The Science Talent Project – Investigating the science of scientific excellence

Genius time management – how do really successful people manage their time?

There are lots of books on time management, from the famous ‘Getting Things Done’ to less famous works like ‘How to Live on 24 hours a day’ or ‘How to get everything done and still have time to play’. These books may have value, as they represent the struggles and experiments of real people to get grips on their life. Still, it may also be worthwhile to look at people who achieve what time-managers strive to obtain, which is not so much cramming as much stuff as possible in one’s daily allotment of 24 hours, but a successful life.

If you ask people why they cannot achieve their goals, the likely answer is “because I don’t have enough time’. Or perhaps more worryingly, even many people without grand (or not so grand) goals seem to be suffering from chronic stress, which, even if it does not lead to burnout, likely leads to a lower life expectancy. Scientists in academia are no exception to the ‘rat race’ of modern life, they even likely work longer hours than the average person, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 55 to 61 hours a week.

Now, this may be logical; after all, prizes, grants and careers are typically awarded to scientists who produce quite a lot of work. And it stands to reason that if you work longer hours, you can produce more work. However, if you look to research that tried to predict the success of a number of scientists, there does not seem to be a relationship between numbers of hours worked in the week and scientific accomplishment; in fact, most top scientists described themselves as ‘lazy’. What is going on?

The first explanation, that top scientists have much better brains and therefore can work faster, does not seem to hold true; all professional scientists have IQs of 120 and above, there don’t seem to be IQ differences between Nobel laureates and random scientists (as the quoted Root-Bernstein study as well as other comparative research between top and average scientists suggests).

But if raw brain power is not the issue, what is? There seem to be three factors:

1. Top scientists use their time more efficiently. This seems at least for a part because of smarter research strategies, often gleaned from their mentors (which were usually also top scientists themselves). Top scientists often do riskier, or more original, or more important, or more ‘doable’ research; they seem to spend more time finding the right question and choosing the right approach, instead of just ‘experimenting and writing.’

2. Next to working in smarter ways, top scientists also work with more focus, enthusiasm, and likely speed. Let’s call this ‘energy‘. Top scientists tend to be quite good at managing their energy. This happens in a quite unexpected way: they consider themselves ‘lazy’, by which it seems they mean that they only work when they feel like it, and generally don’t do things they do not like. If taken to excess, this has some disadvantages in social relationships (Einstein’s first marriage broke down because he was not a very supportive husband), but in general, being bold in doing things as much as possible only when you feel like them has some unexpected advantages. First of all, since top scientists generally do not overwork themselves (though exceptions exist) they continue finding their work joyful and interesting instead of just one more duty on the treadmill. Secondly, since they get joy out of their work itself, they can feel less attached to uncontrollable outcomes like tenure or Nobel prizes, which cause their colleagues stress and may also contribute to loss of the joy of science if the sought awards take too long coming. Thirdly, they also have fewer ‘energy leaks’ since they do fewer things that bore or frustrate them. Fourth, by doing enjoyable things even if those are not ‘scientific’, such as having hobbies, like playing the piano, or sailing, or painting, they regularly recharge energy.

3. Top scientists are willing and able to spend a greater proportion of their waking time to research. Whether by character, social skills, or ambitions, top scientists tend to focus more on doing research, and less on teaching, administrative tasks, or prestigious invitations. They find it easier to say ‘no’, also to themselves! Less time spent in meetings or editing journals equals more time spent on research. Of course, it is fortunate that there are academics who are dedicated to teaching or to administration, as those are possibly even more needed than ‘pure research-heads’. And some people simply love teaching or getting a high-status administrative position. Still, top scientists found it easier to focus on research, the Root-Bernstein paper reported that they much more rarely took up administrative tasks than average scientists, and if they did, they tried to drop them as quickly as possible. So next to a generally more productive research strategy (point 1), top scientists tend to have certain interests and priorities which differ from the average (less aiming for status and social contacts, more aiming for research) and are skilled enough to get away with it.

These factors led to the surprising interview results of Root-Bernstein that while average scientists wished they had more hours in their day, top scientists considered themselves to have plenty of time. They had fun, and they were paid for it!

If one would compare it to time management books, great scientists could be considered (in the ‘getting things done’-parlance) to drop almost everything, leading to very small ‘to-do’-lists. And since they mostly did what they enjoyed, problems with procrastination (like discussed in ‘How to get everything done and still have time to play’) also largely disappeared (largely, not entirely, the later Nobel prize winner Murray Gell-Mann had a huge writer’s block, not only as a student, but even when he was a famous, Nobel prize winning physicist, though that of course involved writing, not research).

The most interesting question may however be: how can we apply this knowledge to our own lives?

First, try to find effective strategies. The first obvious approach is try to befriend people who are successful in your field (or at least more successful than you) and talk with them, try find out how they approach problems or tasks. That may take care of the ‘effective strategy’-part. Of course, you can also experiment with approaches and see what works for you (as most self-help-book authors do), but finding a role model may save you lots of trial-and-error.

Secondly, try to enjoy your life more. Which for a part may depend on getting comfortable with wanting less, not being a person who wants a career and a relationship and a busy social life and lots of travel and a gloriously large and clean house and who knows what else (like kind of everything your friends have on Facebook). Of course, this is easier said than done. Not only is it scary (though for that it can help to know that other research kind of confirms Root-Bernstein’s finding: also outside science, happiness leads to success, so don’t fear too much that your success will be sacrificed on the altar of happiness), but it is also hard. It is not that easy to be happy. There are gratitude exercises, kindness exercises, but I guess the great scientists generally did not do such exercises but consciously or unconsciously maintained three principles: do what you like, do what you value, and let go of whether you achieve a certain goal or not.

The third item – spending more time on activities that are relevant to success in the direction you want to go- can also be complicated. If you like the other activities more than research, it seems legitimate to spend more time on them, though you should not complain then that scientific success eludes you. But do be honest with yourself: are you doing all those other activities for fear of being disliked or fired? Or do you do them because you burned yourself out on research by working too hard on projects that did not inspire you? In the first case, you may need to work on your skills, network, self-confidence or simply move to a less-demanding career. If the second, try to enjoy your research as per the second of three rules.

So be smart, be effective, and have fun too! And till next time!

(Almost) instant talentology: the state of the field in 600 words.

A summary of the basics discovered so far.

Scientists generally don’t spend much time thinking about what makes a scientist great, since they have lots to do already. However, it may still be useful to know a bit about the causes of great science, so one can make more informed choices on where to concentrate one’s time and effort. In this post a brief overview of the factors that literature indicates as relevant..

‘Great science’ is the production of information or ‘memes’ that are novel and important. In practice, it is also necessary to communicate that information to others in such ways that the idea spreads, and one is seen as the originator of it. A great scientist is ‘simply’ someone who produces great science, sometimes just once, usually multiple times.

