Mindframe

In 1501, the Church of Florence commissioned Michelangelo to sculpt a marble statue of David the Biblical shepherd boy. Because the statue was to be placed on a hill and viewed from below, it needed to be about thirteen and a half feet tall—roughly twice life-size. Proportionally, this created some challenges, but to make it an even greater test of ingenuity, the marble Michelangelo had to work with was not pristine. It was a leftover from an unfinished 1464 sculpture by another artist. Clearly, Michelangelo had his work cut out for him. At this point, the artist was only in his twenties, but he had already made a name for himself with his Pieta in Rome. More to the point, he had spent so much time and concentration honing his skills that even working with another sculptor’s scraps, he was able to free the David from his marble prison. At first read, this might sound like a nice metaphor about art emerging from nature, but it’s at the critical mass of something noted scholar ...

Across a wide variety of domains, people who have achieved expertise share a common trait. In fact, this one factor might lie at the very epicenter of behavioral control. It’s called ‘the rage to master”—the relentless pursuit of knowledge or skill, in the face of all other distraction. You can see the results in everything from Steve Curry’s three-point shooting to Meryl Streep’s acting to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s command over the blues guitar. In the latter case, Vaughan’s quest for mastery included supergluing his fingertips so that he could keep playing after he’d bloodied his fingers from practicing the same riff over and over again. The flip side of the coin is another, less polite word: obsession. In clinical psychology, obsessions are something that people seek help to overcome. There’s even an official diagnosis for people who struggle with their fixations: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD. If you have OCD, you might feel an uncontrollable urge to wash your ha...