Dear Kids,

Happy first day of school! I’ve got good news and bad news.

First the bad news: You are about to spend hundreds of hours learning a bunch of small, interconnected facts, most of which you will never, ever, ever use again. (Proof: ask your parents how to calculate the area of a rhombus. I rest my case.)

Now the good news: school is hugely, amazingly, life-changingly worthwhile. Here’s why: learning bunches of interconnected facts makes your brain faster and stronger. School is like a machine for improving your brain. But in order to improve it the most, it helps to know the basic rules of how that sucker works.

(Why don’t more schools spend time — a half-day, say — teaching kids the how their brains work? This state of affairs seems utterly crazy to me. Would you try to teach someone to drive a car without showing them the accelerator and steering wheel?)

So before you get started filling your brains with facts, here is a (very) brief user’s manual for your brain.

Rule 1: Feel the Burn

If you want strong, fast muscles, do you:

• A)   do nothing and wait for your muscles to get strong
• B)    Go to the store, buy bags of marshmallows and lift them over and over
• C)   Go to the gym and work out until your muscles burn

Congratulations for picking C) – because here’s the deal: your brain works exactly like your muscles. To get stronger and faster, you have to push yourself right to the edge of your ability, until you feel the burn — which in this case is that spot where you make mistakes.

This is not easy. It feels uncomfortable – sort of like lifting a heavy weight. But it’s how you’re built. Struggle is not optional – it’s a requirement.

• Do: Be willing to make mistakes, fix them, reach again. Mistakes aren’t verdicts – they’re navigation points for the next try.
• Don’t: Sit back and let information flow over you like a warm, comfortable bath.  This feels good, and it’s an absolutely terrible way to learn.

Rule 2: Repetition is Underrated. (Repetition is Underrated.) Also, Repetition is Underrated.

When it comes to learning, there is nothing (repeat: nothing!) you can do that is more powerful than repetition. The reasons are complicated, but boil down to this: intense repetition makes the wires of your brain work faster. A LOT faster.

• Do: Picture the wires of your brain working faster and faster with each rep.
• Don’t: Think of repetition as drudgery. It’s not like doing boring chores. It’s a lot closer to installing high-speed broadband.

Rule 3: Steal From the Best

Look, I know your teacher and parents tell you that you are special and unique, but the truth is, you aren’t the first person in the history of the world to do math, music, art, or sports. In short, it’s not about you. When you encounter a problem, look to others. Find the people who do it well, and copy how they study, how they listen, how they take notes. Rip them off. Steal their habits, figure out the way they think, break into their vault. Your brain is built to mimic.

• Do: Keep a list of useful habits you’d like to steal.
• Don’t: Take defeat too personally. (Same with success, for that matter.)

In sum, making your brain fast and strong is all about doing the three R’s: Reach, Repeat, and Rob the Banks.

Good luck!

It’s not just the condescending phrase —  the whispered implication that they should have bloomed earlier. And it’s not the fact that our culture tends to sprinkle the young with the fairy dust of infinite possibility, while treating late bloomers with the grim surprise we give when spotting an escaped farm animal roaming city streets – what are YOU doing here?

No, the real reason they are underrated is that these kinds of second-act successes are more common and possible than we might think.  So in the interest of germinating blooms in our own lives, here are a few random ideas.

1. Be Willing to Be Stupid Early On

We know about Julia Child taking her first cooking class in her mid-thirties, Shinichi Suzuki opening his legendary music school at 46 , late-arriving authors like Frank McCourt and Norman Maclean, and of course the official godmother of late bloomers, Grandma Moses, who learned to paint in her seventies.

What’s not mentioned in those stories is how the rest of the world — often including their closest friends — regarded their venture as borderline insane. To persist in the face of this sentiment is not an easy thing to do, and requires a particular combination of muleheadedness and dreaminess.

Muleheadedness also comes in handy during practice, because it takes an older brain more repeats to learn something. On the other hand, older brains tend to be good at remembering what they’ve learned.

I like the way Abraham Lincoln put it: “I am slow to learn and slow to forget what I’ve learned. My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch anything on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.”