So what determines whether an individual scientist produces great science?

Major influences:

-knowledge: 10 year rule/10.000 hours learning about a field – possibly more in science! Mere years spent ‘working as a scientist’ do not count, it is about the number of hours that a scientist has learned about his or her field.

-excellent mentors: almost all Nobel laureates had been PhD-student or postdoc of a (future) Nobel laureate or nominee for the award. This is not merely a selection effect: teaching likely plays a major role since the mentors educating most future Nobel laureates, Enrico Fermi and Arnold Sommerfeld, also spent strikingly high amounts of time with their students.

-ambition/saying no: eminent scientists as a rule avoided administrative duties and (sometimes) teaching as much as possible.

-motivation: great scientists generally focus on subjects that fascinate them, instead of following fashion or doing what others tell them to.

-a bigger acceptance of risk (research that could fail)

-superior research strategies, such as spending more time on getting and refining ideas, and seeking out more criticism and more collaborations than is ‘customary’.

Moderate influences:

-type of motivation: liking to work hard, or wanting to master a field is good. Being overly focused on ‘winning’/competitiveness seems to be counterproductive.

Minor influences:

-luck: Luck can play a role in science, but overall ‘chance favors only the prepared mind’ – most great scientists made several great discoveries, too many to explain by mere luck.

Variable-strength influences:

-IQ: Having a low or average IQ may prevent you from becoming a scientist in the first place. However, IQs that are sufficient to get you into PhD-programmes (over 115-120) all seem to be sufficient for pretty good scientific careers, looking at people like biologist Edward O. Wilson (IQ around 123) and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman (IQ around 125). So for most scientists, IQ is not really a concern.

Unknown influences:

We definitely don’t know everything about scientific excellence yet. Some things that still puzzle me even after thousands of pages of reading:

-what exactly did famous mentors teach their pupils? And could less-great mentors emulate that?

-knowledge is essential for scientific excellence – but what to learn, exactly, and what would be the best methods to learn it?

-are there things besides IQ and personality that are relatively fixed yet relevant for scientific excellence?

-would a sufficiently intelligent child be able to become any kind of scientist with proper stimulation, or are there tendencies that would ‘predispose’ one to chemistry, maths, history, psychology or such?

So there is lots to discover yet – but that does leave room for following blogposts!

Talent, desire, training, or tricks – what makes a top performer?

At the end of one of my recent posts I mentioned that aspiration to do better may be the characteristic distinguishing top performers and medium performers in many fields. However, while most people would likely agree that such differences in motivation may make a difference in regular jobs, there are also fields like professional sports, soloists in music, and academia, where competition is fierce and one has to be better than one’s peers to retain one’s job. Wouldn’t all those professionals be equally fiercely motivated? If that is the case, motivation would be a bad explanation for performance differences. Should we again try explain things by ‘talent’ or, if we look further, are there other factors we should take into account?

Most people, by definition, are not top performers in their jobs or careers. However, they generally do not have to be; as long as they are perceived by their employer or customer to deliver more value than they are paid, or customers or employers cannot very well judge the quality and quantity of their work, they can generally remain in their jobs and earn money for themselves and perhaps their family. So most people have no great need to improve in their job.

However, life is quite different if one is a professional sporter, artist, or untenured scientist. If you don’t perform very well compared to your competition (which tends to be considerable) you are soon out of clients, sponsors, funds, or a job. You really cannot slouch that much, every professional in these fields would have at least some motivation to perform well and pay attention to their performance. So it would be natural to think that if all performers are motivated if not very motivated, differences in performance in those fields cannot come from motivation, but must come from other factors, like talent.

Of course, talent may exist. In some fields, like the 100 m sprint, the dominance of black sprinters suggests some genetic talent that can give a small but crucial advantage over people who did not originate from the west of Africa. Sometimes genes play a role. The genetic advantage in this case may be small (0.15 s, or less than 2%), but in sports, very small differences count, as differences between best and worst professional sprinters may only be like 10%, which is noticeable, but is obviously much less than the reported factors of 2 to 10 differences observed for scientists, programmers and teachers.

So while talent may give explain some performance differences, one should also look at other factors. Quality and quantity of training, for example, and -indeed- differences in motivation.

The easiest factor to assess are differences in training. In general, top performance started training earlier in their field than less prominent performers. Mozart who started music lessons at age 2, and Tiger Woods, who even before that age was placed by his father in a children’s chair to watch dad Woods hit golf balls again and again. Michael Jackson and Andre Agassi similarly started (or rather were started) their training early, driven by dominant dads. It is hard to separate the effects here: brain plasticity is likely highest at young age, social support/pressure is enormous as the trainer is someone incredibly important to the trainee, the amount of time available for training is very large, and social recognition for the ‘prodigy’ will likely also enhance motivation. How early training starts, how much training one has received, and how much attention one pays to the training that is received simply because the trainer happens to be someone very important to you will all influence how much is learned. Definitely, differences in performance will at least for a part reflect differences in the amount of effective training, one can definitely explain differences even among professionals for a large part due to differences in training instead of immediately claiming differences in ‘talent’.

Another reason to believe in the importance of training, also in fields like science which seem to have much less fanatical dads drilling their offspring, is the phenomenon reported by the sociologist Harriet Zuckerman in her book “Scientific Elite“: over half of US Nobel prize winners had been either PhD student or postdoc in the laboratory of another Nobel prize winner. Most of those who hadn’t, had worked as PhD student or postdoc of a scientist who was nominated for a Nobel prize (but did not get it), or had a supervisor who worked closely together with another (future) Nobel prize winner. In short, most extremely successful scientists worked closely in their ‘formative years’ with scientists who also were extremely good. And they indeed reported that their experience with those top scientists had been very important to them, not so much as for learning subject matter knowledge (like physics formulas) but ways of thinking and doing research.

Now, one could argue that learning might not have played a role at all here; the ‘mentors’ could have gotten their Nobel prize together with their mentee (like happened to physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft who shared his Nobel prize with his mentor Martinus Veldman), or the mentors used their social clout (Nobel prize winners can nominate candidates) to bring their favorite pupils to Stockholm too. Or only the most promising young scientists were selected by the mentors to join their labs; the young scientists would very likely received a Nobel prize on their own, their talents were simply recognized early.

The above factors may indeed have an influence, however, a closer look at the data suggests that education plays an important part too. The persons who supervised most future Nobel Laureates, Arnold Sommerfeld and Enrico Fermi, were neither the most famous scientists of their age (so they could not necessarily expect the best and brightest to flock to them), nor did they have the strongest networks they could use to ‘Nobelize’ their mentees; Sommerfeld never won a Nobel prize so could not nominate people himself, Fermi died relatively young. However, the striking similarity between the two mentors is that they cared a lot about mentoring their students. In Cropper’s book “Great Physicists“, Fermi was the only one described as wanting to become a professor because he loved teaching, and while he carefully selected his students, he was willing to spend infinite amounts of time and care on mentoring them. Sommerfeld was a supervisor who would have 1-to-1-discussions about their projects and developments in science in general for about 1 hour every other day with each of his PhD students, which is an enormous amount compared to the more typical half an hour a month that normal supervisors are willing to spare. Of course, Fermi and Sommerfeld were themselves also very good researchers. However, among the many great researchers in the 20th century they stood out not for being the best researchers but as those professors most dedicated to give promising young scientists a great education. And the record numbers of Nobel prizes for their pupils (7 for Sommerfeld, 6 for Fermi) seems to indicate that they were quite effective in that.

So even in science, training is important, and it is likely that top educators are in shorter supply than top potential talent is.

And the original premise of this blogpost, that in highly competitive fields all performers should be equally motivated? That would also seem to be untrue, in two aspects even: not only is the amount of motivation different between people (and likely in individuals over time), but people actually have multiple possible motivations, influencing their effectiveness in reaching goals.

For example, Daniel Pink (in his book ‘Drive’) cites research claiming that motivation to master one’s field is more correlated to the number of patents obtained than the desire for money is, even when controlled for effort. The article “Making It in Academic Psychology: Demographic and Personality Correlates of Attainment” indicates that both the quantity of motivation differs among professional academic psychologists (so motivation is unequal even among practitioners in a competitive field), and the types of motivation. Quantity of motivation is important: more motivated psychologists publish more. And kind of motivation is too: if psychologists were mainly motivated by the desire to outdo others, they published below-average work, if psychologists desired to master their field or simply liked to work hard, their work was above-average.

Talent may exist, but based on the above, training and motivation can move one up and down in any competitive hierarchy, which can at least make the difference between keeping one’s job and needing to find another career.

The above may sound nice and even somewhat convincing, but what can a practical scientist/artist/sportsperson do with that knowledge? Three conclusions stand out.

It pays to find a good mentor/coach. Definitely, some weeks of effort, of networking, of asking more experienced people who they think are (beside themselves) make good mentors or coaches can pay off enormously. At least much more than those same four or such weeks simply spent ‘working hard’
Try to keep your motivation high, for example by using the general strategies described in my previous posts on ‘passion growing‘ and motivation.
You may also want to stress your personal growth and mastery instead of ‘beating others’. How to do that, I’m not sure yet, perhaps by praising and rewarding yourself when you have learned or improved something, instead of only congratulating yourself when you have ‘beaten’ another person. That being said, not all fields may be like academic psychology, and quite some top sporters became quite successful despite attaching great value to winning (like John McEnroe’s temper tantrums seemed to indicate).

In conclusion: while professionals in competitive fields may differ in talent, they also definitely differ in training and motivation; and while you may not reach the absolute top by only carefully handling your motivation and finding the best mentors you can possibly get, you can definitely achieve more (if not much more) that way.

So what is next for this blog? I’ve discussed the basics of training and of motivation, and while subjects like creativity, networking and marketing are also important for scientists, I’ll probably first check my archive to see which subjects may be most relevant to update and repost. And I’ll also add some book reviews, so you can know where to look or study further.

Till next time!

On the care and feeding of passion

Many people are looking for their passion – or have given up for lack of results. However, even for top performers their passion was seldom ‘love at first sight’, but grew throughout the years. So it may be better to learn how to nurture and grow an interest into a passion, than to hope that a perfect passion will just appear before your eyes one day. This post describes how one could get started on growing one’s passion.

Barring the few people who excitedly jump out of bed every morning, most of us probably wish that we had a bit more passion in our lives. Which is understandable, as having fun is, well… fun, and even from a scientific talent perspective, loving an activity or subject is useful, as it will increase the speed of learning about it, as well as the probability that you will get creative ideas about it.

The question for most people, however, is how to discover that passion. For a part, it may help to simply spend more time exploring new activities. For example, the psychologist Richard Wiseman states in his book “The Luck Factor” that lucky/’lucky’ people maximize their chance opportunities by trying out different hobbies, going to different places, and so on. However, more intense exploration cannot be the entire answer. After all, developing a passion for anything is like falling in love: while it can occasionally happen fast (‘on first sight’), that is no guarantee that it will last on the second or third sight. True passion for a subject or activity, like true love, probably needs to be developed over time to be more than a fun fling.

But how to do so?

A while ago, I gave a workshop in Rotterdam, “Developing your inner Einstein”, in which I proposed a five-step process that many top scientists seemed to have followed, whether consciously or unconsciously. It involved following their own interests, learning more about their preferred subject, doing something with their knowledge, befriending fellow enthusiasts, and, at least to some extent, letting go of the outcome. Seems simple? Well, I listed some ‘gotcha’s’ below, as well as a sixth step, that may be useful for most people.

Step 1:
Select an activity that you like most (or dislike least) of your current activities. Note that there are two additional requirements:
-it must be something you yourself want to do, independent of what other people may want, like or push you to do.
-it must be something that you feel at least a bit proud of when you have done it; for example, if you are like most people, an activity like “watching television” may not fill you with pride – so don’t make it a “passion candidate”
Tip: if you find it hard to decide what interests you, take a tip from Isaac Newton and keep a ‘philosophical notebook’ in which, for say 5 minutes a day, you write down what interests/interested you today and what you would be interested in knowing more about in the future.

Step 2:
Learn more about the subject, whether by reading, talking with others, watching Youtube videos, listening to podcasts, going to lectures, or whatever method you like. Again, there are two important rules:
-don’t overdo it. Don’t be in a hurry; stop the learning/listening when you still want to learn more. As time goes by, you can ‘up’ the daily or weekly study time.
-Especially at first, choose learning methods that you enjoy and/or those created by people you admire, even if they are not the ‘best’ or ‘most efficient’ learning methods. Learning should always be fun, and it should especially be so in the beginning!
An example of a scientist following this rule was the physics Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, who as a first-year student decided to follow 3rd year physics courses, which he found more fun and challenging.

Step 3:
Do something with your interest. For example, if woodworking is your chosen ‘budding’ passion, you can try to execute a few designs yourself. If such a direct production is not possible, you can for example write about it (in a journal or blog), or make drawings, or give speeches or do something else, as long as it is somewhat related to the subject. Whether you communicate about the subject and/or experiment with it may not matter too much, especially not in the beginning. Again, the golden rule: keep it fun (don’t do ‘too much’, and first select activities on ‘fun’, not on ‘efficiency’/’usefulness’).
An example of this rule would have been the young Charles Darwin going out into the woods to catch beetles for his collection. Darwin loved bug-collecting so much, that once when he had a beetle in each hand and saw another beautiful beetle, he popped one of his hand-held beetles into his mouth for ‘safe keeping’ to grab the third. (He also learned from the experience that some beetles can bite).

