We all know that world-class writers write differently from the rest of us. What I didn’t know — at least until recently — was how differently some of them read.

Check out these links to the private books of two pretty fair writers: Mark Twain and David Foster Wallace. They’re worth exploring, because 1) it’s as thrillingly close as you’ll get to the engine room of their minds; and 2) because they provide a vivid (and for me, utterly humbling) lesson on how to truly read.

For most of us, reading is a “lean-back” experience; a warm bath. Not these guys. They’re on the balls of their feet, swords drawn. DFW and Twain  challenge, criticize, scribble new ideas, tease, steal, improve, admire. They fully engage with the work. It’s like a writer’s version of a vigorous athletic workout.  Because, I’d like to suggest, that’s precisely what it is: an intense firing of their circuitry; deep practice in excelsis.

On the surface, this seems like a small shift — after all, scribbling a quick note versus thinking a thought. But the act of writing is profoundly different than thinking because it forces precision and it creates a record that can be linked to other scribbles. These notes are a kind of playing field where thought happens; without the marks on the page, the thoughts float up and disappear.

In most circles, particularly schools, marking up books is discouraged, even forbidden. But should it be? With the possibilities of e-books, could this sort of sharp-pencil dueling be encouraged, even taught?

When I was in grade school, my ironclad bedtime routine included setting out the next day’s clothing. I didn’t fold the clothes, but laid them carefully on the floor exactly as I would put them on: pants next to socks, socks next to shoes, and so on.  An unsuspecting passer-by would assume either 1) a small child had suddenly evaporated; 2) I was maybe a bit obsessive/compulsive.

The link between talent and neural disorders is fascinating. The list of world-class performers who have been diagnosed as bipolar, obsessive-compulsive, or autistic is staggeringly long: Hemingway, John Nash, Nijinsky, Van Gogh, Faulkner, Orwell, Nabokov, and Glenn Gould, to name a tiny handful.

We usually think of this link in poetical terms. According to this way of thinking, certain people are gifted with an innate superpower (genius) that carries a terrible price (madness).

This view is tempting. The only problem: it’s not true. Almost nobody – including the crew listed above – has been found to be exempt from the rule of 10,000 hours. Even savants, according to Dr. Michael Howe in his insightful book, Genius Explained, achieve their skill through intense practice. They aren’t different; they are simply better at doing what we’re all trying to do: to focus, to practice deeply, and to build superfast neural circuitry.

Consider:

• OCD creates precise repetitions and elaborately organized behavior.
• Autism creates focus, sensitivity to detail, and repetitions.
• Manic-depression creates periods of high energy.

All of these processes are key elements of the skill-building process – which is all about repeating, making connections, and which requires large amounts of energy. (Perhaps that’s why these disorders exist; after all, if they had no benefit, why would evolution have selected for these traits?)

Which leads us to an interesting idea: what if geniuses aren’t geniuses because of innate ability, but rather because of the way their disorders equip them for highly motivated practice? I don’t want to be flip here – I’m not saying it’s an advantage to be depressed or autistic. And surely there are some rare synesthesic savants like Daniel Tammet who are wired differently from birth.

But I’d like to suggest that for most of us, the connection between genius and neural disorders holds two lessons.

1. The majority of geniuses are building their brains using the same tools as the rest of us.
2. We should align our talents with our disorders. Seeing as many of us possess mild, garden-variety versions of neural disorders, we should funnel those behaviors toward the practice that will grow the skills we desire.

When I think about my own life, I can see how I’ve done this almost unconsciously. While I no longer lay out my clothes the night before, I do have a ridiculously baroque system for organizing my notes. It’s obsessive, to be sure, but it works pretty well when it comes to capturing and arranging  ideas for a book or an article. (My sock drawer? Don’t get me started.)

I love this video, first because of the kid’s uncanny resemblance to Young Forrest Gump. Second, because of the reaction of the other kids  — they’re stunned, thrilled, and ignited by his performance. (If he can do it, why can’t I?)

But the main reason is that it holds a useful strategic lesson. This kid has memorized a massively impressive number by breaking it down in three- and four-number chunks — and then linked those into larger chunks (check out the pauses as he moves from one string to the next).

We instinctively think these kind of barrier-breaking feats are accomplished with overwhelming force — a superpowered “photographic” memory. But that’s an illusion.  In fact they’re accomplished by small, flexible efforts, repeatedly and strategically applied.