2. Play to Your Strong Suits

Young people are good at learning certain kinds of skills — okay, lots of skills. But older brains actually work better as they get older in many softer integrative tasks, especially those requiring discernment and reasoning.

Cheerful fact: People aged 40-65 score more highly than younger people on four of six major mental capacities, including the most vital: inductive reasoning. So while teens make good figure skaters and violinists, there’s a good reason we don’t choose many 19-year-olds as CEOs, teachers, or leaders. So pick something that plays to your increasing neural strengths — soft skills rather than hard ones. For more on this, check out Barbara Stauch’s wonderful and useful new book, The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain.

3. Use Your Freedom to Screw Up

Let’s take a moment to feel sorry for super-talented young people, because their lives too often resemble a fast-narrowing corridor of endless practice routines, early pressure, and the kind of devilish bargaining that led a violinist Yeou-Cheng Ma (sister of Yo-Yo Ma) to produce the saddest quote I’ve ever heard: “I traded my childhood for my good left hand.” Their skill comes to defines their identity and thus their possibilities — and creates a mindset where they are often afraid to take risks.

Late bloomers, on the other hand, get to develop their own identities and, equally important, screw up. If something doesn’t work out, they have other skills to fall back on — particularly emotional skills. And when it comes to building their talent, they’ve got the most important asset: the freedom to experiment, to make mistakes and fix them.

For a good lesson on doing this, check out this Julia Child clip (interspersed with Meryl Streep’s re-enactment from a recent movie). Child takes a risk, screws up royally, and it comes off as a triumph of late-bloomer resilience.

If tomorrow you were given the chance to be great at every single skill in your life — I’m talking world-class level, in each of your various interests — would you do it?

For many of us, the answer comes easily: Yes. Being tops at everything is considered Life’s Big Goal. Accordingly, we spend a lot of our time fervently traveling toward the promised land — shoring up weaknesses, honing strengths, targeting where to excel.

But I’d like to point out that this way of thinking misses out on a potentially important point: that there are some real advantages to being terrible.  There’s an underrated beauty in clumsiness. There’s virtue in sucking.

At this point I’d like to introduce the piece de resistance of bad, the great pyramid of terribleness: the golf swing of Mr. Charles Barkley (see above). It is not just bad. It is an Everest of ineptitude, a Versailles of discoordination. (Note: this video is not a fluke — it’s his real swing, as seen here and here in terrifying slow motion.)

Historically speaking, there are two ways of looking at being bad:

1) It’s bad. It’s to be ignored, avoided, and spoken of as little as possible.

2) It’s secretly kind of good, because it teaches important lessons we can’t learn anywhere else.

In this second way of thinking, being bad contains a potential silver lining: character development, teaching the invaluable skill of resilience. We see this all the time, not just in the work of psychologists like Albert Bandura, but also in the biographies of luminaries like Beethoven, Churchill, Darwin, Emily Dickinson, Harry Truman, and John Grisham — all of whom endured excruciating stretches of ineptitude before they got good.

What’s more, we can take this idea even farther.  Because I think the advantages of being terrible go well beyond the eat-your-vegetables benefits of resilience and character. Being terrible can be useful because:

• It gives us freedom to experiment. Maintaining greatness is a narrow pursuit — you are essentially playing defense, vigilantly guarding against erosion. Being terrible, on the other hand, is a license to try new things. It permits a looseness and a creativity, since there is very little to lose.
• It connects us to other people. It’s interesting to see the contrast between the way people treat the ever-smiling Barkley and the ever-grim Tiger Woods.  People admire greatness. But they relate to Barkley’s awfulness because we’ve all been there.
• It lets us practice the vastly underrated skill of knowing when to quit. In this overprogrammed world, it’s all too easy (especially for parents and kids) to say yes to tennis, music, golf, theater, everything. But to get really good at anything, you can’t say yes to everything. Knowing when and how to quit is not just handy — it’s a survival skill.
• It keeps us humble and grounded. Lives built on the relentless pursuit of perfection tend to be relentlessly narrow. Witness some of the tone-deaf, clueless, and indefensible behavior we’ve seen lately from perfectionists on Wall Street, Washington, and in the athletic arena.  Being terrible is a reminder that we’re like everybody else — vulnerable, human, prone to error. It tilts us toward a learning mindset.

