How to be an expert in knowledge work: a modern Mozart, Da Vinci, Ben Franklin

[charlie cho]

Basically, knowledge work is related to the brain only. It has nothing to do with physical reality. But knowledge work is different from spiritual work, like priests and monks. 

What makes Bach? What makes Mozart? What makes a Benjamin Franklin? Churchill?

They were successful in using their brains. Maybe they weren't spiritually developed, but their work is admirable. 

What are their habits? What makes them, them? 

Any advice? 

[Thought Art]

Read Mastery (the whole thing) by Robert Greene and buy Leo’s book list and read the books on mastery there and then put the work in

[Asayake]

What makes Mozart: Hours of daily practice at playing piano and composing & arrangement as well as being counseled from a very young age from his father who also was a composer. Talent is overrated is a good book if you want to dive deep in this topic.

[Bobby_2021]

Have a high IQ, high energy, incredibly high work ethic, curiosity & talent. 

Be God's favourite. 

[Cireeric]

Read the biographies of Benjamin Frankling or Mozart.

[Snader]

''If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.'' -Michelangelo

Of course it's not easy to pursue something so hard, but that's why finding out your personal values and strengths, creating a purpose based on them, and aligning your life with that, is so powerful. That will evoke a deeper inner power that all of those people you mentioned had.

Some will have that much easier than others. Some will have good parenting or guidance to help them do that, some will find that by luck, some of us need to take more responsibility and build that by ourselves through inner work.

[VioletFlame]

Hey--great question. I am currently a Music Therapy major and may I just say that simply listening to Bach's music seems to elevate my mood.  

So I'm no genius, but one thing that helped me write my last album was committing to a deliberate, consistent, steady morning routine. First thing in the morning, (and this is beginning to sound a bit cliché but it does work wonders) I would wake up and make myself do yoga and meditation before working on anything related to my creative project. I basically constructed this as a rule for myself because I knew it produced such better results for me. I felt much more clear-headed, focused, and inspired during the creative process after working on my spiritual practice. And I found that it helped to prevent or defeat any resistance or procrastination, and also helped me to be less critical and more impartial and constructive with my work. 

Consistency is key. Practice, practice, practice, until it is virtually impossible to make the same mistakes. Keep correcting yourself. Humor yourself; laugh at yourself. Trust me, that is a skill in itself. Embrace and experience the power of catharsis. And just try to stay inspired as much as you can. Inspiration and motivation go hand in hand. It's difficult to have one of those things without the other. 

[Leo Gura]

On 6/12/2022 at 3:54 PM, charlie cho said:

It has nothing to do with physical reality.

This is a very reductionistic and twisted way of holding it.

[Purple Man]

To anyone thinking that talent is overrated: think twice. We all can put the work, but talent is the absolute basis of real greatness. I could compose music even while being beaten by a bike gang. I could not make a decent painting even if I devoted my last decades to it, full time.

In the last years, political correctness has created an absolutely distorted way of understanding "equality", one that prevent people from understanding and accepting the huge difference in people´s talents. Just please, don´t say work makes Mozart or Bach. It is just totally wrong, even if they worked in their music like donkeys.

[Asayake]

25 minutes ago, Purple Man said:

To anyone thinking that talent is overrated: think twice. We all can put the work, but talent is the absolute basis of real greatness. I could compose music even while being beaten by a bike gang. I could not make a decent painting even if I devoted my last decades to it, full time.

In the last years, political correctness has created an absolutely distorted way of understanding "equality", one that prevent people from understanding and accepting the huge difference in people´s talents. Just please, don´t say work makes Mozart or Bach. It is just totally wrong, even if they worked in their music like donkeys.

Did you put down 25 000 hours of practice while being mentored by a super skilled composer since childhood on a daily basis?

Edit: I'm not coming from a political correctness angle. For example, in sports like bodybuilding or running genetics play a huge role in whether you can be successful or not. But there's no reason for evolution to make someone talented in writing fugues, which is a completely useless skill when you're living in a cave.

