by Andrew Lynn
He started his career as an artist in 1880 at the age of 27. For the first 2 years of his development he devoted his energies to establishing drawing skills and learning basic techniques from Mauve.
Second, the next several years, from 1882 until 1888, he experimented with different approaches and emulated other artists, most notably the then renegade Impressionists and traditional Japanese artists. He spent 6 years of intense experimentation in an effort to develop a unique, personal vision.
Third, after serving an apprenticeship, and after experimenting with the knowledge he had acquired, Van Gogh liberated himself from previous styles of art, and learned to execute paintings quickly and effortlessly, so that a work that took him weeks to complete during the first 2 years of his 10-year tenure as an artist, took him 45 to 60 minutes to complete during the last year of his activities as an artist. He spent the last 2 or 3 years of his life executing work after work – sometimes up to three complete oil paintings a day, executed in an hour or less – in a style that was novel and that was a liberation from previous attempts by others.14
For Van Gogh as creator it was a decade not of semi-reluctant dilly-dallying but of thoughtful and self-directed training – and that’s another aspect of the ten-year rule.
Artists share one other thing in common with experts: they repeat and revise and repeat until they can do it exactly as they wish. Leonardo Da Vinci sketched over a thousand hands before settling on the hands in the finished version of the Mona Lisa. Ernest Hemingway rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms a full thirty-nine times. Van Gogh was no exception: he drew over 150 heads before finally opting for the five heads we now see in his ‘Potato Eaters’. In the words of one commentator, it was a kind of constructive repetition. That’s not exactly the same as deliberate practice, but it’s close.
So we have the years of dedication to a single activity and we have something akin to the deliberate practice identified by Ericsson. But there’s one extra step that creators need to take that the experts don’t: they need to be able to draw together and synthesize existing ideas to bring about something new.
* * *
Let’s return to the career curves – but with a difference. This time, let’s look squarely at one of the creative arts.
It’s back to Simonton and (this time) the opera. Simonton was not interested in operatic performance – that would be a ‘standard talent domain’. Instead, he turned his attention to operatic composition. That’s a field in which technical expertise simply isn’t enough. What’s necessary to be a really great operatic composer is that elusive thing we call creativity.
Simonton looked at the careers of fifty-nine classical composers and over nine hundred operas that they had composed. The operas were all rated for aesthetic success. (That’s a composite measure based on the number of audio/video recordings, number of times the operas were performed in ten of the world’s major opera houses, and number of times mentioned in histories, dictionaries, and reference works.) Simonton then applied statistical techniques to explore the relationship between the experience of composers and the success of their work. Would more years and more experience composing opera result in greater aesthetic success?
The results are complicated and intriguing. True it may be, shows the research, that the greater the number of years a composer has been composing operas, the greater their aesthetic success. However, look more closely and other trends appear to throw into question this effect.
One curious feature that emerges is that the relationship between number of operas composed and their aesthetic success is (broadly) negative. So, whereas composers tend to write better operas when they have spent many years working on opera, the actual number of operas they have composed tends to have a detrimental effect. On these principles, the composer who writes many operas is likely to be outperformed by the composer who writes one opera, produces no further operas for many years, and then finally returns to the field.
Another curious feature is that domain-specific experience appears to have less impact on aesthetic success than broader generic experience. ‘If a composer is working on an operetta, it is better to count the total number of operas he or she has so far created than to count the number of past operettas,’ says Simonton. ‘It might be better,’ he adds, ‘to count the total number of compositions of all types.’ This isn’t something we would expect if the simple expertise model applied. In the expertise model, if you wanted to become an expert at composing operetta you would deliberately practise operetta. Simonton’s research suggests – counterintuitively – that you might do better composing violin concertos or cello symphonies.
So, for creators, does breadth of experience trump intensity of practice within a limited field? Almost right; but not quite. In fact, the greatest operas tended to be written either by those who specialized in writing operas (Rossini, Donizetti, Bizet, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, etc.) or by those who showed exceptional musical versatility (Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, etc.), with the latter group having an advantage. This mirrors the conclusions in a related study of over 200 scientists carried out by F. J. Sulloway which found that the most eminent were either extremely specialized or extremely versatile, also with the most eminent falling in the latter group.15
It’s possible for us to excel in creative fields as in any other by working away in one narrow field until we are, effectively, experts. But in creative endeavour that’s not the only way to get there, nor is it necessarily the best way to get there. That’s because what characterizes the really top creatives is not their specialization at all; it’s their breadth, and it’s their versatility.
* * *
When Van Gogh had completed Sorrow and The Roots, he wrote to his brother Theo.
Van Gogh had been having a hard time of it. He had lost a lover: ‘She for whom I felt what I wrote you about is not in my path,’ complains the artist. ‘She is out of my reach in spite of all my passionate longing.’ And on top of that there were money problems. His works just couldn’t be shifted: ‘unsaleable’ and ‘without charm’ were the words that were being bandied around. Van Gogh was forced to turn once again to his brother for help to the tune of 150 francs per month for another year.