My area of terribleness is the guitar. I’ve played it for 12 years now, and I know all of 12 chords. (That’s one new chord a year, for those of you keeping score.) When it comes time to pick out a melody, I’m hopeless, if not downright Barkleyesque. But I still keep picking the darn thing up. I can’t imagine life without it. And if somebody asked me to justify why I spent time doing something I’m objectively so unskilled at,  I’d have to say that it’s because I just like it, and that’s all.

The question is, how do we make these moments happen more often?

I think one of the best ways is by using more precise language.  Too often, teachers and learners alike settle for vague instructions, like “do it like this,” or “try it again.”  These are well intended, perhaps, but in essence they are squishy, meaningless words that create squishy, meaningless actions.  What learners need isn’t cheerleading – it’s information on what sensations they should feel, what techniques they should use, what goals they should aim for on the practice field or the classroom.

With that in mind, here’s a semi-serious list cobbled together from various talent hotbeds, and stolen from business, sports, art, music, and academics.  Some are undoubtedly more useful than others, but all reflect a simple idea: to reflect the sensations and goals of the way the brain really learns.

• Brick (v): The simple beginner’s errors that feel clumsy and stupid, but in fact form the crucial building blocks of future progress. Usage: “During the initial round of presidential-primary debates, Obama spent most of his time bricking.”
• Lego (v): To break a desired task into its most basic component parts; akin to chunking. Usage: “Little Wolfgang struggled with the chord changes until his father helped him lego it out.”
• Hack (v): To analyze the components of ideal performance with the goal of replicating it. Frequently assisted by the use of YouTube.
• Hi-Def (v): To deeply and completely memorize the image of an ideal performance. Often used while hacking. Usage: “Kobe spent hundreds of youthful evenings staring at the posters on his bedroom wall, high-deffing Michael Jordan’s jumpshot.”
• Ping (v): To send a short, concise instruction; typically from a teacher to a student. Usage: “Coach Wooden stalked the sidelines during practice, relentlessly pinging the team as it ran through its fast break.”
• Rainman (v): To productively obsess on a tiny, crucial detail until it is dialed in with 100 percent accuracy. Usage: “The calculus test was Friday, so Albert started rainmanning his derivatives on Wednesday night.”
• Sandwich (n): A three-part demonstration where a teacher vividly shows the right way to do something, then the wrong way to do it, then repeats the right way to do it. Usage: “In the movie ‘Stand and Deliver,’ Jaime Escalante teaches algebra by sandwiching.”
• Suck-cess (n): A surprising favorable outcome; typically occurs following the combination of bricks, hacking, and pinging.
• Vex Education (n): The process by which people grow familiar with the central paradox of learning: that being willing to be bad makes you good.

(What other words should we add?)

But there’s another way of thinking about error, and it begins with a story I heard recently about Marina Semyonova, a master teacher at the Bolshoi Ballet in the fifties.

The story goes like this: Every year, Semyonova would hold a tryout for the Bolshoi, which was (and still is) one of the world’s greatest ballet troupes. You can imagine the scene: dozens of brilliant young dancers milling about, years of experience holstered and ready, their dreams on the line.

At first, the tryout would proceed like any other: the dancers would try to show their abilities and vast repertoires. But then Semyonova would surprise them. She would stop the audition and teach them one new move  – something they’ve never tried.  They weren’t big complex moves – to the contrary, they were quite simple. It was as if the top-level audition suddenly was replaced by a beginners’ class.

The beginners’ class section took only a few minutes. But it was by far the most important moment of the audition, because by the time it was over Semyonova knew precisely which dancers to pick and which to pass over.  And as the record shows, she proved to be right far more often than not.

Semyonova wasn’t a neuroscientist, but she was onto something.  She wasn’t interested in measuring levels of skill – which changes over time and can be frustratingly unpredictable. She was zeroing in on a tiny slice of time that makes a massive difference in our learning ability  — that primal instant right after we make a mistake.

