who belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
— Mark Twain


"If we don't discipline ourselves, the world will do it for us."
— William Feather


"Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power."
— Lao Tzu


"Never suffer your courage to exert itself in fierceness, your resolution in obstinacy, your wisdom in cunning, nor your patience in sullenness and despair. "
— Charles Palmer


"This quality of self-denial in pursuit of a longer-term goal and, indeed, the willpower to maintain the denial, is excellent training for the boardroom."
— John Viney
Drive


"Rule your mind or it will rule you."
— Horace


"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be."
— Thomas á Kempis


"Leaders aren't born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal."
— Vince Lombardi


"Success is a matter of understanding and religiously practicing specific, simple habits that always lead to success."
— Robert J. Ringer


"It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.'"
— Ralph Waldo Emerson


"Nobody's a natural. You work hard to get good and then work to get better. It's hard to stay on top."
— Paul Coffey
NHL star


"A successful career will no longer be about promotion. It will be about mastery."
— Michael Hammer


"The good Lord gave you a body that can stand most anything. It's your mind you have to convince."
— Vince Lombardi


"The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might and force of habit. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him—and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires."
— J. Paul Getty

Self discipline is the opposite of decadence and sloth. A slothful and decadent society is one that is easy to overcome from within or without. Even the slightest observation shows that socialist and communist societies become decadent--even more decadent than affluent capitalist countries. A society that provides all the amenities to everyone gratis, is a society in danger of breeding sloth into its members.

It is easy for a society to go too far in the opposite direction, as in ancient Sparta, or modern Palestine and Southern Lebanon. Societies bred exclusively for war. These societies will never produce great art or anything else but bloodshed.

Humans have always had to thread the eye of the needle, plot the course between disaster and oblivion. According to history, virtually every society eventually meets with oblivion. Sooner or later.

So, suppose a society learns to breed talent AND self-discipline into its members. Would that be enough to assure the durability of that society and its underlying civilisation? Well, luck plays a part, as does the wisdom of experience in understanding where to apply all that talent and discipline.

Wisdom is not what most people think it is. More later.