Adult geniuses and 10,000 hours rule

Adult geniuses and 10,000 hours rule

We’ve an exclusive club of poets on the internet. Poets were hand-picked from different poetry forums to become members of ‘the pub’. Members are mostly from US, Europe, Asia, and Africa in that order. Actually we’ve only two Asians and one African-African. Although ‘the pub’ was created by an American poet we call Ming, one of the founding members is Victor Claude.

Victor is sixty years plus and a Nam Vet (American soldier who fought in the Vietnam war). Besides the wisdom that comes naturally with old age, Victor has other gifts such as the ability to tactically end hot debates on the pub; like debates between theists and the majority of the atheists, war, Gaza, and so forth.

But by far the most extraordinary of Victor’s gift is his ability to write poetry. His poems are clear, meaningful and easy to read. From cinquains to acrostics, Victor is a master of them all. And members are grateful to him for his contributions to the forum. Currently, he’s the poet of the month for his excellent limerick, “Seven Fish in a Bog.”

I’m telling you Victor’s story in an attempt to answer readers’ questions that trailed the piece I wrote on how geniuses are developed. Most of them argued that since my focus in that article were children, is there a way adults, starting from now, can attain genius status? Below is one of such letters:

“Dear Prof. I couldn't help writing to you about the above titled (Genius is 100% preparation) article in Weekly Trust of Saturday Feb 28 2009. I was impressed with the analysis. But my main question is: how does one start being a genius when one is already an adult?

“I am an adult, married with three children and struggling to balance a job (in a Bank), married life, and still pursue a PhD. Could you kindly come to my rescue with some points on how to be a genius or half genius? All I want is, to be good in my job, study area, learn and master two or even three languages (including my mother tongue), be proficient in computer usage, apart from the banking rudiments, be able to write good research papers or articles and be generally intelligent or knowledgeable.
Kindly come to my rescue.”


To answer the question of how an adult can get extraordinarily good (what we call genius) at what he does, let’s study what Victor Claude says about himself:

“I began to write poetry 35 years ago as a means to remain sane. It is still therapeutic, but it has become much more than that. I have always been fascinated with words and their ability to communicate meaning. I write daily, even if what is produced is not what I would call excellent. Excellence only comes through practice in any endeavour, writing included. I am still practicing--Still practicing.”

There’s almost a consensus by members of the pub of Victor’s genius, members look forward to his poems, he writes with so much clarity and simplicity and he posts more poems than any single member. How did Victor get so good? Victor jumps off the page amongst members of the pub (some of who are prodigies, professors, writers of many books on poetry, and teachers of poetry) because he does one thing: he writes poems everyday for 35 years. He practices.

But it doesn’t help you much to learn that you can attain genius by practicing, does it? But what if we reduce the ‘practice’ to science so that you can follow the steps and become genius? Or better still, what if there’s a formula or a minimum level of practice you need to achieve to become a world-class expert in anything?

Here’s the simple minimum prerequisite for becoming a genius: practice what you do for 10,000 hours. Neurologist Daniel Levitin writes:

“Study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needed to know to achieve true mastery.”

If we apply this rule to Victor’s case, you can see he’s attained more than 10,000 hours. Let’s say he dedicates one hour per day to think, write, clean, and revise his poems, that’ll total more than 12,000 hours of poetry writing.

But don’t panic you don’t need 35 years to clock 10,000 hours. If you practice nine hours everyday, it’ll take you only three years; but if you need to achieve the expertise in five years, you need to practice for five and a half hours everyday. Some of my friends doing research in the life sciences told me they’ve embarked upon five-year mission. I wish them good luck.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could read through books in a fraction of the time it takes you now?

Wouldn't it be nice if you could read through books in a fraction of the time it takes you now?
By Michael Masterman

Speed reading is a much simpler process than many people realize. We read the way we do for two reasons: the first is that we are trying to hear what we're reading, internalizing every word; the second is that we've been trained to read carefully so that we don't miss anything. But both of these have the same effect; they slow us down!

Depending on your age, you may have been reading this way for ten, twenty, thirty years or more, long enough for it to become a well-ingrained habit. But the good news is that it only takes a short time to learn to read in a new way.

One thing that slows us down is the way our eyes move across the page. By training your eyes to move more quickly, you can learn to read faster.

Try this technique yourself to see just how easy it is to perform...
• Use the index and middle fingers of your left hand to scroll across the page from left to right. Move across and down the page in a zigzag motion.

• Follow these hand movements with your eyes, focusing on the words just above the fingers. Don't worry about reading the words just yet but simply try to keep up with your hand movements.

• Continue to scroll across and down, zigzagging across the page, following your fingers with your eyes in a smooth, steady motion.

• Practice this hand-eye coordination technique for a couple of pages; then push your self to go a little faster.

• Turn the pages with your right hand, which helps you go faster and keeps the flow going smoothly.

This simple technique will have you doubling or tripling your reading speed in minutes!

When your eyes follow your hands it prevents them from stopping in certain places where they might otherwise be tempted to re-read passages. It also helps you overcome the need to internalise what you are reading.

For more information on how to instantly triple your reading speed, go to Speed Reading Secrets

Speed Reading Newspapers and Magazine: 3 Tips to Getting all the Education You Need from News Journals Quickly

How to use speed reading to blaze through newspapers or magazines
by Ibraheem Dooba

This article will show you three techniques you can use to save more than half of the time you use in reading newspapers. You will not only save time, but also your focus will increase and you’ll have fun reading even the uninteresting reports.

Read the first paragraph

The reason why journalistic writing is called ‘history in a hurry’ is because of its wont to quickly condense vast information in a very small space. This plays to the advantage of the harassed reader who wants to stay current but has very little time to read.

Often all you need to understand a news piece is the first paragraph. Here the reporter will tell you what’s happening, who it’s happing to and where it’s happening. Sometimes you don’t even need to read the entire paragraph because the first sentence or the first couple of sentences give you all the information.


If you still have more time you can move on to step two; otherwise, you can stop reading.

Read the last paragraph

Some news pieces are follow-ups of events that were earlier reported. In such a situation, the first paragraph may not give you all the information you need. But the last paragraph will do the job. It’s usually in the last paragraph that the user is given the background information that leads to the story.

Read the “quotes”

After you’ve read the first and last paragraphs and you still feel you need more information or have more time to play with, you can dabble into middle of the piece by reading the direct speech of the sources of the news item.

In all forms of writing where quotations are used, the writer leads the reader into the quotes and then leads the reader out. This (leading) takes too much space and therefore, robs the reader out of some precious time.

Fortunately, you’re intelligent enough to understand what the subject or the source is saying without any interpretation from the reporter. So glide directly to the quotation marks and read what’s within them.

Conclusion

Read the first and the last paragraphs. Then read the quotations. If you follow these steps, it’s possible to get about 80 per cent of a news piece. And it’s rare to find a report that’s compelling to the extent that you want to get more than 80 per cent out of it.

For more tips on how you can instantly triple your reading speed,
Click this link for free no obligation articles. Yours for free by visiting Speed Reading Secrets