That instant – which this very cool brain-scan experiment shows to be about 0.25 seconds – is a fork in the road; the moment when things tip one way or the other. Either the mistake is judged as a verdict and thus blocked out — or it’s seen as a piece of information to be used.  And indeed, in the experiment referenced above, the students who used their mistakes (whose brains processed them deeply in that magical 0.25 seconds) ended up scoring higher than students who didn’t.

In other words, the old chestnut proves out to be true: it’s not the mistakes that are good or bad, but rather our reaction to them.  And this reaction – which we might deem our error-reflex — is in itself a kind of meta-skill, a measurable quality that is an accurate indicator of potential, and which can also be improved.

So the question becomes, how do we improve our own error-reflexes? How do we make more of our 0.25 second window? Here are a few ideas:

• Depersonalize our mistakes by picturing them as navigation points. Because that’s what they are, literally, inside your brain –neural circuits whose wrongness nudges you in the right direction.
• Break the reflex down into component parts. Every action is really three actions – the action, the recognition of the mistake, and the response. Each should be insulated from the others.
• Expect to feel a bit disoriented because it’s a tricky balancing act, emotionally speaking. One moment, you have to put all of yourself into a sincere move – the next moment you have to pull back and evaluate. It requires an emotional equilibrium that helps you lurch between hot commitment one second and cool analysis the next.

That all reminded me of a sight I’ve seen while watching the World Cup these past few weeks: a player making a mistake (missing a shot at a wide-open goal, for instance), and then smiling about it, as if it somehow didn’t profoundly affect his future or the happiness of millions in his home country.

These are gargantuan, life-changing, career-altering moments – and yet a surprising number of the erring players (even the Germans!) react with the same understanding, nearly bemused smile that we never see on the faces of similarly erring stockbrokers or lawyers or politicians.

I’d like to suggest that their smiles can be traced to the essence of the game, which is built on the essential difficulty of controlling a ball with parts of our body least suited for control.  It’s very, very tough to score goals, or even make five good passes in a row, never mind get past 10 enemy players and a goalkeeper. As a result, soccer players are good friends with error.  They live in a world of constant screw-ups. They understand mistakes deeply, and that’s precisely what makes them such marvelous and resilient talents.

PS: Speaking of error’s bright side, you should check out Being Wrong, by Kathryn Schulz.  She’s a brilliant and funny guide to how errors are gifts, and how screwing up is key to our happiness and success.

When it’s up, it’s way up – lots of fresh ideas arriving and connecting, leading to new projects, articles, even books. When it’s down, it’s pretty flat. If you were to draw a chart of my generation of good ideas over a given stretch of time, it would look like a map of Montana – large stretches of vast, windswept plains, leading to a few clusters of tall peaks where the majority of good ideas occur.

I’m interested in those peaks, in part because I think this pattern is pretty common.

Take the Beatles, for instance. In a 12-month period from mid-1968 to mid-1969, they recorded three groundbreaking albums (The White Album, Let It Be, Abbey Road) plus enough material for a later triple album (Anthology 3 ), plus five singles, plus a film (Let It Be), plus the film and soundtrack to Yellow Submarine, plus five solo albums recorded or released, plus writing a number of songs that turned up in later albums. Or there’s Einstein in 1905, cranking out the three world-changing scientific papers in one year, a triple burst of world-changing insight.

I know those are quasi-insane comparisons – my scribbles are an awful long way from the theory of relativity or the genius of “Hey Jude.” But I’d like to suggest that this pattern applies to all of us more than we might suspect. We all have innovation  hot zones where the majority of our good ideas happen, and their existence raises an important question. What is causing these zones? How do we create more of them?

I think we get a good insight into this question from a surprising place: Ira Glass, the host of This American Life and one of the most prolific, savvy radio producers on the planet.   A while back Glass did a series of revelatory interviews about the creative process. Here’s a clip:

If you’re in the innovation business, you should check out the whole thing, but in essence it boils down to two simple steps:

1. In order to get quality ideas, you have to do the long, hard, wildly inefficient work of generating a lot of non-quality ideas.
2. You should ruthlessly eliminate the possibilities that don’t work.

Here’s Glass on Step One:

“To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it’s usually going to fail. You have to take that into account and you have to make peace with it. We spend a lot of money and time on stuff that goes nowhere…. And you can’t tell if it’s going to be good until you’re really late in the process. So the only thing you can do is have faith that if you do enough stuff, something will turn out great and really surprise you.”

