Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
Once you get to the edge of your field, you may not know exactly where you’re headed, but you know the general direction, and you have spent a good deal of your life building this ladder, so you have a good sense of what it takes to add on one more step. Researchers who study how the creative geniuses in any field—science, art, music, sports, and so on—come up with their innovations have found that it is always a long, slow, iterative process. Sometimes these pathbreakers know what they want to do but don’t know how to do it—like a painter trying to create a particular effect in the eye of the viewer—so they explore various approaches to find one that works. And sometimes they don’t know exactly where they’re going, but they recognize a problem that needs a solution or a situation that needs improving—like mathematicians trying to prove an intractable theorem—and again they try different things, guided by what has worked in the past. There are no big leaps, only developments that look like big leaps to people from the outside because they haven’t seen all of the little steps that comprise them. Even the famous “aha” moments could not exist without a great deal of work to build an edifice that needs just one more piece to make it complete. Furthermore, research on the most successful creative people in various fields, particularly science, finds that creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time—exactly the ingredients of deliberate practice that produced their expert abilities in the first place. For example, a study of Nobel Prize winners found that they had generally published scientific papers earlier than most of their peers and that they published significantly more papers throughout their careers than others in their discipline. In other words, they worked harder than everyone else. Creativity will always retain a certain mystery because, by definition, it generates things that have not yet been seen or experienced. But we do know that the sort of focus and effort that give rise to expertise also characterize the work of those pioneers who move beyond where anyone has been before.
Peak
Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool
The final element was the action happening in the photo. It had to be impressive, even astonishing, to work. Nobody wants a photo of the latest snow hero on a bunny slope.
Creative Calling
Chase Jarvis
“You know it isn’t all like that,” she said. “You should tell about the good part.” She had a point. It isn’t all like that—only the first draft. First drafts are slow and develop clumsily because every sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow. The first draft of my book on California geology took two gloomy years; the second, third, and fourth drafts took about six months altogether. That four-to-one ratio in writing time—first draft versus the other drafts combined—has for me been consistent in projects of any length, even if the first draft takes only a few days or weeks. There are psychological differences from phase to phase, and the first is the phase of the pit and the pendulum. After that, it seems as if a different person is taking over. Dread largely disappears. Problems become less threatening, more interesting. Experience is more helpful, as if an amateur is being replaced by a professional. Days go by quickly and not a few could be called pleasant, I’ll admit.
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise