How to become a genius.

Here is an article that ties together Malcolm Gladwell's ideas with the ideas from my last post about the quarterlife crisis. Enjoy!

And so that you guys don't think that I'm all work and no play, here's a ridiculous video to enjoy.

a basement, a shrewd manager, a conversion

I joined a Bible study in the basement of my dorm during my first semester at Pomona College. But I'm not entirely sure why. I guess I was spiritually interested. I was involved in a lot of different activities as a freshman, and Bible study seemed like a good addition.

My church in Portland had been a liberal Presbyterian church. We didn't study the Bible much, and there were a lot of members who didn't believe in Christ's unique ability to save. Nonetheless, I was a spiritually confident freshman, and I came to Bible study assuming that I knew everything about Jesus and the Bible. I was, of course, wrong in my assumption. The Bible and this group slowly opened my eyes to a number of my misconceptions about Christ and spirituality.

My Bible study leader's name was Amber. My first impression of her was her height--she was pretty short (well, I mean, she was...); my next impression was her demeanor--she was quiet, a history major who liked to study (I think she's getting a PhD. now, studying the history of the Holocaust). We met in her tiny dorm room in the basement, and we studied the parables of Jesus. Amber started us out on the well known parables: the Good Samaritan, the Talents. She did a great job of pulling out the nuance and mystery of what Jesus was saying, and I began to appreciate the depth of each parable. Jesus' teachings had begun to scratch at my heart.

After a few weeks we came to the Parable of the Shrewd Manager (Luke 16:1-15, click here for the passage). I read the passage, and the group began to discuss. Amber, in her quiet but forceful way, would not let us settle for a simple explanation of the text. No, Jesus was not saying that we should cheat and connive like the Manager, and no, He also wasn't saying that the Manager was just a jerk--Jesus had a deeper lesson for our group and for me.

I was utterly confused. That night was my first experience of being confounded by the Bible (I think not understanding the Bible can be a good thing). I remember that night was the first time I prayed: "Jesus, what the heck are you trying to say?"

Slowly, He made himself clear. Jesus was addressing the idea of stewardship. We gain wealth, possessions, and power in this life, and there are many different ways to spend these resources. Jesus says, "Use them for the one thing that will not pass away!" When this teaching sunk in, I was left humbled. Jesus was saying something profound through this passage, and I had missed it entirely. In his own meek way, Jesus showed me that my SAT scores and hot grades meant very little when trying to understand the Kingdom of God. His wisdom is different than the kind of knowledge I was learning in school. I could be brilliant and still miss the point.

That night God converted my mind. He convinced me that the Bible is mysterious but true and that I can trust what is written there. It would take another seven months to convert my heart (that's another story), but this study in Amber's dorm room was crucial to God's victory in my life.

Thank you Jesus for your mysterious wisdom. Thank you Amber for not letting me settle.

Why is Saint Augustine so brilliant?

(A couple of weeks ago a wrote a post discussing the source of Malcolm Gladwell's brilliance. This post does the same but for Saint Augustine.)

I picked up Saint Augustine's Confessions just before Christmas for some vacation reading. Augustine is a doctor of the faith, incredibly influential in shaping Christian theology, so I thought that I should read one of his works. The politics major in me wanted to read City of God, but when I saw how long it was, I thought better of it. Confessions seemed more manageable.

I was primed for an intellectual marathon, but what I found in his Confessions was a readable and relevant description of one man's relationship with God. He discussed the Manichees and Platonism a bit (which I didn't really get), but as a whole, the book had a greater impact on my heart than my head.

Augustine knew God well. When I first began reading, I had to put the book down every few pages because I felt humbled in light of his description of Christ and the Father. He understood much about God that I am barely beginning to grasp. He emphasized one point that was especially poignant for me.

He writes, "If physical objects give you pleasure, praise God for them and return love to their Maker lest, in the things that please you, you displease him. If souls please you, they are being loved in God; for they are also mutable and acquire stability by being established in him..." Augustine gives thanks to God for each blessing in his life: nature, friends, family, opportunities, and more. If a contemporary Christian were to talk the way Augustine writes, I would probably label that person "hyper-spiritual" and a little out of touch with reality. But since Augustine is Augustine I am humbled and compelled to take him seriously.