And here’s Glass on Step Two:

“It’s time to be vicious. It’s time to kill, and enjoy the killing, so something better can live. Not enough is said about the importance of abandoning crap. All video production is trying to be crap. It’s like the laws of entropy.”

I like these steps because I think most of us do some version of this instinctively, but as Glass so eloquently points out, we don’t do them nearly aggressively enough. We generate ideas, but not intensively, and not by the dozens. We test and eliminate bad ideas, but we don’t get excited and eager about playing Terminator. And maybe we should.

If we were to diagram this process, it would look like this: a massive generation, followed by a pruning. A hundred starts, followed by 99 endings and one surviving miracle. It would be a kind of churning machine — a creative engine – that generates/prunes endlessly, and which every once in a while produces something beautiful.

The interesting thing is the innovation machine Glass describes is a precise replica of another fairly effective system: evolution. I’m not the first to point it out, but the resemblance between evolution and innovation is uncanny, as both consist of a constant churning of new life, followed by a ruthless selection where the fittest forms survive.

And here’s the other parallel: every once in a while, evolution hits one of those hot zones, producing a great burst of successful innovation. Some good examples: the rise of the dinosaurs, the explosion of life in the Cambrian period, or the changes that started around 35,000 years ago with Cro-Magnon man. These explosions of innovation are evolution’s equivalent of the 1968-69 Beatles — a lot of great ideas happening in a relatively short time.

All of which leads us to a potentially interesting point – like the Beatles, evolution isn’t “trying” any harder during those successful periods than they are during the unsuccessful periods. It’s churning away just as it always is – but then, for some mysterious reason, something hits, something changes, something connects, and suddenly there’s a magnificent run of successful innovations.

Just as with evolution, the productive explosions of the Beatles and Einstein proved to be the exception in the long run. Einstein spent much of his later career pursuing unified field theory, which turned out to be a dead end. As for McCartney and Lennon et. al., they went on to produce some really good work, but would never again approach that kind of concentrated, fertile idea explosion of 1968-69.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s this: maybe our innovation velocity is not about us as much as we think. Maybe our job is to build a good creative engine – generate and prune like crazy – so that we’re ready when the world aligns for us, when the factors come together.

So what can we do in the meantime?

When I think of my innovative zones, I find they tend to happen when I’ve put myself in a position where I have to deliver – the proverbial deadline pressure. Pressure produces clarity; it compresses time and alters your vision; it increases the velocity of the idea-generation and the ruthlessness of the idea-killing. Churn rate increases; ideas and strategies are born and die quickly, like generations of fruit flies – accelerating the series of adaptations that lead to the best work.

I take a couple lessons from this:

• 1. Generate more, in short bursts. Break a day into sections: a conscious searching for new stuff, experimenting, a kind of safe zone where things a tried without judgement. Think of this as the mutation phase – lots of random DNA colliding, creating new combinations.
• 2. Use deadlines. This accelerates the test, so that the fittest ideas can survive.
• 3. Use other people, but more for step one (the generation part) than step two (the ruthless killing part). When it comes to selecting what will live and what will die, it’s better to rely on our own sensibilities.

Also: it never hurts to listen to a lot of Beatles music.

Story #1 takes place in the seventies, at an international ski race in Austria. The world’s best racers are all training on a course that possesses a slightly unique feature: after the finish line, skiers must traverse a long, flat section that leads back to the chairlift.

Now most competitors do exactly what you would expect: they complete their practice run, and then make a beeline for the chairlift – they point their skis and zoom over the flats, in order to get there as quickly as possible.

All except one skier. This guy does the complete opposite of a beeline. He crosses the finish line, and then skies ever so slowly across the flats, carving curlicue turns in the snow. He plays with the snow and the edges of his skis, to see what happens. He goofs around. His name? Ingemar Stenmark, a.k.a. the the greatest slalom skier who ever lived, winner of more ski races than anyone in history.