Step 4:
Make friends! Seek out friends and clubs and websites and blogs and forums and whatever of people with similar interests! If those really do not exist, try to find something somewhat related with a larger community. For example, since the psychology of science is yet a very small community, I also try to keep track of people studying education, or arts and sports performance. Again, don’t overdo it, and keep it fun. The enthusiasm of others will keep you going even when the going is tough.
This was, by the way, also one of the ways in which the chemist Svante Arrhenius survived the disdain he received from his professors about his ‘silly’ theory that salts in solution split into so-called “ions”. The old professors did not believe him, but his young colleagues Wilhelm Ostwald and Jacobus van ‘t Hoff believed him and encouraged him. It was a pretty good ‘club’: Arrhenius’ ‘silly theory’ is now taught in every introductory chemistry book, and each of the three won his own Nobel prize.

Step 5:
Practice serenity: one of the most problematic aspects of passion is that many people want to earn their bread with it (or at the very least become famous with it). This is occasionally possible, but it is usually very hard, and requires mixing the activity you are passionate about with things you like less, whether that is administration or contacting potential customers. Even Einstein said:

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it. (…) Only when we do not have to be accountable to anybody can we find joy in scientific endeavor.

(Reply to a 24 Mar 1951 letter from a student uncertain whether to pursue astronomy, while not outstanding in mathematics).

Of course, if another profession offers more opportunities to follow your passion than your current profession does, feel free to pursue it! But regard ‘marrying’ a passion to a profession like a wise person regards marriage: while overall you may like the relationship, there will be stormy seas and disappointments.

Step 6: (or, perhaps, ‘component 6’)
Keep track of problems and opportunities. Reflect on what you do and what you experience. There are many things that can go wrong. For example, you can become too goal-driven (overstrain), which takes the fun out of the activity itself and can cause stress due to forcing you to give up too many other things you care about. ‘Dutyizing’ or staleness, where things become routine or automatic, and you lose the connection to the joy. You can become lonely or discouraged (if you don’t find people who encourage or support you), you can get too dispersed (undertaking too many activities and spending too little time on a single one to make yourself grow in skill and motivation, abandoning things prematurely). Also, sometimes a road leads naturally in a direction that does not really interest you, and you need to change course. It can help to regularly ask yourself questions like “How much fun is this?” “Which problems do I encounter?” “What opportunities do I see?” “How can I get in touch with others with the same interests?”

Finally, you may find that while practicing a passion, that you automatically drift to an adjacent field. Let it happen: the most important thing is that you enjoy what you are doing, and even the greatest of scientists switched fields occasionally.

In a picture (with apologies to the authors of the sub-pictures, whose credits I had not written down)

But… does it work?

This 6-step plan may look a bit naive at first sight, and it is, at least in the sense that, like a plant, passion needs to be provided with sufficient “water”. And the ‘water’ for passion is attention. If you are so poor that you have to work 17 hours a day just to survive, you won’t have time (or energy) to develop a passion. Whatever your passion is (like photography), if you can only spend 2 seconds a day on it, it can probably never flourish to a ‘proper’ passion, just like dating a person for on average 2 minutes a week will usually not be enough to develop a solid relationship. There probably are people who are so poor that they cannot and (unless they have a huge stroke of luck) will never be able to develop a passion.

On the other hand, one should also beware of being ‘too greedy’ or ‘a martyr’. Most people in western countries do not need to work 17 hours a day to be able to pay for enough food and possibly a place to sleep. Much of the money we earn goes to things that are nice to have (or with which to make the neighbours envious), but which don’t give us true joy or pride; much of our time is spent on either maintaining our set of possessions in an ‘acceptable’ state, or in maintaining our social relationships. Again: in most cases at least some of our relationships can survive with a little bit less attention, and our floor can stand to be vacuumed a little bit less frequently. In my opinion, having something that you like and care about is more important than having as many friends as possible; at the very least there should be a kind of balance between ‘passion time’, ‘social time’ and ‘maintenance time’. If you really can’t spend 15 minutes or even 30 minutes a day (or say 2 hours total per week) on something you deeply care about, you should probably try to change things in your life, like reducing contacts with your friends a bit, wearing the same clothes for more days, spending less money or (when work times are excessive) even quitting your job when you have enough to survive say 1 year of job-searching.
But even that may be more radical than needed: if you find that even in your limited amount of time you can develop an interest in/enthusiasm for something, you are very likely to find that you will automatically care less about feverishly following Facebook or cleaning your house or earning as much money as possible, as doing something you are genuinely proud of will go a long way towards reducing your need for social validation and the rather time-consuming pursuit thereof.

My personal experiences
You may wonder whether I am ‘taking my own medicine’. The answer (on July 2017) is ‘partially’. Like I guess most people, things go well for my interests if I obey one or more rules: when I was in highschool, chemistry was one subject of the many I encountered but which ‘stuck out’ a bit (principle 1), made me read a lot about it for fun in well-written books that I found (principle 2), prompting me to do things like making my own lists of elements and their properties and building molecular models (principle 3), and receiving social support, mainly from my father (who also liked science), though my chemistry teacher gave me at least a second role model (principle 4). I achieved ‘serenity’ basically by trusting that things would work out (point 5). However, the lack of reflection (point 6) made me neglect to try change things when at university, I found much of chemistry boring (experiments or mathematical derivations), did not encounter role models or clear encouragement. Had I more aggressively sought out my own reading lists or projects in my spare time, I would likely still not have pursued an academic career, but I would definitely have had more fun while studying and not have had my ‘end-of-PhD-gap’ in which I did not know what to do. I’ve now taken on a small ‘passion project’ (developing a tool in JavaFX to help me manage my scientific talent notes), and, while 10 years may be a tad too long for a report, I’ll link an update to it in 3 months.

Conclusion
Provocatively, I would say that unless you are extemely poor, if your life seems void of passion, you don’t lack luck, you lack skill – passion-growing skill, that is.
Longer version: it’s great if you can discover your passion, but it is definitely also useful if you can develop a passion if none seems to pop up spontaneously. If you follow the steps of listening to your heart, learning, doing, befriending, ‘letting go’, and reflecting, even if you do it only a little bit or rather clumsily at first, you will be able to grow even the tiniest seed of passion into a flourishing flower that nurtures your spirit and the rest of your life.
May you bloom happily!

Aspiration and motivation: why would one wish to become better?