We think it’s Goliath. But underneath, it’s really David.

ps — Do lots of schools do this pi contest? It strikes me as a fun, simple way to get kids amped about math, not to mention the power of their brains.

pps — Speaking of limits, check out WNYC’s RadioLab show this week. It’s about what happens when we get close to the edge of physical and mental performance. (Yep, I’m on it.)

Spiderweb? Loop? Or Funnel?

Let me back up a second and start with a simple idea: Skills are really circuits in your brain.

I think this is a cool and useful idea, first because our brains are plastic and changeable. And second, because it leads us somewhere even cooler and more useful. Shapes.

All neural circuits have shapes. In fact, I’d like to assert that those shapes come in three basic types, into which pretty much every talent in the world can be sorted, and which might hold important lessons for us. Here’s why: if we know the shape of the circuit, we also can know the best way to grow that circuit to make it faster, stronger, and better.

(Note to science-minded readers: I’m not saying the circuits are literally structured in these shapes. Rather, that it’s useful to think of them this way.)

Spiderweb

• Examples: stock trading, quarterbacking, debating, social skills
• Description: This circuit is all about pattern recognition and fast response. You perceive something (a set of stock prices, a blitzing linebacker, a smiling stranger) and you respond swiftly and accurately. It’s about perception, flexibility, and navigating a matrix by making quick, accurate choices.
• How to Build It: Set up a grid of  if/then propositions. If Event A happens, you respond with B, C, or perhaps Z. The key is to take input, generate responses, and track their effectiveness.

Loop

• Examples: playing a musical instrument, ice-skating, gymnastics, spelling
• Description: This circuit is about precision. It isn’t trying to be flexible or responsive; rather, it’s trying to create (or re-create) an Ideal Performance; to achieve timing, speed, and power.
• How to Build It: Break the task down to its elemental chunks, polish them, and piece them together in many different ways. You should play with time — slowing and speeding. Pay particular attention to the first repetitions, since they’ll be the tracks in which the rest of the circuit grows.

Funnel

• Examples: poetry, design, business innovation
• Description: This circuit is about slow, creative thought; connecting ideas that were not previously connected.
• How to Build It: Practice making unconventional connections; linking ideas that have never been linked into larger frameworks. Speed doesn’t matter (in fact, as this remarkable new study shows, creative thought happens more slowly). Find a container in which to collect ideas, the better to create a jostle of possibilities. (In her terrific book, The Creative Habit, choreographer Twyla Tharp recommends a shoebox.)

Most talents involve a mix of shapes. For instance, when a jazz pianist plays a solo, he’s reacting to the music and the band (spiderweb), hitting precise notes (loop), and perhaps even noticing some new wrinkle to explore (funnel). When a comedian does her routine, she’s delivering precisely-worded jokes with timing (loop), tuning her delivery to that of the crowd (spiderweb), and trying to come up with new jokes (funnel).   And of course we are all familiar with people who are great at one part of the job but terrible at another (like those rocket-armed college quarterbacks who are marvelous at the loop-circuit skill of throwing while also being hopelessly bad at the spiderweb-circuit skill of reading NFL defenses).

The emerging lesson here is simple: the shape of the training should match the shape of the circuit. And that’s what I observed at the talent hotbeds like Meadowmount (where loops ruled), Brazilian futsal (home of fast, reactive spiderwebs), or the Bronte household (spiderwebs and funnels).

So in sum, if you want to build spiderweb circuits, train like this:

If you want to build loops, train like this:

And if you want to build funnels, train like this:

Returning from a spring break trip to Montana, my 14-year-old son Aidan and I were minding our own business, walking among the weary hordes of travelers at the Chicago airport. Then we noticed a slight commotion twenty feet ahead of us. A middle-aged woman had accidentally dropped her boarding pass, but since she wore an iPod, she was unable to hear the voices of people calling out. So the woman strode  briskly on, unaware.

Behind her, about a dozen people were doing what people usually do in those kinds of situations: they were yelling louder and louder, trying futilely to get iPod woman’s attention. Others (including us) were  instinctively slowing so we could see how this would play out.  In sum, nobody was doing much of  anything — except for a dark-haired guy in a black turtleneck.

The dark-haired guy  jumped out of the gathering crowd, snagged the fallen boarding pass and, calling “excuse me” in a loud voice, dashed up to deliver iPod woman’s boarding pass. Then the dark-haired turtleneck guy turned around, and — you guessed it — it’s Yo-Yo Ma.

As in, Yo-Yo Ma the cellist.  The six-time Grammy winner. The man who’s considered by many to be the most talented musician in the world. (Also, the guy I wrote about briefly in The Talent Code.)