Story #2 takes place in the late 1940s, in a cafeteria at Cornell. A young physics professor notices a student tossing a dinner plate into the air. The plate is wobbling, and the red insignia of Cornell is going around, and, just for fun, the professor decides to try to figure out the motion of the rotating plate by writing some equations — “piddling around,” he calls it.   The professor’s name was Richard Feynman; those piddling equations later led to his 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics.

There are loads of other stories about the power of goofing around – in fact, here’s a whole book on them.  And it’s clear that goofing around is on the rise — it’s official corporate policy at Google, which grants its employees “20-Percent Time” for them to pursue projects of their own choosing and initiative. Many of Google’s best innovations — Google News, Gmail, among others — trace their roots to 20-Percent Time. Other organizations are following suit.

We all know at some level that goofing around is a smart thing to do. But I think there’s an deeper connection to explore here that has to do with the specific kind of goofing that leads to innovation. To put it simply: it’s not about the goofer – it’s about the precise quality of of goofing.

We get some good insights into this from new research about daydreaming. As this WSJ story points out, daydreaming is not just idle time:

“People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty,” says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. As measured by brain activity, however, “mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem.”

What’s more, daydreaming activity is not all equal. As the ever-insightful Jonah Lehrer points out in this story, daydreaming has been linked to all kinds of creative breakthroughs – if it’s done right.

“The point is that it’s not enough to just daydream,” [Dr. Jonathan] Schooler [a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara] says. “Letting your mind drift off is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enough awareness so that even when you start to daydream you can interrupt yourself and notice a creative insight.”

I think that’s an interesting zone – the directed daydream, where part of the mind is held in reserve, watching intently for a good result – much like Feynman and Stenmark. We can visualize these goofing-around moments as places where our wiring gets a chance to stretch into new areas; where we are activating the edges of our neural circuitry, creating new, surprising, and potentially useful connections.

So what does good goofing have in common? Three qualities, it seems:

• It’s inherently fun, and playful, because it’s rooted in a genuine enjoyment of the process.
• It explores the edges of our abilities,  not the center. It finds new connections between unexpected sources, rather than going over old territory.
• It  doesn’t always lead to something important. In fact, it usually doesn’t.

I think this final point is a worthy one. We never hear about the wobbly-plate daydreams that do not produce Nobel Prizes – but that doesn’t mean they are any less important in the long run. As with so many other things in life, we can’t control the outcome, but we can slightly tilt the odds, provided we make it a habit.

As the great ski coach and author Warren Witherell of Burke Mountain Academy likes to say, real talent is not about execution. It’s about exploration.

Beneath every big talent lies an ignition story – the famously potent moment when a young person falls helplessly in love with their future passion.

For Albert Einstein, that moment happened when his father brought him a compass. As Walter Isaacson wrote in Einstein: His Life and Universe:

Einstein later recalled being so excited as he examined its mysterious powers that he trembled and grew cold…. [Einstein wrote] “I can still remember – or at least I believe I can remember—that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.”

For music educator Shinichi Suzuki, the moment happened was when he was seventeen and he heard a phonograph recording of violinist Mischa Elman playing Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” Suzuki, who would go on to found the famed Suzuki Method, would write:

The sweetness of the sound of Elman’s violin utterly enthralled me. His velvety tone as he played the melody was like something in a dream. It made a tremendous impression on me….I brought a violin home … and, listening to Elman playing a Haydn minuet, I tried to imitate him. I had no score, and simply moved the bow, trying to play what I heard.

These moments pop up fairly often. In his memoir, the writer Stephen King tells of the mindblowing thrill of writing a story for his mother when he was seven. The neurologist Oliver Sacks tells about the transporting smells and explosions of childhood chemistry experiments in Uncle Tungsten. (My own moment came when I read Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.)

As moving as they are, these moments aren’t the whole story, of course. They are doorways to years of work and passion — the slow construction of beautiful neural broadband. But they’re still important because these moments lead us to a question: What exactly happened there? Is there something special about certain kinds of inspiration? And more important, how do we make it happen?

I think we can find one clue by looking more closely at the moments themselves. So let’s break it down:

1. The moments are serendipitous. Nobody sets it up; there’s no mediator. It happens by chance, and thus contains an inherent sense of noticing and discovery.
2. They are joyful. Crazily, obsessively, privately joyful. As if a new, secret world is being opened.
3. The discovery is followed directly by action. As the Suzuki example shows, the point is not merely listening to the song, but in trying to play that song — to be the player. Like the others, he didn’t just admire – he acted.