In my previous post, I discussed that the main problem that prevents people from achieving top performance (or even close to top performance) with experience is that most people improve until they are ‘good enough’. In fact, even top performers have that to some extent in most of their activities: Einstein may have been a great theoretical physicist, but he was definitely not a top performer as a public speaker, father, husband, marathon runner, or singer. Becoming great in something is not easy; it requires time spent reading, listening and experimenting, time that you cannot spend on TV or friends, it requires money otherwise spent on one’s home or hobbies, and it requires socially scary things like contacting top performers for advice or mentoring. And these costs and efforts need to be borne continously for a decade or more! Motivation therefore seems to be a major problem/challenge for talent development. So let’s study it some more…

As the ten year rule states, people need to invest lots of time before they can become really good in something. And this does not mean merely ‘being active’ in a field, it means they have to concentrate on improving (also called ‘deliberate practice‘), and pour lots of mental effort, time and possibly even some money into it. Most people don’t, because they don’t find it worth the effort, or have other goals that they find more important.

Still, “motivation” is a very slippery concept. Despite centuries of being studied eagerly by politicians, marketers, salespersons and other interested persons, and even scientists joining the fray a few decades ago, we are still not even close to being able to predict with reasonable accuracy, for example, who of a class of 50 chemistry students will drop out in the first year, who will finish and then will go to become teachers, or who will become PhD-students or will even make the effort to become professors. We have learned some things, though, which can explain at least a few phenomena, and can offer ways to enhance at least your own motivation.

“Aspiration” may be more important than motivation. For example, while expert musicians were about equally ‘motivated’ as amateurs, their aspirations are a lot higher. Remember that I said that people improved until they felt they were ‘good enough’. Therefore one’s definition of ‘good enough’ is very important. Of course, one’s aspirations are influenced by one’s environment (parents etc.), but it is perfectly possible to set one’s own aspirations in a favorite field to something like “I want to be a master of …”. Even if you are not terribly motivated, your brain will still seek ways to improve then.
A related factor is ‘identity’. People actually have two decision mechanisms in their head, one like a banker, the other like a priest. For example, when people are put in a brain scanner, and are asked to sign statements that are the opposite of their normal opinion in exchange for money, different areas in the brain are activated for trivial values, like ‘I am a tea drinker’, than for sacred values, like ‘I am in favor of gay marriage’. In fact, for trivial values, cost-benefit-related brain areas were activated, for sacred values, the brain areas were activated that distinguish (moral) right from wrong. Sacred values may have their limits (I don’t think they arouse the attention and energy expenditures that cost-benefit brain areas bring), but they definitely may have value for getting up on time, sticking to one’s training when the going is (temporarily) tough, saying ‘no’ to distracting social invitations, or doing something that is unpleasant or scary but is in line with who you want to be.
Goals can also be more motivating/inspiring if they are challenging. There is a kind of sweet spot between ‘too easy’ and ‘I’ll never make that’. Personally, I occasionally set goals which have a chance of like 80% of success (like doing something so fast or so good), instead of 100% or 10%. Your own ‘inspiring percentage’ may be higher or lower, though.
As Daniel Pink puts in his book ‘Drive‘, and Martin Seligman in his book ‘Flourish‘, we get motivated (or less demotivated) if we have autonomy in a task (when we do it, where we do it, how we do it, with whom we do it, and possibly also what we do), feel mastery (getting better at an activity we value), and feel purpose/meaning. Seligman also lists good relationships with others, and achievement, though these may not always be very handy immediate goals, as you cannot really control how others think of you, or control achievement (as that is usually based on competition with others, whom you also cannot control, in contrast to purpose and mastery). Motivation for food/shelter/sex etc. is of course also interesting, but may not have too much to do with scientific achievement.
Interest in a field can occur when a person him/herself has experienced a problem. For example, surprisingly many people seeking a different career and consulting a coach get the ambition to become a coach themselves (instead of, for example, a farmer, computer programmer, or waiter). Also known as the ‘wounded healer’ effect. [what you would conclude about my motivation to write this blog is up to you, of course 😉 ]
Interest can increase the more you know about a field, as the Dutch saying goes “unknown makes unloved”. As long as you (mostly) voluntarily learn about the field, the more you will generally like it. This may also be one reason why many professors are so hyper-specialized. In many cases, as explained by Ruth Colvin Clark in her book “Developing Expertise”, the development of this knowledge goes from situational interest (an inspiring teacher or book) to ‘personal interest’, where the person knows so much that motivation is more or less self-sustaining.
Motivation is enhanced by what other people like or praise. This works not only when you yourself are being praised or admired for something, but also indirectly, if you see someone else- someone who you see as somewhat similar like yourself, just a bit older/experienced getting praised. With the huge media attention in the Netherland for soccer, it is no wonder that many Dutch boys want to become professional soccer players, and after the success of the South Korean golfer Se-Ri Pak many other South Korean women (but not men – identifying with someone is important!) took up golf, and quite successfully too.
Motivation also depends on ‘rational’ factors like the availability of competing activities and goals, expected value of success, expected chance of success, time necessary for the goal to be reached (an interesting book in this regard is that of Dr. Piers Steel, “The Procrastination equation“), but also emotional factors, like how vivid in pictures or words you paint the story of the benefits. Story! Simplicity! Concreteness! Emotional! Books about making a message stick with other people, like the Heath Brother’s book “Made to Stick” are equally valid when motivating or demotivating yourself.
Also note that in the ideal case, the activity needs to be kept fun. People have multiple needs and interests, and like it is natural to occasionally eat and then do other things than eating, and sleep and then do other things than sleeping, so it is natural (and healthy) to do something as long as you enjoy it, and not force yourself to exhaustion or bitterness by working long and hard to achieve something else (fame, riches, promotions, praise). Working too hard/being too ambitious or hard for yourself, or depending on validation by or admiration of others, may give you some successes, but will often hurt you in the long-term, which not only happened to Se-Ri Pak who was hospitalized with exhaustion, or Michael Jackson who, despite vast fame and fortune, could not find happiness or peace of mind without ‘chemical help’.
Most people naturally dislike effort (which is reasonable), but when we make an effort, we usually feel better afterwards – most people would feel better after learning Spanish for an hour than watching TV for an hour. And this effect may even be stronger if effort is rewarded, so-called “learned industriousness“

So we know a lot about motivation – at least from a scientific point of view. We can even increase it with the right interventions (some tips below). However, it may also be clear from the above why motivation to become a top performer is so rare: bosses and teachers might ideally want to inspire us, but practical necessities, from standardized tests to demanding customers, may make them unwilling to give us much autonomy in which tasks we do and when we do them, making us work much longer on things than our natural interest can sustain, thereby weakening our interest and motivation. Hobbies, while offering the autonomy we lack elsewhere, often go without social reinforcement or without a believable vision that extra effort is worthwhile – after all, even if you like playing soccer, chances that you’ll ever become a professional are slim. In practice, we may lack role models, coaches and fans. We may also have multiple interests, which compete for our time and attention, further diluting our effort. Also, the length of time required to reach top expertise is also a risk factor; Benjamin Bloom, in his book on developing talent in young people, reported that even the talents he investigated had often encountered obstacles, and if some of their transitions (to different teachers or environments) had been sooner or later, they would have dropped out. While one should not underestimate the influence of individual passion, talents and persistence, Bloom summarized that when he had started the study, he expected to find extraordinary children in normal environments, but found that most top performers actually turned out to have been pretty normal children in pretty extraordinary environments. This definitely is also valid outside Bloom’s studies: consider for example the cases of Mozart, Tiger Woods, Andre Agassi, Michael Jackson, or the Polgar sisters, all of which had extremely driven parents (usually the father), though of course in may cases the home environment is slightly less extreme.

