The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (19 page)

Strategies like these prove that a kid’s mode of gratification can be altered by parents and teachers. Overall, what emerges about the study of delayed gratification is that it is a skill set—and the skills can be acquired. Kids can learn to distract themselves from objects of desire, learn to abstract those desires, learn to monitor their own progress, and so on. “Children will have a distinct advantage beginning early in life,” Mischel concluded, “if they use effective self-regulatory strategies to reduce frustration in situations in which self-imposed delay is required to attain desired goals.”

Any parent can adopt basic strategies to encourage self-discipline and delayed gratification. Here are two:

• Model self-control
  . Behave as you’d want your child to behave, now and in the future. Don’t buy, eat, or grab whatever you want whenever you want it. The more self-control you demonstrate, the more your child will absorb.
  

• Give kids practice
  .
  Don’t immediately respond to their every plea
  . Let them learn to deal with frustration and want. Let them learn how to soothe themselves and discover that things will be all right if they wait for what they want.
  

There’s no single pathway to achieve these desired results as a parent, of course. Each parent must chart his or her own course. Any philosophy, religion, or practical exercise that reinforces that principle is going to work well for parents and children.

4. EMBRACE FAILURE

In the sometimes counterintuitive world of success and achievement, weaknesses are opportunities; failures are wide-open doors. The only true failure is to give up or sell your children short.

Developmental biologists, in fact, stress that all of human development is set up to be a response to problems and failures. Parents are supposed to play an important role by drawing attention to those challenges.
“Specific motor problems
are in many cases called to the infant’s attention or even thrust upon the infant by one or more caretakers in what we call a field of promoted action,” writes the noted philosopher of science Edward S. Reed and his colleague Blandine Bril. “It is because human adults promote specific motor problems for infants—often before the child is capable of solving that problem—that human action development takes the course that it does.”

In other words, parents are not supposed to make things easier for kids. Instead, they are supposed to present, monitor, and modulate challenges. The great success stories in our world come about when parents and their children learn to turn straight into the wind and gain satisfaction from marching against its ever-increasing force.

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CHAPTER NINE
How to Foster a Culture of Excellence

It must not be left to genes and parents to foster greatness; spurring individual achievement is also the duty of society. Every culture must strive to foster values that bring out the best in its people.

That whole philosophy of persistence … is one that I’m going to be emphasizing again and again in the months and years to come, as long as I am in this office. I’m a big believer in persistence. I think that … if we keep on working at it, if we acknowledge that we make mistakes sometimes and that we don’t always have the right answer, and we’re inheriting very knotty problems, that we can pass health care, we can find better solutions to our energy challenges, we can teach our children more effectively … I’m sure there’ll be more criticism and we’ll have to make more adjustments, but we’re moving in the right direction.

—PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, MARCH 24, 2009

L
eonardo da Vinci, painter of
Mona Lisa
and
The Last Supper
, exceptional engineer and anatomist, conceptualist of the automobile, helicopter, and machine gun, and also part-time geographer, mathematician, musician, and botanist, considered by some historians to be the most diversely talented person in the history of humankind, could also be a bit of a jerk. According to the sixteenth-century artist and writer Giorgio Vasari (a direct witness),
da Vinci sported a public “disdain” for his younger peer Michelangelo Buonarroti—a hostility so strong that the great Michelangelo eventually felt compelled to leave Florence so that he and Leonardo wouldn’t have to share the same town
.
Da Vinci also pointedly criticized the art of sculpture—Michelangelo’s forte—as a messy, easier, and obviously inferior craft that requires “greater physical effort [while] the painter conducts his works with greater mental effort
.”

Not that Michelangelo treated his elder rival any better. His general disposition toward Leonardo was said to be resentful and mean-spirited. On one occasion when the two men happened to be in the same vicinity, a bystander’s comment led to a rather nasty exchange:

Walking with a friend near S
. Trinità, where a company of honest folk were gathered, and talk was going on about some passage from Dante, they called to Lionardo, and begged him to explain its meaning. It so happened that just at this moment Michelangelo went by, and, being hailed by one of them, Lionardo answered: “There goes Michelangelo; he will interpret the verses you require.” Whereupon Michelangelo, who thought he spoke this way to make fun of him, replied in anger: “Explain them yourself, you who made the model of a horse to cast in bronze, and could not cast it, and to your shame left it in the lurch.” With these words, he turned his back to the group, and went his way. Lionardo remained standing there, red in the face for the reproach cast at him; and Michelangelo, not satisfied, but wanting to sting him to the quick, added: “And those Milanese capons believed in your ability to do it!”

Today, we gaze at the
Mona Lisa
and the statue of David as phenomenal works rendered by singular geniuses, and we pay little mind to the gritty human process behind their creation. In so doing, though, we often overlook what may be the central cultural lesson of great achievement: that it is rooted in comparison and rivalry.
“Every natural gift must develop itself by contests,” wrote Nietzsche
. While we tend of think of achievement as an individual phenomenon, no human is an island. At its essence, humanity is a social and competitive enterprise. We learn from one another, share with one another, and constantly compare and compete with one another for affection, accomplishment, and resources.

