I was thinking of his early debut in the music world. He joined the family band at the age of 5. Under the hands of his father he underwent infinite rehearsals to hone his talent. But is this so unusual ? It does not seem so .. consider the following celebrities...
- Venus and Serena Williams - who say they do not remember ever learning to play ... they just knew how to play !!!
- Andre Agassi - whose father Mike Agassi is supposed to have hung a tennis ball over Andre's crib and taped a racket to his hand as soon as he could walk !!
I am sure there are others .... but I am not commenting on the parenting styles of the parents of these celebrities.
My question is more basic - would these people have become so great in their fields without the overwhelming and relentless focus in their areas of expertise ? Just think of some other top-notch people -
- Michael Phelps - Trains 5-6 hours every day ... 7 days a week ... 365 days a year ... no holidays / Sundays. This hardly leaves him time for anything else.
- Tiger Woods - Was a child prodigy who began to play golf at the age of two. He does weight training and of course practises golf daily especially his swings.
- Vishwanathan Anand - Daily tunes up anywhere between 4 - 10 hours depending on whether he has a match or not.
- Warren Buffett - He was just 6 when he displayed his ability to make money off cola bottles !!
- Bill Gates - Was never satisfied to be the best. He always had to push beyond.
- It is well known that vocalists, musicians, dancers, circus performers, magicians etc have to practise/rehearse daily. It is not enough to know their trade - they must hone it on a daily basis.
This kind of targeted knuckling down obviously does not leave much time to lead a so-called-balanced life. And what is a balanced life ? Is it really good-to-have ?
When I was working I had attended this workshop called "I can". There was an exercise in which we were supposed to draw 8 spokes of a wheel. Each spoke represented a section of our life - like - spiritual , professional , health, relationships like father/mother/sister/brother etc ....I forget the rest. One had to mark how proficient one was in each section. 0 was the center. 10 was the extreme and represented 100%. And at t
he end of it .. we were to join all these points on the 8 spokes. Needless to say the joined dots never formed a circle which was supposedly the result to aspire for. But today I believe living a balanced life is a myth. Like it or not unless we invest in our orbit of excellence - we will never be good - forget being the best !In this process of trying to lead a balanced life ... we do not seem to recognize that it seems to be a path to becoming a "Jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none". Perhaps it is time to accept that living a balanced life is not really desirable. It seems to be recipe to make one mediocre .... It is more beneficial to focus on our core strengths in one / two domains and realize that everything else will be at the expense of these ... and rightly so. Being a master in any sphere involves - time, effort, discipline and yes; sacrifice.
More to the point - Natural ability or talent ... will just remain raw potential unless it is exploited. Couple of areas of our life will dominate our waking hours - making time and having time for any other interest is just a bonus. So forget trying to be a 'super-anything' .... just be excessively good in your mainstays and let the rest take care of itself !! :))
This begs the question ..... For some these child prodigies - did their parents do a good thing by helping them harness their abilities or did they do them a disservice by pushing them so early ?
Would the genius have surfaced without the prodding ?
4 comments:
Vidya, I started commenting and figured it got very lengthy. I have done a cross-post at www.kuppurao.com
I think balancing one's life is an ongoing process... It is how one knows what to prioritize in every day situations. And how well one executes.
This comment is in response to the cross post that can found here
http://kuppurao.blogspot.com/2009/07/balanced-life-is-myth.html
Wonderful insights Rao ! Following are my thoughts ....
I too think achievers cannot really stop practising .. I mean the latest record by Phelp was achieved with some 1/1600 th second gap between the first two contenders ... an infinitesmal gap ... .. that separates him from the virtual oblivion of being second .... ( not for Phelps perhaps since he has achieved a few other records ).
With win and loss so finely divided ... no achiever can relax .. unless he/she wants to walk into the sunset ! :)
I believe achievers have more choice than mediocre people in general. They can take with them the same discipline , the same ability to focus to another field. Perhaps this might not be so easy with creative pursuits which obviously require a specific artistic bent ... but a person who is a great salesperson .. can sell apples, computers , Ponzi schemes or even derivatives ! :) I am giving a very common example but I think you get my gist.
Lastly regarding point 3 - I myself find the question difficult to answer and I have a child !! This is a torture I think parents face , especially now with the child-centric focus on how supportive/encouraging/helpful etc we must be to kids.
Added to this is the physiological aspect - the main neural highways of the brain are supposedly formed and fairly crystallized by the time one is seven years old. So if the child has been exposed to classical music at an early age, he/she learns to appreciate it better. The neural pathway for appreciating classical music becomes an expressway while may be the pathway for juggling remains a rough mud road. You can extrapolate this to other aspects.
Now the point is not that - the child cannot learn anything new after this age. What this does mean is that making a express way from the rough mud road will require a lot of hard work. More so b'cos nature believes in "Use it or lose it" phenomenon. So if the neural highway for juggling remains dormant for a long time - this road may disappear altogether !!!!
So what to do ? Do we expose children to all that is reasonably possible to create a map of multiple broad neural channels or do we re-wire ( am speaking purely in physiological terms ) the brain so the child can do only one thing extremely well but in the process lose other abilities perhaps, since those neural centers have not been stimulated ???
Needless to say - taking a middle path is not easy. And this is an anguish quite a few parents live with.
[ P.S. - Note that I am talking of regular brain growth. There are many cases of re-wiring type of miracles happening with this wonderful organ but these cases are special ]
Interesting view point Namratha. Something like limit to 0 without ever becoming 0 ! :))
Sigh ... execution is the key everywhere !! :)
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