This is a tiny moment. Perhaps it’s meaningless. But on the other hand, perhaps it raises some interesting questions about Ma’s mindset — and ours.

In the few seconds after the boarding pass fluttered to the ground, thirty people had the chance to act. Only one did, with an urgency and directness that seemed almost unconscious. In that brief time, Ma could have easily kept walking and let someone else take the lead. But that’s not how his mind works. He wasn’t thinking about himself or the crowd’s reaction. He was noticing a problem, and solving it.

I think that Ma’s mindset — outward-focused, perceptive, action-oriented — is no accident. Being a great performer, in the most profound sense, is not about the individual — rather, it’s about the music, or the athletic move, or whatever intricate series of thoughts and movements that are being connected. In truly great performances, the performer disappears.

We instinctively think geniuses are successful because they can get lost inside their private worlds, but I think this shows we might have it upside-down. Yo-Yo Ma isn’t successful because he’s lost in his own world. Rather, he’s successful, in part, because he is so deeply attentive to ours.

(Also, as the photo shows, he’s deeply warm to two strangers who chatted with him a few minutes later.)

P.S. — Apparently Yo-Yo isn’t the only one with this habit. Shinichi Suzuki (founder of the Suzuki Method) was once giving a concert when he suddenly ran offstage and down the aisle. The reason? A woman had accidentally left her purse behind; Suzuki wanted to return it.

(Thanks to Kimberly Meier-Sims of the Cleveland Institute of Music for sharing that memory.)

This time of year our family happily geeks out on the Iditarod, that legendary 1,049-mile sled dog race from Willow to Nome. We tape a map on the fridge and follow our favorites — Lance Mackey, Ally Zirkle, our old neighbor Jim Lanier, and, this year, Jamaica’s own cool-runner Newton Marshall.

This year’s race has been completely great, with what looks to be a familiar ending. As of today, Mackey looks like he’s set to win for a record fourth-straight time.

The interesting question is, how does Mackey do it? More specifically, what makes him different? Because the truth is, everybody’s tough as nails. Everybody’s got super-fit dogs — and several top mushers have more resources than Mackey (who prefers living in a broken-down trailer to a house). And this is where the story gets interesting — because it’s where you can draw a line between Mackey, LeBron James, and the world’s top young violinists.

The difference with Mackey — his killer app — is his supreme flexibility. While others are grinding out the miles, Mackey changes strategies all the time. Sometimes he blows right past checkpoints, preferring to camp on the trail. Sometimes he pretends to fall asleep, and then, when his unsuspecting rivals doze off, slips out of the checkpoint. Mackey was one of the first mushers to run the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest race a bare two weeks before the Iditarod, a strategy which most race observers thought insane at the time, but which is now being emulated because it works so well. In short, Mackey wins because he is the best innovator, both strong and flexible.

So how can Mackey do this? The answer is, he trains that way.

From musher Joe Runyan’s blog at Alaska Dispatch:

“[Mackey] begins in August by training his dogs to expect uncertainty by harnessing them innumerable times. Day or night, he will harness his dogs to his four-wheeler, train with them on dry-land trails, rest, and then go again. The distances and the rests can be long or short and are completely random. The result, Mackey likes to report, is that his dogs develop a calm confidence in his unpredictability. Mackey’s move Saturday out of Kaltag may have been the moment he trained for so deliberately for in the fall.”

Training for unpredictability is an interesting idea. Because when we start to look at other talented performers, we see a similar pattern.

Like basketball, for instance. Trainer-to-the-stars Idan Ravin — whose students include LeBron James, Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony, and others — is famous for the tennis-ball drill, where he has his clients dribble with one hand while they catch tennis balls with the other. He takes a skill they’ve got (dribbling) and then uses distraction and randomness (in the form of tennis balls thrown at their heads) to let them practice overcoming distraction.

And golf. While training his son, Tiger, Earl Woods loved to tip over a golf bag or shout unexpectedly during his son’s backswing.

And music. Violinists learning the Suzuki Method are routinely asked to play a song while lying on their back, or turning the bow upside down, or walking in a circle.

The desired quality here is focus, which we can define as the ability to maintain concentration and control emotions in the face of unpredictability. We usually think of focus as something that’s innate, part of your character.

But the lesson here, I think, is that our instincts might be wrong. For Mackey, James, and the violinists, focus is a kind of skill, one that requires a training regimen all its own.