Based on the above, you may understand that in normal circumstances, it is hard to excel in something; it is almost as if society at large conspires to keep people mediocre! That being said, since ‘every little bit helps’, some tips if you want to try enhance your motivation/passion for something.

Keep the activity fun as much as possible, especially in the beginning. Even if a book, video or teacher is “recommended” or “certified” or (created by) an expert, if you don’t have fun learning from her/him/it, find another book, video or teacher. The ‘professional’ materials and teachers are for later, when your motivation can stand them.
Try to increase your knowledge about the subject, via books, videos, blogs, magazines, teachers, or whatever. Possibly also make notes about/pay attention to what you have learned/which progress you made. Having a kind of journal where you can see your level 1, 2 or 3 months ago can help you realize that you actually made some progress.
Don’t overwork yourself – don’t push yourself to spend more time on the activity than you like; if things work out, your capacity and eagerness for hard work will naturally increase over time.
Set high standards for yourself (‘I want to be a master’) or such, and try tasks that are challenging to you, that have a chance of failure.
For the ‘logistical decisions’ (like going to sit down and practice) your identity or values may be helpful, like ‘since I want to contribute to the world, I start every day by studying 30 minutes’, or ‘I am someone who values practice’
If you make an effort, reward yourself for it. This does not necessarily have to with splurging, just reminding yourself why you have made the effort and that you are proud of yourself can help (as described in Kelly McGonigal’s book ‘The Willpower Instinct‘. You can teach yourself industriousness!
Find fans and fellow-enthusiasts, possibly even role models. People whom you (for whatever reason) like or can identify with can be especially helpful. Anyway, social validation and encouragement can be of great help, so take some time to find fellow-enthusiasts. It’s worth it!

Now, some people could say: ‘lack of motivation may be understandable for school teachers and computer programmers and such, who simply need a job in order to eat, but surely, if you look at sports, academia, or other highly competitive fields, people need to be extraordinarily motivated to even be a professional, can you really say that the less successful people are simply less motivated instead of less talented? The answer seems to be rather subtle. But before I’ll go into that, it may be worthwhile to answer the question that seems more relevant for the 99.5% of people comprising the rest of humanity: how to find something worth to be motivated for? How to find my passion?

Why experience does not necessarily lead to excellence

Summary: As discussed in my previous post, a huge amount of effort and experience is needed to become a top performer. Even if there were something like ‘talent’, by itself ‘talent’ is by far not enough; even Einstein worked hard at maths and physics for more than 15 years before his ‘miracle year’ breakthrough. Of course, this leads to the counter-question: if experience is necessary, and perhaps even sufficient (as the Ericsson investigation seemed to imply), why are then not all professional performers equally good? The difference has to be caused by differences in talent, right? The answer is however ‘not necessarily’, as experience is a tricky teacher, which can make you great, but much more commonly teaches you until you reach an ‘acceptable’ level. This post is about how that works and how you can avoid or escape ‘experienced mediocrity’ and reach excellence (or at least pretty impressive performance) instead.

Practice makes p_____. What is the second word?

“Permanent”

-Joke among educational scientists

A while ago I was discussing with some acquaintances the rule that ten years of practice are necessary to achieve world-class performance. One of them said: then we must be world-class, for we have worked in our field for over ten years!

My acquaintances may have been world-class in their field (I wouldn’t know the ranking order in their profession). Generally observing people around me, however, I must unfortunately conclude that 10 years (or, more clearly, 10000 hours) of practicing anything does not necessarily guarantee top performance, or even performance that is anything close to top performance. This is not just in science, where US Nobel laureates publish two times as many papers as scientists still worthy enough to make it into ‘American Men and Women of Science’ (Dean Keith Simonton, “Origins of Genius“). There are experienced teachers who fall far below the level of equally experienced but ‘expert’ teachers (see, for example, John Hattie’s “Teachers Make a Difference, What is the research evidence?“), and in computer programming the difference between the best and the worst programmers even reaches a factor of about 10x ! (Steve McConnell, “Origins of 10X – How Valid is the Underlying Research?“) And also in the programmer case, experience seems not to play any role (though that may partially be because all programmers studied were quite experienced).

So while experience is necessary to reach top performance (as seen by the near-universal validity of a 10-or-something-year rule in many fields), there are huge differences in performance between equally experienced individuals. One could of course invoke ‘IQ’ or ‘talent’ as an explanation, but research suggests a different cause.

Take for example an investigation undertaken by the US army into the performance of its personnel, ranging from cooks to attilerymen (quoted by Earl Hunt, ‘Expertise, Talent and Social Encouragement’ in ‘The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance‘). This research showed that people starting a new job indeed became better in it with time- but that they only improved the first 1 to 3 years. Then their skill plateaud. Hattie found something similar for teachers; teachers got better with experience, but most of the gain occurred in the first few years. After that, gains were minimal.

Since we know that people need ten years or more to become top performers, but most people stop improving in an activity after two or three years, the hard-to-avoid conclusion is that top-performers are not necessarily better than ‘normal’ people because they have more experience, but because for whatever reason they continue improving and learning.

Now, you may wonder: why do (future) top performers improve? Do they have special capabilities that allow them to keep improving beyond the 3-year mark?

In fact, no special capability is needed to learn longer than three years; children take over a decade to master the vocabulary and grammar of their mother tongue to a decent level. And it is also telling that in the army investigation, smarter people plateaud earlier (sometimes even within one year), even if their plateau was slightly higher that that which employees with lower IQs reached in their three years. This strongly suggests that there is no such thing as a ‘three year block’, but that there is an entirely different reason why people stop improving: they (or at least their brains) consider themselves ‘good enough’.

Consider the hypothetical case of someone living in Berlin who wants to visit Amsterdam. Not seeing road signs leading to Amsterdam, but remembering the saying that all roads lead to Rome, he decides to travel to Rome first, and from Rome get to Amsterdam. And he gets there. So it worked! His brain is satisfied.

While he is traveling again and again from Berlin to Amsterdam via Rome and back, he slowly forms a habit, meaning that neuronal connections in his brain are strengthened (go south at Bern, for example), and in the end he does not have to think about the road anymore (in psychological terms, this is called automaticity). This is nice, because he can think about other things instead, like his job, or his girlfriend.

