Ingredients of Craft

I've just about finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. It finally came out in paperback, and was discounted 20%, so I thought it was time to dip in. Like so many other things I've read over the past few years, its main gist is how the unconscious mind can be trained to make complex choices and evaluations, given the right experiences. This should not be a surprise to anyone who's paid more than a minimal attention to processes of learning, for instance anyone who has had children, and who has watched them learn to walk, to speak, wield silverware without hurling bits of food in a broad and undefined radius, or who has recently had necessary learning crunches of their own, and suddenly found what was once agonizing become near effortless.

According to Gladwell, part of the trick, along with having numerous learning occasions to draw upon, is limiting the information that is available to what is truly relevant, and using this smaller subset to discern useful patterns. What turns out to be relevant, however, is not always so obvious. It is also not so obvious which information is less than useful, and what may actually pollute the process. He makes an example of how many more women were hired to play for symphony orchestras once a screen was used to blot out visual information. Evidently, a formidable appearance would make lesser players sound better. For many conductors, seeing a woman would make the playing sound weaker, less robust, though the same conductor might hear quite a different performance from behind the screen.

Any of you who have practiced a craft, somewhat well, or who have survived working, even "done well for yourselves," whatever that might mean, have learned to make complex judgments on the unconscious level, just like some of the experts in Gladwell's book, or those modeled by Bandler and Grinder & Co. You may not have developed an expertise to the level of Milton Erickson, Yo-Yo Ma or a Michael Jordan, but you can speak the language, read people to enough to survive, or to understand what they want or expect from you and meet those expectations to a degree. Otherwise, you'd be nowhere.

There is a class of people who think they are responsible for everything, who believe they have all the magical skills that make the earth spin on its axis, and who believe they should be treated special for it. There was an article in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about them. A few CEOs thought that their skill sets were so extraordinary that they should be rewarded anything the might possibly demand.

I'm not even going to comment on that. All I can say is I've been in some organizations whose leadership has dragged them through fairly sudden and intensive reorganization, obviously not having the slightest idea what they were doing, and I have witnessed near miraculous response from unknown people on many levels. I've seen these people do what I thought was impossible, or at least unreasonable, without even appreciating what it was they had done, themselves. If you're not paying attention to the details, it is very easy to imagine that you're accomplishing magic just by willing it to occur.

You might build things, or you might sit in a cubicle sifting through information. You might help people deal with their alcoholic siblings, design cartoon characters, haul refuse, check IDs at dance clubs; whatever you do, you have the job you do because you do it better than others would. There are an infinite number of micro-skills (curves) you are probably overlooking.

A pianist, for instance, in order to produce something we generally recognize as music, has to have a tremendous amount of control over the speed and pressure she applies to each of the keys, the time she waits between pressing each key, the recognition of intervals between notes, harmonies and discordances among notes played together, or overlapping. And all of this knowledge must be coordinated across the entire nervous and endocrine systems, the muscular and skeletal systems, since musical patterning is as much biological and chemical as it is mechanical and aural.

If you were to study the patterns of an experienced trash collector, you'd find something on the order of black belt neuro-physical skills. How else would such a person be able to endure long hours of lifting and dumping without destroying his or her body and leaving more of a mess behind than he found. It's extraordinary, the precision and coordination needed to maintain oneself over time, not to mention the intuitive knowledge one must have of objects in motion, which might very well surpass those of a college level physics professor. These are things we generally take for granted.

Whether the discussion is about work, or something you do for pleasure, there are more curves at play than you can possibly count. It might be in your better interest, therefore, to discover those that are more useful in either category, and expand upon them, nurture and experiment with them. The easy part is that they are often set in motion by sensory definable cues, such as imagery, sounds, scents and feeling.