Mindframe

In the last twenty years we’ve learned a tremendous amount about how expertise is created. Scientists like K Anders Ericsson from Florida State University have been leading the charge. His new book, Peak, Secrets from the new Science of Expertise chronicles years of experiments examing how expertise is attained across a wide spectrum of domains. Ericcson’s findings shatter three commonly held myths about experts. The first myth— Talent is bestowed upon you by winning the genetic lottery .   Many people believe that their IQ, for example, is fixed and nonmalleable, as is their abilities in sports, mathematics, the arts and so on. In other words, you’re either born with talent or you're not. Repeated research has shown that IQ, like early talent in a given domain, has very little causal relationship to the level of expertise you can eventually attain.   Acquiring expertise, instead, shows a one to one correlation with the kind and quality of your training p...

What is a leader? The simplest and perhaps most literal definition is “someone with followers.” But the presence of followers alone doesn’t signify that you’re any good at the act of leadership. History is littered with men and women who blithely led others straight into disaster. Great leaders do three things that set them apart. First of all, they start with a growth mindset, a term coined by psychologist Carol Dweck. This is far more than a simple positive attitude. Positive thinking alone can lend situations an undeserved—even dangerous—rosy cast, verging into denial. Growth mindset, which holds that improvement is made possible through honest self-assessment and hard work, encourages people to acknowledge and learn from their mistakes. Dave Guy, who plays trumpet alongside The Roots, Jimmy Fallon’s house band on the Tonight Show, is one of the foremost trumpeters alive. Early in his career, he made it his goal to learn how to play in as many different genres as he could—b...

What’s the best way to gear up for a new habit? There are two common approaches. One is to imagine the positive outcome of solving a given problem. The other is to ponder what about your current situation makes you unhappy and what the solution to your problem might look like. Gabriele Oettingen of New York University decided to test these ideas against each other. She ran an experiment in which she divided her subjects into three groups and gave them the same problem. The first group was told to start by indulging themselves, fantasizing about having solved it. The second group was told to dwell on the negative consequences of not solving the problem.  The last group, however, was told to do both: to envision the satisfaction of resolving the problem, then to focus on the harm done by not resolving it. Finally, they were to contrast their imagined positive outcome with the current negative reality. It turned out that when expectations of success were high, the thir...

Where do great ideas come from? Often, the answer is “other great ideas, sort of mashed together.” The term “remix culture” was coined after the invention of technologies that made hiphop possible: literally sampling pre-existing recordings. Sugarhill Gang’s landmark “Rapper’s Delight” samples the bass riff from Chic’s “Good Times,” a riff which has since been sampled dozens of times, by everyone from Grandmaster Flash to Will Smith to Daft Punk. Of course, the concept of using someone else’s work to make something new has been around since nearly the dawn of music. In his classic Folk Songs of America , historian Alan Lomax takes a moment to defend “cowboy music” from “book-learned folklorists” who at the time alleged that it didn’t count as a true folk movement, since so many of the songs were reworkings of older ballads. “To my mind these critics have merely pointed to the fact that the West was a cultural melting pot,” Lomax wrote in 1960. “…That this evocative and self-...