In fact, we can go further and divide all training into two basic types: 1) the training that builds the fundamental skill (a.k.a. the fast, fluent neural circuit); and 2) the training that field-tests that circuit, whacking it with all kinds of real-world randomness and distraction, in order that it become stronger, more reliable, and capable of handling surprises. Sort of like a good dog team.

What makes certain teachers so magical? What qualities should we look for, and what ones should we ignore?

In the last month we’ve seen a provocative new wave of reporting and research on that old and important mystery, from Elizabeth Bennett (New York Times Magazine), Amanda Ripley (Atlantic), and two terrific new books, Teaching as Leadership, by Steven Farr, and Teach Like a Champion, by Doug Lemov.

You should check out the stories and accompanying videos for yourself, but here’s the key point: great teachers share certain signature traits. Some of these traits are no big surprise — for instance, great teachers don’t see mistakes as verdicts, but as opportunities for learning; great teachers are immensely skillful at “holding the floor;” i.e. managing attention. Others are a bit more surprising.

• Trait 1: They set big, ambitious, highly specific goals.

The key word here is specific, as in “my students will progress 1.5 grade levels this year” or, in the case of basketball, “our team will score an average of 50 points a game.”  Great teachers are constantly looking for vivid, trackable measuring sticks — which, by the way, are frequently creative (for instance, an orchestra could track the number of pieces it plays perfectly).

That sounds rather obvious, but the real art is in setting the right goal, making it visceral, and using it as a type of powerful magnet, orienting the mindsets, aspirations, and identity of the group. Above all, the goal is to avoid not having any. As Farr writes, vague goals are a kind of motivational smog, dimming expectation and achievement. Great teachers are allergic to vagueness.

• Trait 2: Great teachers are constantly revising themselves.

They see their own work as never quite good enough. Behind the scenes, they tear up old lesson plans and draw new ones. In addition, they are magpies, stealing good ideas from fellow teachers, borrowing techniques, relentlessly upgrading their game. This finding seems strange, until you think of them as engaged in constructive editing. Like any good business or athlete, they are involved in an internal kaizen process, always looking hard at results, finding tiny ways to improve. They’re obsessed with honing their neural circuitry.

• Trait 3: Great teachers radiate satisfaction with their lives.

They simply love teaching — a finding which seems warm and cuddly until you consider the hard numbers: according to a study in the Journal of Positive Psychology cited by Ripley, teachers who scored high in life satisfaction were 43 percent more likely to perform well in the classroom than their less satisfied colleagues. Their zeal is not coincidental; it fuels the work of the job, allowing them to reach out again and again, engaging students.

It’s also interesting to note what qualities are not on this list — namely that Dead Poets’ Society, leap-on-the-desk quality known as charisma — which doesn’t turn out to be nearly as valuable we might instinctively suppose. (Ripley’s article contains a scene of two aspiring teachers competing for a job with Teach For America; one is charismatic and charming; the other quiet and prepared. Guess who gets the job?)

The lesson: sorry, Robin Williams. While the desk-leaping sizzle of your charisma is hugely enjoyable, it’s useful only when paired with the thick, juicy steak of real educational skills.

Ah, Oscar Week. Over the next six days we’ll witness people praising the visionary talent of best-director co-favorites James Cameron (“Avatar”) and Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”). We’ll hear about Cameron and Bigelow’s amazing skills: their unerring sense of story, their painterly eye, their supreme knack for framing an unforgettable story. Over and over, we will hear them be described as geniuses.

There’s just one major topic we won’t hear about: how did they get so good?

The surprising answer is this: they got good by making lots of extremely bad, schlocky movies. Click on the transcendently cheesy 1988 video above — directed by Cameron and starring Bigelow — and enjoy. Should you desire more, here’s a rare clip of Cameron’s first-ever movie, “Xenogenesis.”

We’ve all heard Cameron’s story — the obsessive mastermind behind blockbusters “Terminator” and “Titanic.” However, many biographies omit a vital fact: Cameron spent his early career apprenticing with legendary director/producer Roger Corman, king of the low-budget B movie, who specialized in making entire movies in less than three days. Think about that: script, shots, sets, actors — in 72 hours, a system that created Cameron-helmed classics like  “Pirhana II: The Spawning.”

Other Corman apprentices include Martin Scorsese, John Sayles, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Carl Franklin, and a dozen others. (To his credit, Cameron doesn’t downplay the connection, joking that he attended the “Roger Corman School of Film.”)

