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The Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, had numbered 15,000, which made it by far the largest body of its kind in the old world. By contrast, the Cheka, within three years of its establishment, had a strength of 250,000 full-time agents.
Modern Times
Paul Johnson
Nearly two centuries later, psychologist Dean Simonton has gathered research supporting Quetelet’s early observations: the most accomplished scientists, artists, and scholars are also those who produce the most. Simonton explains that across many domains, personal productivity and social creativity are highly correlated. If we look at the pattern of creativity across an individual’s career, Simonton argues, the periods when a person produces their best work also tend to be the periods when they produce the most work. Measuring the number of highly acclaimed works and dividing them by the total can produce a kind of quality ratio. “This ratio of hits to total shots does not change in a regular pattern with age,” Simonton explains. “The ratio neither increases nor decreases, nor exhibits any other form. This remarkable result suggests that quality is a function of quantity.” Simonton proposes an “equal-odds baseline,” which suggests that, once a person begins contributing original work to their field, every attempt has roughly equal potential for world-changing impact.
Get Better at Anything
Scott Young
So to aid my preparations for that spring’s Ottawa Marathon, he helped me devise a twelve-week routine, five days a week, rotating through three different cognitive tasks (arrows, shapes, letters), starting with extremely modest sessions of fifteen minutes and progressing, if all went well, to an hour and a half. By triggering the flood of neurotransmitters associated with mental fatigue and, in particular, response inhibition over and over, we hoped that my brain would adapt to the insult—and that my resistance to mental fatigue would translate into an ability to sustain a slightly faster pace at the same effort.
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