It had been a rough time weather-wise too. Three nights of storm had ripped away the window of his studio where he had worked: ‘You can imagine it was not pleasant. The wind came blowing across the open meadows and my window got it firsthand – the drawings torn from the wall, the easel upset, the railing downstairs also thrown down.’ Van Gogh had been thrown upon his own and his neighbour’s rather basic resources to fix the damage. ‘With my neighbour’s help I have been able to tie up the window, and I nailed a blanket in front of the hole.’ No matter, concludes the artist: ‘Before any success there must first come the hand-to-hand struggle with the things in nature.’
All he can offer is his work:
Now I have finished two larger drawings. First, “Sorrow” in a larger size – only the figure, without any surroundings. The pose has been changed a little: the hair is not hanging down the back, but falls over the shoulder partly in a plait, so more of the shoulder, neck and back is in view. And the figure has been drawn more carefully. The other, “The Roots”, shows some tree roots on sandy ground. Now I tried to put the same sentiment into the landscape as I put into the figure: the convulsive, passionate clinging to the earth, and yet being half torn up by the storm. I wanted to express something of the struggle for life in that pale, slender woman’s figure, as well as in the black, gnarled and knotty roots. Or rather, because I tried to be faithful to nature as I saw it, without philosophizing about it, involuntarily in both cases something of that great struggle is shown. At least, it seemed to me there was some sentiment in them, but I may be mistaken; well, you must judge for yourself.16
Look back at the two drawings and you can see it: something of that great struggle, as Van Gogh puts it. And that ‘something’ is something that has little to do with his ten years
or his 10,000 hours and everything to do with cross-fertilization of ideas between different enterprises. Van Gogh could have spent his days perfecting how to draw a woman, or perfecting how to draw a tree. What he did instead was to work on both – and more. And isn’t that the same thing that Simonton found with his composers and Sulloway with his scientists?
* * *
Why should any of this matter?
It matters because most of us really don’t work in ‘standard talent domains’. For most of us, the model of success is not the arithmetician, the violinist, or the chess player; the great majority of us do not have our lives determined by our expertise in a narrow field. Our work is far more likely to be characterized by fuzzy boundaries, opaque standards, and fluid, shifting goals. The problems we face may demand technical expertise, but our success rarely depends upon it.
Expertise theory has a lot to tell us about the need to knuckle down on a single path and the dangers of hopping from one enterprise to another. But that doesn’t mean ten years to the exclusion of all else. If it means anything at all, it means ten years spent drawing together disparate skills and experience in pursuit of a single goal. And – in this respect at least – it’s probably true to say that we’re all a lot more like Van Gogh than we might ever have guessed.
7
The Accumulation of Advantage
The Accidental Celebrity
It was early in 1990 when Mark Rowswell gave a performance that would, in due course, go on to make him one of the most famous Canadians the world has ever known.
It wasn’t the first time that Rowswell had appeared on Chinese television. Just one year previously he had featured on a New Year’s gala playing the role of a bumpkin in a comedy skit. It was a performance that was to give him his stage name, Dashan (coined because it’s simple to write and ‘a popular name for illiterate peasants’). But this time Rowswell was to do something a bit more than just turn up and play the clueless foreigner: he was to perform a traditional Chinese form of comic dialogue known as xiangsheng.
Xiangsheng (or ‘cross-talk’) has been performed since the times of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Usually delivered in the Beijing dialect, it is a linguistically demanding art form, rich in puns and allusions. You can have one-man xiangsheng: that’s a bit like stand-up comedy. You can have two-man xiangsheng: that’s a double-act where one comic leads and the other chimes in. And if you want to make things really complicated, you can have three-man xiangsheng, where an additional comic is thrown into the mix to lead the others astray.
Rowswell’s cross-talk debut on CCTV was a three-man xiangsheng called mingshi gaotu (‘famous master – high student’). It was a curious event. In the late eighties China had little of the glitz and conspicuous consumption of today; there was still something very ‘homespun’ about the set and the studio audience. All the same, there was an air of mild expectancy to it all. The Chinese hosts were established comic personality Tang Jiezhong and Rowswell’s very own xiangsheng master, Jiang Kun. Put these two together with a Mandarin-speaking Canadian and something amusing was bound to happen.
The fun begins. Rowswell turns up looking every bit the part: he’s wearing spectacles, his sandy-blond hair is swept back to create a blow-dried bouffant effect, and (presumably as a concession to his audience) he’s dressed-up in a black Mao suit. As he strides onto the stage, he’s grinning awkwardly, conscious that this could all go horribly wrong.
The Chinese hosts introduce their guest. Then it’s Rowswell’s turn. It’s the New Year and Rowswell wants to say a few words. His xiangsheng master, Jiang Kun, will translate:
Rowswell: Soon we will enter the New Year together.
Jiang Kun: He says … He is 24 years old today.
Rowswell: I am very honoured to have this opportunity to say a few words to you all. [Rowswell bows deeply, touching his shoulder as he does so]
Jiang Kun: He touches his shoulder … It’s a way of celebrating the workers.