Basically, you can say that the brain is lazy: if some course of action gets the desired result, the brain will do exactly the same thing the next time. With time and repetition, it becomes an automatism, becoming faster and faster and taking less and less effort, which is good. However, while this automation means that there will be some improvement in speed given sufficient practice, it only makes inefficient methods slightly less inefficient, it will not make one’s habits or skills great. For that, you have be taught the better method, or invent it yourself.

The true ‘bottleneck’ is that in many cases we don’t think it worth the time to investigate or experiment with alternative methods (“if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”), and bosses or colleagues may not have the time, courage, expertise or drive to teach us better ways.

The neat results of Ericsson of hours practiced versus skill achieved are likely neat exactly because music lessons and practice are very different from a regular job: teachers are always telling students to do things better, and giving more and more challenging assignments. This is definitely not what happens in most jobs, where feedback is sparse, late or absent, and the difficulty level of tasks is not neatly ramped-up.

Why then do top-performers seem to flout the ‘3-year rule’, even if they may not have formal teachers? The answer seems to be two-fold:

a) they try to interact with top performers in their field and/or their works, whether that means having a postdoc at the group of an eminent scientist or reading/studying the works of the great people in their field, like Einstein, as a student, tried to read everything of Maxwell and Helmholz and other 19th century top physicists.

b) they spend time thinking how they can become better, or how they can overcome obstacles. And they experiment! For example, Linus Pauling (Nobel laureate in chemistry and peace), would spend 15 minutes before going to bed thinking about an important problem, hoping the answer would come to him in his sleep. Definitely this is not ‘natural’ behavior or behavior he learned at school; he very likely invented it himself to push his performance even further.

The great challenge therefore does not seem to be that the average person is physically or mentally unable to learn for longer than a few years, it is more that people are generally not motivated enough to spend the time and mental effort and take the social risks to improve beyond an ‘adequate’ level. Of course, it also does not help that for most jobs and activities there is not a clear course or program on how to continue improving, and often even motivated people can fail (witness the high failure rate of people wanting to lose weight or stop smoking). Still, lack of motivation/aspiration seems to be the root cause of premature plateauing of skill. So that may be the most suitable subject for my next post.

Is ‘talent’ just a classy name for working extremely hard?

Summary: Some people seem so incredibly good at their field, that one can understand why the Romans attributed outstanding performance to a ‘genius’, a spirit sent by the gods to inspire the fortunate individual. However, when studying the lives of prodigies and eminent persons, it becomes clear that eminence in any field takes lots of practice for even the most ‘talented’ – at least 10 years.

‘What nonsense is that?’ Tom Poes exclaimed. ‘You gave Sir Oliver the recipe for making gold, which involved molten lead, that needed to be stirred…’

‘With a stone’, the other added. ‘Stirring and stirring, around and around and around. 123,456,789 times; for it is not the formula that is hard, it is the work! After stirring 123,456,789 times the stone has become the philosopher’s stone, and only then the lead it touches turns into gold.’

Tom Poes and Roerik Omenom, ‘The lead reformer’, Marten Toonder

When watching or listening to prodigies or world class experts, it can sometimes be hard to believe that those people are mere humans. How can those people create the most wonderful music, hit the impossible ball, or develop such simple yet marvelous theories? It is no wonder the Romans explained extremely high ability with the concept ‘genius’, denoting that there must have been a special spirit, the genius, instilled by the gods at birth into the fortunate individual.

The existence of ‘prodigies’, children who are already famous performers in their field, like Mozart, Tiger Woods, or Bobby Fischer in chess seems to lend extra credence to the ‘genius’ idea. However, one should remember that prodigies are called prodigies because they perform much better in a certain field than other children. For example, Tiger Woods won his first golf competition at age 2 (the Under Age 10 section of the Drive, Pitch, and Putt competition at the Navy Golf Course in Cypress, California). However, he was not able to beat his father, who was merely a good amateur golfer, until he was 11. So while the golfing skill of Woods was extraordinary for a child his age, in absolute terms even an extremely talented toddler like Tiger was by far not yet good enough to take a serious shot at the world championships: he won his first major trophy in the adult competition at age 21, at which time he had been golfing for more than 19 years. Similarly, Mozart was indeed a child prodigy, but his first composition that is still regarded as a masterwork (instead of a pretty good work – for a 10 year old) was the Piano Concerto no. 9, written when Mozart was 21 years old. By that time, he had had composition lessons for at least 10 years. Bobby Fischer, who was not yet quite an adult when he became a chess grandmaster at age 15, had nevertheless been practicing chess for 9 years already.

In conclusion, even prodigies apparently need to put in time to reach an (adult) world-class level in their chosen field.

Researchers who looked at prodigies as well as people who were not considered prodigies but nevertheless reached great eminence in their field (for example Einstein, Darwin, Marie Curie, but also chess grandmasters, poets, writers, and composers such as Bach or Beethoven), discovered that all of them had spent at least 10 years (or about 10,000 hours) mastering their field before they produced their first masterpiece. This finding has been so consistent, that it has been dubbed the ‘10 year rule’: over a decade of practice is needed to excel in a field.

Now, ’10 years’, while memorable, is actually an oversimplification; the exact amount of time seems to depend on the starting age, the skills needed in the field (strength, aerobic capacity, intelligence, creativity, and/or motor skills), and the competitiveness of the field. In cases where there are few or no full-time practitioners, like in memory competitions, one year may already be enough to win a national championship (as described in Joshua Foer’s book ‘Moonwalking with Einstein‘). But in older, better-known fields the minimum seems to vary from about six years (for painters [Handbook of Creativity, Robert J. Sternberg] and very tall basketball players), to about 15 to 20 years for violinists. However, while the ’10 year rule’ is therefore not very accurate in a literal way, it is still very true and potent in its essence: it takes an enormous amount of effort to reach the top in a field, much more than most people are willing or able to expend. If you merely think “wouldn’t it be nice to be a Nobel-prize winning physicist/wealthy rock musician/world famous tennis player” you are very unlikely to have the perseverance or be willing to make the sacrifices needed to attain that level – because the ‘reward’ is a very, very long way off.

Of course, while these data strongly suggest that a large amount of work is necessary to reach a high level in any activity, it does not say that it is sufficient. Perhaps it is necessary to put in all that time to reach world-class levels, even if you are talented or even a genius. But that does not automatically mean that anyone who spends 10 years doing or practicing something will become incredibly good at it. You may need both talent and time: without talent, time spent practicing may not have much effect, or at least probably won’t make you rise above mediocrity.