The only talent that could be spoken of there is being genetically gifted with higher intelligence or higher work ethic or something like this. But you're not born with a talent for composing music, Stephen Hawking is very intelligent but he can't compose music for shit. It all comes down to deliberate practice(there's a difference between 10 000 hours and 10 000 hours, the effort  and passion you put into it).

Edited June 14, 2022 by Asayake

[Michael569]

On 12/06/2022 at 11:54 PM, charlie cho said:

What makes Bach? What makes Mozart? What makes a Benjamin Franklin? Churchill?

Being born and having lived at times when the competition was scarce for what they were trying to achieve 

Being born to a well-off family that had an appreciation for the importance of "daily practice" and education

Being born in a first-world country with decent economic resources and political stability 

Having had financial resources growing up 

Having had influential parents or guardians 

 

Ofcourse we cannot discount persistence, discipline, dedication, commitment and the ability to commit to thousands of hours of deep undisrupted work. But without the above it would not happen. This is why some people grow to become CEOs and other, working even harder end up having 3 shitty jobs earning 500 times less. 

How you are positioned in the society when you are born, makes success much much easier but ofcourse it is not guaranteed as you can see in Gen Z guys and girls being born to rich families and suffering crippling anxieties, depressions and getting completely overwhelmed with life without challenges . 

[Purple Man]

@Asayake

28 minutes ago, Asayake said:

Did you put down 25 000 hours of practice while being mentored by a super skilled composer since childhood on a daily basis?

(...) But you're not born with a talent for composing music. It all comes down to deliberate practice(there's a difference between 10 000 hours and 10 000 hours, the effort  and passion you put into it).

To say that people are born with the same artistic level is terrifying. Really, I don´t want to sound rude, but I never thought that I´d heard such a incredible negation of reality. 

Edited June 14, 2022 by Purple Man

[Purple Man]

20 minutes ago, Michael569 said:

Being born and having lived at times when the competition was scarce for what they were trying to achieve 

Being born to a well-off family that had an appreciation for the importance of "daily practice" and education

Being born in a first-world country with decent economic resources and political stability 

Having had financial resources growing up 

Having had influential parents or guardians 

 

Ofcourse we cannot discount persistence, discipline, dedication, commitment and the ability to commit to thousands of hours of deep undisrupted work. But without the above it would not happen.

The fact that you have taken arguably two of the three most gifted music composers of all time, absolute giants, with a science fiction natural talent that the world has not seen again although hundreds of years have gone by, and don´t even mention that word ,"talent", to explain their success is, again, so astonishing that I don´t have words.

Many millions have dedicated their life to music composing and still do, devoting all their energy and resources, much higher than theirs, and got from nowhere to a good musical career. Which is light years from what those giants achieved. Just please, don´t say that Beethoven´s symphonies are within everybody´s reach as long as they have a piano, musical education, live in the first world and study as much as they did daily, because it is too wrong. 

Edited June 14, 2022 by Purple Man

[charlie cho]

@Purple Man I agree with you. I just don't believe you having that certain belief in your mind will help you though.

Edited June 14, 2022 by charlie cho

[Purple Man]

4 minutes ago, charlie cho said:

@Purple Man I agree with you. I just don't believe you having that certain belief in your mind will help you though.

The worst damage you can do to a child in development is creating for him the fiction that he is as talented as the best for the very act of being born. He has to be prepared to understand that talents differ so much that there will be a gap that he´ll never overcome in certain areas. And there is nothing wrong with it. That´s what maturity is about. Understanding life, challenges, different skills in the same person and in other people compared with oneself is the key to a healthy approach to life. Telling him that Beethoven only worked harder than him is beyond nuts.

[Asayake]

27 minutes ago, Purple Man said:

@Asayake

To say that people are born with the same artistic level is terrifying. Really, I don´t want to sound rude, but I never thought that I´d heard such a incredible negation of reality. 