Rowswell: As we leave 1989 and enter the new decade…
Jiang Kun: He says … He’s very tall … and wears size 48 shoes.
Rowswell: I would like to wish everyone the utmost success and happiness in the 1990s.
Jiang Kun: He welcomes everybody to his house where he will prepare baozi [steamed dumplings] for them.
The joke’s on Jiang Kun, of course, who (like many of his generation) are too old to learn English but too proud to admit they don’t understand. The audience are enjoying themselves; they all know people like this and there’s the pleasure of recognition.
The sketch continues: the Chinese host has been made a fool and now it’s time for the foreigner to get his comeuppance. How? By making Rowswell perform a tongue twister in Mandarin. That sounds simple enough until you consider that Mandarin tongue twisters are based not just on words with similar sounds but on words with identical sounds and different tones. For example, the word for ‘ten’ (shi) and the word ‘is’ (shi) sound exactly the same apart from the tone of the former being a rising tone and the tone of the latter being a falling tone. The tones are one of the most demanding features of the language for a foreigner; it can take years to even properly identify the tones, let alone reproduce them.
Tang Jie Zhong runs through it first. The Chinese hosts then turn to their foreign guest. Rowswell must have rehearsed this but it’s fairly evident that everyone’s quite skeptical. Without a moment’s hesitation he begins:
Si shi si [Four is four]
Shi shi shi [Ten is ten]
Shisi shi shisi [Fourteen is fourteen]
Sishi shi sishi [Forty is forty]
Shei yao ba shisi shuocheng sisi [Whoever says 14 in the wrong way ]
Jiu da ta shisi [Then hit him fourteen times]
Shei yao ba sishi shuocheng shishi [Whoever says 40 in the wrong way]
Jiu da shei sishi [Then beat him forty times]1
It’s an immaculate performance, the likes of which the audience have never seen or heard before. The studio bursts into spontaneous applause and there are smiles all round. The foreigner can really speak Chinese.
The process that had been set in motion would make Rowswell a household name. Over the course of the following two decades, he would be transformed from stand-up comedian to TV presenter; from TV presenter to actor on stage and screen; and from actor on stage and screen to representative of his nation. Rowswell is now a celebrity and a household name.
It’s an astonishing career for an ordinary chump from Ottawa.
* * *
What’s striking about Rowswell’s success is just how little of it appears to have been planned; he’s truly what could be called an ‘accidental celebrity’.
For a start, Rowswell is not obviously celebrity material. He is tall, blond, and not unhandsome – but that’s where it stops. He wears spectacles. He has a goofy smile. When he stands straight, he stands a bit too straight. Rowswell gives the impression that he’s not really comfortable with himself. If you met him on the street, you may suspect he was a computer programmer or an engineer; he has the look of somebody who would be happiest working with machines.
Then there’s Rowswell’s decision to dedicate himself to the Chinese language. This wasn’t part of any grand plan; Rowswell simply found the other courses on offer ‘kind of boring’. (‘I didn’t think it would hurt,’ says Rowswell.)2 His decision to go overseas was equally fortuitous: he applied for a federal government scholarship, got it, and went over in 1988 ‘with a sort of cavalier attitude just to see what would happen.’
And there’s the show itself: nobody had a clue at the time how it would be received. ‘Just close your eyes and shoot wildly and you just happen to hit the bulls eye,’ says Rowswell of his first TV performance. ‘That’s really what that show was about and the producer thought this would be kind of fun. It was a New Year’s Eve special; it’s an international holiday, so let’s get some international talent. Let’s get a couple of foreigners in here to do a skit. That kind of thi
ng is much more common now but in the eighties, there weren’t a lot of foreigners appearing on Chinese TV and they were certainly not performing the kind of skit we were.’
Of all the stories in this book, Rowswell’s is clearly the one most likely to support a ‘randomness’ theory of success. Rowswell just got lucky. China was already a decade into its ‘open-up and reform’ period; after years of self-imposed isolation the Chinese were finally opening-up to the outside world. If there had ever been a time and a place for a hapless Canadian to make an impact, this was it. Right place, right time.
Luck, though, can only be half the story. Rowswell didn’t win the lottery. He didn’t inherit unexpectedly. He didn’t stumble across a pot of gold. His journey from unknown foreign student to national icon didn’t happen instantaneously. There was a process at work: a process that transformed luck into opportunity and opportunity – inexorably – into success.
It’s that process that this chapter is about.
High Roads and Low Roads
When we talk about the success of the likes that Rowswell has enjoyed, what we’re really talking about is the phenomenon of one (or some) individuals pulling away from the crowd. Unattractive as it may be, there can be no real success in this sense without some divergence: if we all succeed, then none of us succeed, because success is by definition relative. From a moral perspective, the crucial question will be whether or not the opportunity to diverge has been fairly spread. From a practical perspective, of course, our interest is a bit different: we want to know why and how such divergence occurs. And there’s no better place to look for answers to that than in our schools.