"Talent is Overrated"

Jim Citrin has this provocatively titled piece on Yahoo! Finance. Apparently it's the title of a book that just came out. Here's an excerpt from the article:

Contrary to popular belief, what makes certain people great is not inborn talent. Rather, it is something called "deliberate practice," a sustained, often life-long, period of purposeful effort designed to improve performance in a specific domain. This turns out to be just as true in business as it is in sports, music, medicine, chess, science, and mathematics.

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements: It is an activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher's help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; and it's highly demanding mentally. It is far different than the general notion of "practice makes perfect." Instead of repeating a task over and over again in your comfort zone, deliberate practice requires that you identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be advanced and then work intently on them.

Sounds very intriguing. I will have to read the book now...

Drawing

Here's a gallery of our recent drawings:

Today Aseem, Supriya and I sat together and drew a dinosaur from the book "The Draw 50 Way" by Lee J. Ames. Aseem started drawing and got frustrated immediately. I told him that we are all learning to draw and it is frustrating in the beginning. I felt that I had to get involved. So we went thru the drawing line by line. I would draw one line, describe it a little (straight/ curved/ connecting this to that etc.) and Aseem & Supriya would copy it. It was fun and satisfying. I am going to offer a course like this next semester at our coop.

Last week Supriya started drawing circles with her new protractor and that inspired her to make them into faces. I thought it made a nice series, variations on a theme.