It cannot, then, simply be left to genes, vitamins, and parents to foster greatness; spurring individual achievement also must be the duty of society. Every culture must strive to foster values that bring out the best in its people.

Cultural differences matter enormously. In the seventh and eighth centuries,
the Islamic Renaissance radiating from Baghdad
sparked great advances in agriculture, economics, law, and literature. Mathematicians used spherical trigonometry and the new science of algebra to develop a more precise calculation of time, latitude and longitude, the earth’s surface area and circumference, and the location of the stars. Europe at the time had nothing like this same inventiveness; it would have to wait until the twelfth century for its analogous culture of innovation. (Among other developments, there were twelfth-century European advances in printing, timekeeping, astronomy, navigation, lenses, ships, and guns.)

History is filled with hundreds of such achievement clusters and achievement black holes.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, France revolutionized Western cooking with dramatic new sauces, soufflés, soups, and pastries, while nearby England rested with its sweet and savory meat pies.
In the twenty-first century, the United States is home to eleven of the fifteen top-rated universities in the world
; the entire African continent doesn’t have even one university in the top 150.

Around 1900, the single city of Vienna incubated the work of Gustav Klimt, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Otto Wagner, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the 1980s and ’90s, the modest region known as Silicon Valley, just south of San Francisco, turned out so many innovations in computer hardware and software that it rapidly transformed the very character of human society. Cultural clusters of innovation and excellence can be as regional as New Orleans jazz, as period-specific as mid-twentieth-century Eastern European physics, and as vital to the betterment of humankind as
New Haven pizza
.

How do some cultures motivate superb achievement while others leave potential geniuses uninspired and inert?
In his study of the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche imagined Plato declaring, “Only the contest made me a poet, a sophist, an orator!
” Competition, Nietzsche observed, was central to that culture, where rivalries were encouraged not only in sports but also in oratory, drama, music, and politics. Other Greek historians concur.
“The ancient Greeks turned competition into an institution on which they based the education of their citizens,” explains Olympic official Cleanthis Palaeologos
. “They presented the victory at major games as a godsent blessing, a joy and pride for the city, its fame and prestige, and they recognised the victors as men worthy of respect and honoured them with great distinctions.”

The ambitious goal was to assist as many Greek citizens as possible (though not women or slaves) in their aim to attain the human ideal. To achieve this, public spaces and customs were designed to encourage public education, mentorship, achievement, and the competitive spirit known as “agonism.” The key emphasis was on contest as a means, not an end.
“Agonism implies a deep respect and concern for the other
,” explains political theorist Samuel Chambers. “Indeed, the Greek
agon
refers most directly to an athletic contest oriented not merely toward victory or defeat, but emphasizing the importance of the struggle itself … marked not merely by conflict but just as importantly, by mutual admiration.”

With this ideal, the Greeks planted a seed that has sprouted from time to time in cultures enlightened enough to understand its promise.
Dutch historian Johan Huizinga suggests that without the agonistic spirit, human beings would simply be incapable of rising above mediocrity
.

Which brings us back to the Italian Renaissance, one of the most concentrated periods of creativity in history. Not coincidentally, it was also an era of planned cultural combat in which patrons and artists constantly competed against one another for the best ideas and works.
Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Correggio were all open-eyed adversaries
who learned from, mimicked, advised, critiqued, annoyed, one-upped, and desperately admired one another. Aesthetic rivalries also flourished on a political level. Interspersed between actual life-and-death battles, cities fought artistic wars, competing against one another for the finest public monuments.
As soon as Florence began to build a new colossal
duomo
, for example, Siena immediately set out to exceed it.

In fact, the Italian Renaissance actually began with a specific contest, according to Rutgers art historian Rona Goffen
. In the year 1400, Florence’s Merchants Guild launched a competition to create grand new doors for its octagonal baptistry.
The contest winner, Lorenzo Ghiberti
, later reported that seven
combattitori
had competed for the commission and that “to me was conceded the palm of victory.” After that, such contests gradually became commonplace, and the increasingly competitive arts culture fueled both public interest and artistic achievement. Artists were pitted against one another like gladiators; bruised feelings were as much a part of the scene as religious inspiration and bold new ideas. In 1503, Piero Soderini, the newly elected chief executive of the Republic of Florence,
commissioned Leonardo and Michelangelo to work literally side by side
on the walls of the council hall. Da Vinci was asked to depict the battle of Anghiari, Michelangelo the battle of Cascina. The rivalry was exploited to the fullest: the contract specified that they were to be “in competition with each other.” The public was expected to enjoy the spectacle.
“Artists have always borrowed from each other,” writes Goffen
. “What is different about the sixteenth century is that the great masters … often knew each other’s major patrons; and they knew each other, sometimes as friends and colleagues, sometimes as enemies—but always as rivals.”

And yes, this rivalry even extended to the great Sistine Chapel. Today, one can stand beneath the majesty of Michelangelo’s ceiling frescos in the chapel and take in the full sweep of their glory.
At the time of its inception, though, Michelangelo was convinced that his commission from Pope Julius II
—which he tried to refuse but could not—was a dangerous sidetrack to his career plotted by the politically savvy Raphael, a much more experienced painter. (Leonardo, meanwhile, was not even invited to compete for the prestigious assignment, which provoked a different sort of resentment.)