Practice makes perfect

Nature or nurture?

That always seems to be the question.

Well, actually, sometimes it doesn't seem to be a question at all. Like for instance, I know that no amount of nurture would have made me a great basketball player. Nature (and the flat feet and limited coordination that nature provided) doomed me to enjoying basketball from the stands instead of on the court.

But apparently for many things, nurture plays the bigger role. David Brooks has an interesting column in the New York Times recently, where he looks at the qualities needed to possess an ability that we would commonly call "genius." Common views see genius as created by a divine spark or, in our contemporary parlance, by nature. When we see a Mozart or a Tiger Woods, we assume that such men were born with something the rest of us were not.

That ain't necessarily so, Brooks argues. "In the [scientific] view that is now dominant," Brooks writes, "even Mozart's early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people's work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today's top child-performers."

So what made Mozart special, then? According to Brooks, it "was the same thing Tiger Woods had - the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills."

Citing researchers into the way talent is expressed in the abilities and accomplishments of people, Brooks concludes, "The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It's not I.Q., a generally gad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it's deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft."

I'll leave off Brooks' use of the term "innate spiritual gift" for now. Christians do believe in spiritual gifts that may give certain abilities within the body of Christ, though we do not believe such gifts are innate (because they come not from us, but from the Holy Spirit). But Brooks isn't making a theological argument anyway. His usage of "divine spark" is really a stand-in for "nature," and he seems to prefer the former term only because it points to the somewhat superstitious way we tend to look at how the unusually accomplished among us get that way.

The overarching point is extremely significant: Geniuses are not born. They are made, through deliberate practice.

And though Brooks favors modern sociological research, he could have come to the same conclusion by reading a a scholar just a bit older. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle ascribes only the barest human abilities to the realm of nature (e.g., our sense perceptions). When it comes to human excellences, he asserts, "Virtues, by contrast, we acquire, just as we acquire crafts, by having first activated them. For we learn a craft by producing the same product that we must produce when we have learned it; we become builders, for instance, by building, and we become harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions" (2.1.4).

For Aristotle, virtue is both a state and an activity, so that the truly virtuous person is one who does the right things for the right reasons. And yet, the states will always follow the activities, meaning that we become virtuous people by engaging in virtuous activities. "That is why," Aristotle writes, "we must perform the right activities, since differences in these imply corresponding differences in the states. It is not unimportant, then, to acquire one sort of habit or another, right from our youth. On the contrary, it is very important, indeed all-important" (2.1.8).

We can have excellence in an endeavor like playing the harp (or playing golf). Or we can have excllence in character, which we see in a brave person or a just person. Or we can have excellence in intellect, such as we see in a person who possess the virtue of prudence (or practical wisdom).

But in all these cases, Aristotle agrees with the research that David Brooks finds so fascinating: Geniuses are not born but made, and in the end, it is practice that makes perfect.