Fortunately, such a hypothesis can be investigated scientifically; one could in principle (if one can clearly quantify skill) try to compare the time needed by different people to reach a certain level of skill. Such a kind of research has for example been performed by John Sloboda and colleagues for musical achievement (Sloboda, J.A.; Davidson, J.W.; Howe, M.J.A.; and Moore, D.G. “The Role of Practice in the Development of Performing Musicians”, British Journal of Psychology 87 (1996) p287-309.) This investigation (as did investigations before) found no evidence for ‘giftedness’ in music; children, whether considered ‘talented’ or ‘untalented’ took approximately equal amounts of time to reach a certain level in musical skill. The ‘talented’ just practiced more hours and therefore seemed to progress faster. An earlier study by K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues at a conservatory (in Ericsson, K.A., Krampe, R.T., and Tesch-Römer, C. “The role of deliberate practice in expert performance“. Psychological Review, 100 (1993) p363-406) found that the best violinists had had about 7,500 hours of solitary practice at age 18, while the ‘merely’ good violinists had on average 5,300 hours, and the future music teachers who studied at the same institution 3,400 hours. There were no clear cases of ‘drudges’ who had studied a lot but with little to show for it, or ‘geniuses’ who had reached the highest rungs with relatively little effort.

So next time you feel a small pang of envy when hearing about a successful artist, musician or scientist, you may at least find some comfort in the thought that that person probably had to work extremely hard to get to that point. However, while Ericsson may not have found drudges in his study of music students, in daily life there do seem to be people who work hard, but never get very good at what they do. How can we explain that?

But that would be an excellent subject for my next post.

How I became a student of talentology

Note to new readers: I’ve started this blog in 2010 on Nature blogs (this very post was actually the ‘application post’ to be allowed to blog there). After a while, Nature blogs was cancelled, my blog being transferred to scilogs, which, after a few years, cancelled all non-German language blogs. So I’m now transferring my posts to a site of my own, for now aiming for two posts a week (Wednesdays and Saturdays) [edit: as I notice I am rewriting lots of stuff and am seeking to create a proper introduction first, the tempo may be more like 1 post every 2 weeks for now (writing on July 1st 2017)], mixtures of the best old posts which deserve de-archivation and updating, and new posts. After all, my investigations are still ongoing and insights are still progressing and refining, partly due to the workshops I have since given on the subject and the people I have since met. I hope that this site will one day indeed become part of a network (hence the .net) of people and ideas that helps shape the future of science or even the world. But more importantly, I hope that some of the insights in this blog will give you ideas and inspiration, and help you achieve excellence and happiness in science or in whichever field you choose.

Tells about: my own history, and why I started investigating science talent and scientific excellence.

When I was about ten years old, on Sunday evenings my father read stories to me and my sister. But those were not stories about dragons or giants, talking animals or wondrous lands; he read the biographies of chemists, from the irascible Paracelsus (“you, who call yourself doctors, are a failed bunch of patented donkeys, who have bought your degrees and consider it a crime if your patients disagree with you”) to the quiet Marie Curie, from the reclusive Cavendish to the politically skillful Lavoisier. That book was the 1931 Dutch version of Bernard Jaffe’s ‘Crucibles: The Story of Chemistry from Ancient Alchemy to Nuclear Fission’, which was, at that time, really following chemistry from ancient history to the present, as Marie Curie was still alive and doing research as the book was being printed.

My father admired those scientists, who pierced the veil of creation. But on me perhaps, the effect was even greater: I dreamt of becoming a truly great chemist. That I too would one day make great discoveries.

Fast forward to eleven years ago. Like many other young chemists, clever or dull, idealistic or realistic, I had had to admit that despite my dreams as a youngster, and despite my excellent results as a student (for example, I did win the Dutch National Chemistry Olympiad) my skill in and enthusiasm for actual chemical research was not at the level necessary to obtain a tenured position at a university, let alone become the greatest chemist of the 21st century. Of course, this was not really a pleasant conclusion for me, however, in the end I accepted that I could never become great in something I did not enjoy (doing cheminformatics research and writing papers) and that, if there was a God or Fate or whatever, its purposes for me may not be as clear as it seemed when first hearing about the adventures of the great chemists of the past.

In a normal case, people get realistic, life goes on, and the dream is stored in a dusty chest in one’s emotional attic, in the hope of never having to be confronted with it again. And such it seemed to be the fate of my dream as well, to be forgotten in my attempts to start leading a normal, well-adjusted life.

Sometimes, however, Fate has a strange sense of humor.

As I said, I didn’t very much like doing chemoinformatics research. However, I loved supervising and teaching and encouraging students. Possibly, this was the influence of my mother, who is a great teacher. So I decided to try out teaching, for which the most obvious choice was teaching at a highschool (simply because Dutch highschools have a chronic shortage of teachers, finding a job would be easy, and would even be valuable experience if one ever wanted to teach at colleges and such – quite some university teachers have started as highschool teachers). As I was aware that people were drawing comparisons between teaching at Dutch highschools and Hell (and listed the comparative advantages of being suspended in pools of boiling sulfur versus teaching Dutch adolescents) I decided to be careful and try an internship first. This internship turned out to be at a very special highschool – namely, one which had special classes to stimulate scientific talent.

Of course, I grew enthusiastic about the possibilities; would it really be possible to teach children to become excellent scientists? But after some further questioning, I realized that the group of uninterested youngsters that had just been apathetically listening to their MP3-players instead of to the chemistry lesson was one of such classes of ‘enthusiastic, talented young people interested in science’. Clearly, if there were a process to stimulate love and skill in science, the school had not quite perfected it yet.

For my internship report (which required me to choose a subject to elaborate upon) I investigated the history of the science classes, and what the teachers did to stimulate science. I soon discovered that the lessons and science programme was not based on any kind of research on stimulating scientific excellence (perhaps the research did not exist), but on common sense. However, common sense was apparently not working very well in this case. So the only way (if it were possible at all!) to make science classes work would be to not rely on common sense, but to take the long and arduous way of trying to find out scientifically what happens in the growth of young scientists, and in which respects excellent scientists differ from mediocre ones.

I will not say that I have all the answers yet. This blog is literally a work in progress, to discuss books, journal articles, newspaper clippings or even things I encounter in my various activities in daily life. Its primary purpose is to share ideas and exchange knowledge with my friends, my former students, and even some family members who have asked to keep updated, even if they are not Dutch nor living in the Netherlands. In the end, I hope it will become a community for information exchange; as I am just one person, and I can only read, think and investigate that much, and even I will sometimes require a fresh perspective of someone else who looks as the same data as I do, and sees new ways to explain phenomena. In the end, this is something that an individual cannot do alone (I am, for example, greatly indebted to authors like Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel Coyle, but also to scientists like Dean Keith Simonton and K. Anders Ericsson and many more). And ultimately, I do not think that ‘excellence’ or ‘success’ is something that should just be about oneself (tempting as that goal is). Discovering things we enjoy, and trying to excel in at least some of them, may bring joy in our lives, and benefit the rest of the world.