Kathryn Bigelow, who started out as a painter, followed a similar trajectory, directing “Near Dark,” “Blue Steel,” “The Loveless,” and “Born in Flames.” Nothing great, by a long stretch (though you can make a case for parts of the surfer/bank robber movie  “Point Break”). Only after working through acres of subpar material did Bigelow create the artful, thrilling film for which she’s being honored this week. (I saw the movie on Friday, and it’s pretty amazing – I’m rooting for it to win.)

This pattern is not a coincidence. The key is to consider their careers from a neural perspective. While other would-be directors were waiting around for the “Right Project,” Cameron and Bigelow were seizing an opportunity to grow their skill circuits at ferocious speed: to solve problems, tell stories, build sets, run a team, work with actors, puzzle out the architecture of a story, over and over and over.

The lesson here has to do with the way we think. We instinctively separate creative people into categories – artists and non-artists, serious writers and pulp writers. Cameron and Bigelow show us the falseness of this distinction. Churning out schlocky stuff is not to be avoided, but instead to be actively sought out — so long as it doesn’t become an end in itself. We all should have a Roger Corman apprenticeship.

This brings up a question: where else do we see this pattern?  Who else’s creative talents were built by cranking out piles of subpar material?

(My first nomination: Charles Dickens, who spent four Corman-esque years as a court reporter, rendering the complex, interwoven, heartbreaking cases – in other words, their characters and plots – into stories.)

Recently I’ve been talking with a few master coaches about learning velocity — specifically, asking them for tools that will help people locate the “sweet spot” where learning velocity increases. And that spot is pretty sweet. Research shows that changes in practice strategy and attention can improve learning velocity by as much as tenfold.

So here’s the result: five questions to determine whether you are in the zone or not.

1. Can you describe the move you’re trying to learn in five seconds or less?

2. Do you have a precise, HD-quality mental image of yourself performing the desired skill ?

3. Are you making — and fixing — mistakes?

4. Are you varying the speed of the action — slow, super-slow, and fast?

5. Are you zooming in and out, isolating your attention on a small part, then seeing how it fits in the larger picture?

If you can answer “yes” to all five of these questions — as Apolo Ohno does so vividly in this video — then the coaching consensus is that your speedometer is pegged. Congratulations: you are learning at peak velocity.

In essence, the questions revolve around three simple acts: 1) isolating an action; 2) pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, firing and fixing your circuitry; 3) combining individual actions into a fluent performance.  And it’s important to note that while athletics is the most obvious application here, these methods apply to music, math, business, social skills — even writing. After all, when it comes to learning skills, neurons are neurons (well, pretty much).

It’s also interesting to note what questions are not on the test. There’s nothing about long-term goals, for instance. Perhaps that’s because when it comes to motivation, long-term goals are essential — but in training they tend to distract from the matter at hand: putting your entire attention toward the act of building fast, fluent circuitry. Also absent from this quiz: any talk of your present level of ability — which is equally immaterial to the process.

With his zone-friendly practice habits, is it any wonder that Ohno performed so well in Dancing With the Stars? And judging by his performance in Vancouver, he’s still firmly in the sweet spot.

And speaking of the sweet spot, I’d like to remind you of the story of Michael Reddick, a regular guy who is attempting to become a professional billiards player. Check out Reddick’s remarkable progress here.

Check out these rare snapshots from Tiger Woods’s early childhood. (Located in the lobby of the Tiger Woods Center on Nike’s campus in Beaverton, Oregon, where they reside like holy artifacts at the Vatican.)

These photos are good symbols for the skills that Woods is going to spend the next few months trying to learn – the ones he missed out on while he was growing up – the skills of managing emotions and controlling impulses.

Managing emotions and controlling impulses are skills. That’s a strange and surprising thought, but it’s true – they’re neural circuits like any other, and in order to work fluently, they need to be fired over and over again, with intensity. (In a profound sense, that’s what cognitive-behavioral therapy is.)

The Tiger Woods story isn’t just moral — it’s neural. Therapy is Woods’s new driving range: where he will have a chance to build up these puny, underdeveloped skill circuits he should have grown a long time ago: how to treat people, how to build and sustain relationships.

Will it work? Well, Woods is at a disadvantage because he’s working against time (like a golf swing, these skills are developed far more efficiently when you’re younger). He’ll also be working against the reality-warping power of his fame, which colors every interaction with other people. Not to mention the presence of an entire world eager to magnify his every move into a Big Definitive Story.

I think it’s safe to say that Woods will never be as good at navigating emotions as he is at navigating a golf course. But can he put in a few thousand hours of hard work and get good enough?

For now, we can only say one thing: Tiger’s work ethic is going to come in very, very handy.