If you don't practice for 10 000s of hours that will not make you special, even if you're born with more intelligence or what you call talent. And if you practice 10 000s of hours half assedly you will not get there either. You have to have a passion for music, live for it. Put in serious effort every time you practice and do it from a young age when your brain is the most malleable.  A kid being exposed to music and encouraged to pursue it since a young age is the key for developing what you seem to think is born talent. A toddler can't tell A flat minor from A flat major, the difference is taught. The younger the child is when the difference is taught the more second nature it becomes. The more complex stuff the child is taught at an early age the easier learning music will become, because what others have to put down 1000s of hours to learn it can skip and go directly to more advanced stuff. But if the child doesn't keep practicing for 10s of thousands of hours deliberately even things like perfect pitch which some think is genetically gifted, is completely useless.

But even perfect pitch is not something genetic but it's something that can be taught at a young age. Lookup Rick Beatos kid Dylan Beato for example. Rick teaches music theory and taught Dylan perfect pitch to an insane level when Dylan was very young. But he also taught his other children perfect pitch and they all managed to learn it to a very impressive degree. When I was in music school I was told perfect pitch was purely genetic, basically saying it's talent. But it turned out to not be true. When you look into it deeper there are many parents who have taught their kids perfect pitch from a young age by playing the piano for them and teaching them the notes. And everyone I met irl who has perfect pitch started learning their instruments at a very young age(around 5-6 years old, sometimes even younger).

Talent is just an excuse to not put in the work you need to put in to get what you think you want. Because we don't want to admit to ourselves when we really don't want something. I don't really want to become Mozart but I might have thought that I did before I realized what that really meant.

 They have done studies on kids who tried to enter a famous music school(don't recall which one right now) where they found that deliberate practice was the most important factor for whether the kids got in or not. Even kids that learned music at a faster pace than others didn't get in if they didn't practice 1000s of hours.

Edited June 14, 2022 by Asayake

[Ulax]

Inevitably, you'll have to come to your own conclusion regarding some major aspects of reality, i.e. free will v determinism.

Are people simply a product of society? Is Mozart a genius, who paved his own way, or was he just a talented person given certain opportunities which were recognised mostly because of the context in which he produced his art?

 

[Michael569]

40 minutes ago, Purple Man said:

The fact that you have taken arguably two of the three most gifted music composers of all time, absolute giants, with a science fiction natural talent that the world has not seen again although hundreds of years have gone by, and don´t even mention that word ,"talent", to explain their success is, again, so astonishing that I don´t have words.

True, talent should have been mentioned BUT....without having the infrastructure created for them by other people, having been pushed into music early in life, having spent thousands of hours practicing in youth (through an incentive of a more conscious person)...this would not have happened if they were born to poor family who struggled to survive and the boy would, rather than being a musician, be selling bread on the corner of some side alley. Talent is useless if the environment allowing it to flourish is not there. 

Actually, I also disagree with you. It is possible, for an average person to match the genuis of Beethoven should they participate in deliberate practice since their early early childhood, get the opportunities, the push and the incentive and go through the same level of trajectory he went through. Ofcourse they need to desire it and it needs to be their greatest vision for their life. They may not overshadow the likes of Mozart, that's true but they could get pretty close if they were, at that times exposed to similar level of intrinsic drive and external environment as well as the opportunities. 

Also, don't forget that the competition was more scarce back then. The world is full of talented hard working artist with an absolute genius level of mastery...that you have never and will never hear about because they are overshadowed by Rihannas and Cardi Bs of the internet and they suck at marketing 

[hugoalfven]

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, da vinci, Shakespeare etc, had a very special connection with infinite intelligence or universal mind where the art was drawn from. It was not Bach's or Beethoven's brains that produced this godlike genius music, they were connected to infinite intelligence. 

 

Edited June 14, 2022 by hugoalfven

[charlie cho]

@Leo Gura  What do you mean?