SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

1% inspiration and 99% perspiration

In the comments thread of Really Thinking About Thinking, Stephen questions the connection between drill and higher thinking. Here are two articles from our archives. One of the articles deals with the connection between math drills and improvements in students’ grasp of “math concepts and applications, including logical thinking”. The other article deals with the connection in the arts between rigorous training in the fundamentals of the discipline and creativity. 

The author of the math article writes: “When a student is freed up from the laborious task of decoding most of the words in a passage, his comprehension improves. So in math: when basic computation can be done with speed and accuracy, more attention can be given to the process or problem.”

The author of the arts article writes: “The originality of Mozart’s music is inseparable from its rule-guided objectivity. It has a logic and an orderliness that come from the supreme grasp of musical grammar. Real originality does not defy convention but depends on it.”

In my opinion, this principle extends to virtually every facet of human endeavour: world-class performance is always the result of thousands of hours of drudgery. Maybe even ten thousand hours.

People have to master a dscipline before they can transcend it.