Since these kinds of interactions are deeply individualized, they are understandably difficult for science to study. But we get one insight through the work of Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, psychologist and author of Flow. Czikszentmihalyi tracked two hundred artists from the time they were students until nearly two decades later. Over that time, some became serious painters; some didn’t. The deciding factor? Joy. The students who became serious painters were the ones who found the most joy in the sheer act of painting.

I think the emerging lesson is that these moments are a lot like falling in love — we can’t force it, but we can increase the odds slightly by doing a few basic things.

• Create lots of encounters; approach each with an open mind.
• Don’t think too much. This moment is not about being logical. It’s about rapture, immersion; about feeling, as Emily Dickinson wrote, “as if the top of my head were taken off.”
• Let it be secret. For parents, this means backing off and giving space. Can you imagine if Suzuki’s parents were eagerly hovering as he listened to “Ave Maria”? Or if Einstein’s dad enrolled him in a class on magnetism? Helicopters are serendipity killers.

Speaking of serendipity: a few years after learning to play violin, Suzuki traveled from Japan to Berlin in order to perfect his craft. He spoke no German, but somehow managed to fall into a musical crowd, and made a lifelong friendship with an frizzy-haired amateur violinist who also worked as a physicist: Albert Einstein.

Dear Amir,

Thanks for your letter and all your cartoons to look at. Your comics are pretty good, especially your staging and continuity. You might have the makings of a good storyboard artist. I’m sending you a very good how to draw animation book by Preston Blair. Preston was one of Tex Avery’s animators. He animated ‘Red Hot Riding Hood’ and many other characters. His book shows you very important fundamentals of good cartoon drawing.

Construction. Learn how to construct your drawings out of 3-dimensional objects. Learn how to draw hands so they look solid. I want you to copy the drawings in his book. Start on the first page, draw slow. Look very closely. Measure the proportions. Draw the drawings step-by-step, just the way Preston does.

After you finish each drawing check it carefully against the drawing in the book. (if you do your drawings on tracing paper, you can lay the paper on top of the book to see where you made mistakes. On your drawing write the mistakes. Then do the drawing again, this time correcting the mistakes.

Here’s another important piece of information for you: Good drawing is more important than anything else in animation. More than ideas, style, stories. Everything starts with good drawing. Learn to draw construction, perspective.

Ok, now it’s up to you.

Allright Bastard, let’s get to work. Draw! and slow now.

Your pal,

John K.

Good teaching is wrapped in mystery. We tend to think of the great teacher as possessing a higher level of knowledge, and so we sometimes expect their knowledge to arrive in cryptic, complicated forms. After all, they’re smarter than we are. We’re not supposed to understand.

Kricfalusi’s letter shows us the falseness of this thinking by delivering a virtual clinic on the powerful simplicity of master teaching. First he establishes a connection. Then he gives a series of straightforward signals — do X, do Y, do Z. Do them slowly. Mark your mistakes. Look very closely. And best of all, Kricfalusi doesn’t just tell – he shows, by drawing examples. (Check out the original document.) Then he re-establishes the connection.

I think this letter is a useful reminder about what good teaching really is: simple, clear signals delivered at the right time, with love.

Amir apparently listened. He’s now in his fourth year at the animation program at Sheridan College — here’s some of his work.

One way to approach the mystery it through the window of a small question: why did so many mailroom workers rise to become CEOs?

Here’s a partial list:

• Dick Grasso (NYSE)
• Barry Diller, Michael Ovitz, and David Geffen (William Morris)
• Mike Medavoy (Universal)
• J. Lawrence Hughes (William Morrow)
• Ned Tanen (MCA)
• Jeffrey Katzenberg (Paramount)
• George Bodenheimer (ESPN)
• John Borghetti (Quantas)
• Tom Whalley (Warner Bros.)
• Sidney Weinberg (Goldman Sachs)

Other mailroom workers-turned-leaders: Don Hewitt (60 Minutes), John Bachmann (Edward Jones), and Simon Cowell (EMI records). If you Google the phrase “started out in the mailroom” and “ceo,” you get 3,450 results.