The doctor gives thanks to God for the gift of intellect at length, providing an interesting counterpoint to Malcolm Gladwell's thoughts in Outliers. Augustine was probably a genius. By age twenty he could out-debate the best teachers in North Africa, so he moved to Italy only to find that he was a top intellect there as well. He writes, "You know, Lord my God, that quick thinking and capacity for acute analysis are your gift. But that did not move me to offer them in sacrifice to you. And so these qualities were not helpful but pernicious (deadly)."

Augustine skips over the terrestrial source of his intellectual ability--I get the sense that he doesn't really care if he's intelligent because of nature or because of nurture--and says that regardless of why he's smart, God is the source of his smart-ness.

I'm definitely not as smart or talented as Augustine or Malcolm Gladwell, so what does all this mean for me? More than anything, reading Augustine has inspired me to use the talents and gifts that I have been given to serve God. I think it is easy for me to get bummed because I don't have some of the flashier gifts to offer to God. Augustine is helping me see that what I have is what God wants--he just wants me to be me.

Why is Malcolm Gladwell so brilliant?

I worked the best overtime of my life last Wednesday. My boss needed someone to go to a nonprofit event in order to count cash receipts and make sure money was transported properly--typically a boring task. But when I read the description of the event, I almost peed my pants. Kai Ryssdal (you know, the guy with the awesome voice and biting questions that hosts Marketplace on NPR) was going to be interviewing some guy named Malcolm Gladwell. Apparently he has written some books.

The night was fantastic in two ways. First, I got to talk (albeit briefly) with Kai. I ended up counting cash in his dressing room, so we had this awkward moment after the event where my hands were full of dollar bills and he just wanted to go home. But that didn't prevent us from shooting the breeze. Apparently, his biting questions had gotten the better of him, leaving him with laryngitis. His voice is so rad that it didn't make any difference.

(okay, some of this is overstatement, but really, Marketplace is the best show on radio. 6:30, 89.3, KPCC)

The second reason the night was so fantastic is a bit more thoughtful. This guy Malcolm Gladwell is quick and had biting answers to match Kai's questions. He writes for The New Yorker most of the time (which I don't read. the articles are too long, like this blog post), and when he's tired of writing for magazines, he writes books. His most recent book is called Outliers, and it's about how exceptionally talented people become exceptionally talented. He writes about Bill Gates and Michael Jordan and people like that. I haven't read his book, but I'm going to write about his ideas anyway. :P

What struck me was his emphasis on luck and chance in the development of an exceptional talent (or exceptional success. how many times do you think I can use the word exceptional (5) in this post?). He spoke about how a disproportionate number of tech/dot.com billionaires were born in the year 1955. Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Paul Allen. The guys at Sun Microsystems. Some other folks I don't remember. He explains that it is not coincidence that each of these outliers was born in 1955. You see, being born in 1955 means that a person was 21 years old in 1976, which was the year that Popular Mechanics made it clear that the home personal computer was a real possibility. Each of these future savants was deeply inspired by this article, and since they were 21 (as opposed to being 24 and working at IBM, the old evil empire, or 17 and still screwing around with Legos) they were the perfect age to decide to build their own tech empires. The random-ness of the universe blessed these 1955 billionaires with being the right age at the right time.

Basically Malcolm was saying that a person can be exceptionally (6) talented, but without a bit of luck fostering the right circumstances, this person will never reach the top of their field. Barack Obama is a perfect example. He has lived his entire professional life in post-civil rights America in which African Americans have relatively more social mobility than in the past (praise the Lord). Had Barack been born 100 or even 15 years earlier, he would not have been able to become president. He probably would not have even been able to attend Harvard Law School. (It's sad to think about all the excellent leaders, thinkers, and artists that the world has missed because chance was not on their side, particularly when this lack of chance was a direct result of human sinfulness.)

Apparently Malcolm is also successful, so Kai asked, "So, why is Malcolm Gladwell so brilliant?" Great question and Malcolm gave a good answer. He described his childhood and the love and enjoyment of hard intellectual work that his parents instilled in him. He talked about being a kid and having two friends who were also savants--and how they recreated Monopoly with their own rules (like selling options on properties and starting with $1; these kids were hardcore). These friendships created an atmosphere of competitive intellectualism that pushed Malcolm to a higher level of intelligence that catapulted him into his current position as a writer. Malcolm was very clear that his childhood upbringing was the impetus of his success, and he was clear that he was grateful for it.

I have another thought on the source of Malcolm's exceptional (7) talent, but I will save it for another post as this one is too long already. In the meantime let me know what you think of Malcolm's idea. Do you agree about the role of luck or chance in the development of exceptional talent?