This is a striking pattern, because it’s so unlikely. At most corporations, the mailroom is the bottom rung. Its duties are simple: you read and sort letters, photocopy, roam the building delivering the mail, fetch coffee. To become CEO, the mailroom group had to do a very difficult thing: they had to outcompete hundreds of employees who were 1) more qualified, 2) better-resourced, and 3) more highly regarded – since after all, they weren’t relegated to the mailroom. And yet despite those immense odds, these underdogs pulled it off. How?

I think part of the answer can be found by looking at the equally demanding world of the NFL – specifically the surprising career paths of current head coaches. Because it turns out that an unusually high percentage  (nine at last count, including the Tony Sprarano of the Dolphins, Brad Childress of the Vikings, and Mike McCarthy of the Packers) share an interesting quirk on their resume: they sll started out on the bottom rung of the pro-coaching ladder, working as quality-control coaches.

Quality-control is not a sought-after job. It’s frequently the lowest-paid member of the staff. Q-C coaches spend their days sitting in a room watching game tape, compiling data, analyzing film, producing 50-page scouting reports for coaches to use, and, yes, occasionally fetching coffee for the “real coaches.”

“We worked quadruple everybody else, but we got to feel like a coach,” said Todd Haley, now the coach in Kansas City, who worked in quality control with the Jets. “We had responsibility. It’s the greatest job in football as far as learning.”

We usually think of leadership as being an innate talent, stemming from such intangibles as “charisma, “vision” and “character.” But the success of these underdogs from the mailroom and Q-C  coaching flips this idea on its head. The leadership talents of these CEOS and NFL head coaches is not being born; it’s being grown. They are positioning themselves smack-dab in the middle of the information flow, and they are working that flow like a training session to change their brains.

To understand how this works, let’s look at a typical day in the life of a mailroom worker and compare it to that of a higher-up.

The higher-up is insulated in their job, cocooned by the responsibilities of the day. Their advancement depends on performing a narrow job well and being recognized for doing so, usually by his or her immediate boss.

The mailroom underdog, on the other hand, roves around like a spy, able to peer into the organization’s inner workings (not least by reading mail and hearing gossip). They are the proverbial fly on the wall inside the offices of the powerful. They can learn the anatomy of disasters and successes. They can navigate a maze of personalities; witness communication skills. They can learn the crucial dividing line between what matters and what doesn’t. Their advancement doesn’t depend on performing a narrowly defined task for a narrow audience; rather, it depends on their impressing someone – anyone, really – of their general-purpose savvy and chutzpah.

In short, the underdog isn’t really an underdog — they’re the overdog. For a person of the right mindset – like former Paramount/Fox CEO Barry Diller – this spot is the perfect neural-training camp.

“My great strategy was to take what was seen as the worst job in the building — photocopying I’d collect things to copy, along with as much of the file room as I could carry, and hole myself up reading through the history of the entertainment business as seen through every deal, every development, every contract I read their entire file room.”

That’s not to say personal characteristics don’t count, because they do. Diller, like all of these successful underdogs, is hugely ambitious, persistent, and hardworking to the extreme. But here’s the point: so are a lot of other people. These underdog groups succeed in disproportionate numbers because they channel that energy through a grid of intensive training to make their brains fast, accurate, and organization-smart.

An increasing number of companies seem to understand this. GE’s Crotonville Leadership Development Center is a now-legendary pioneer in this area. Hindustan Unilever, a hugely successful Indian company, is widely regarded as a talent hotbed –largely because its senior managers spend 30 to 40 percent of their time mentoring young leaders.

So what’s the takeaway from all this? It depends who you are.

For organizations:

• Construct a virtual mailroom,  a training program that allows young employees to learn – through real-world experience, not lectures – how leadership really works.
• Consider leadership-mentoring programs.

For individuals:

• Judge early jobs by their position in the information flow, not by prestige or salary.
• Create your own training regimen. Whether it’s photocopying contracts or making predictions and seeing how they turn out, it doesn’t matter so long as its yours.