Generativity Read online

  Generativity

  Andrew Lynn has a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature from Cambridge University. He now works to help resolve international and cross-border disputes.

  www.andrewlynn.com

  Generativity

  The Art and Science of Exceptional Achievement

  Andrew Lynn

  Howgill House Books

  www.howgillhousebooks.com

  Copyright © Andrew Lynn 2017

  ISBN 978-1-912360-00-0

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Inner State

  2. Regulation of Energy

  3. Social Influence

  4. Being Present

  5. Thinking Differently

  6. Enlarging Expertise

  7. The Accumulation of Advantage

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Index

  Also Available

  Introduction

  The Proposition

  This is a radical book.

  It’s radical in two ways. In the first place, it’s radical in the commonplace, everyday meaning of the term. It’s radical in the sense that what is contained within is unabashedly disrespectful of the conventional way in which we approach knowledge in this fragmented, technocratic, and hyper-specialized age.

  It’s also radical in another sense – the word radical coming from the Latin radix (meaning ‘root’ or ‘going to the origin’). It’s radical not only in that the ideas advanced find their origin in the wisdom of many generations and civilizations, but also in that its core proposition is one that would have been generally approved in virtually every human era other than our own.

  The proposition is a bare one – that the great work is not the work of changing the world but of changing oneself.

  This naked proposition is found in ancient Rome in the words of Marcus Aurelius: ‘The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.’ It is found in the words of the Gnostic Christ: ‘For whoever does not know self, does not know anything, but whoever knows self, already has acquired knowledge about the depth of the universe.’ It is found in the ancient philosophy of the Far East: ‘Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.’ It is found in thirteenth-century Persia in the Sufi poet Rumi: ‘Why should I seek? I am the same as he. His essence speaks through me. I have been looking for myself!’ It is found in India in the independence period in the words of Gandhi: ‘If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.’ And it is found in a sentiment attributed to the great humanitarian Mother Theresa: ‘If everyone only cleaned their own doorstep, the whole world would be clean.’

  When I started my enquiries, I hadn’t been of this view. Like many young researchers of my generation, my education had taken place in the shadow of post-1960s educational reform and social change. What this meant was that well before the point of my entering university, the dominant perspective upon the study of the humanities had been materialism or one of its many subvariants. It seemed that wherever I looked, ‘great men’ were under attack: in history, Thomas Carlyle’s view that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men’ received at best short shrift and at worst vitriolic abuse; in philosophy, philosopher kings were giving way to the history of ideas; and, less flatteringly still, ‘dead white men’, as they called them, had become the bêtes noires of my own first discipline (literature). Social structures and ideology replaced living human beings. Undergraduate work consisted far more of Karl Marx than it did Bhagavad Gita.

  At Cambridge my research focused on greatness in literature: why, for instance, is Shakespeare considered to be a truly great, ‘universal’ writer, whereas his rivals fall by the wayside? In line with some of the presuppositions I had absorbed from my undergraduate days, I looked to the surrounding context and the context of readers and audiences for an explanation: was there something in their social, political, or economic structure that had made Shakespeare’s work more compelling than that of his contemporaries? For three years I rummaged through the manuscripts and early printed books of the seventeenth century, looking for evidence as to the effect of England’s bloody civil wars, regicide, restoration, and Glorious Revolution. There was no better place to do this: Cambridge, then as now, has some of the world’s best minds at work on similar projects, in an environment that is beyond enchanting.

  I now think this approach was wrong. There probably are modest ‘socio-economic’ aspects in the development and assessment of great individuals. But ‘greatness’ by definition has a quality that is rare if not unique – a quality that cannot be merely the product of the age. Either we get rid of the concept of greatness altogether, then, or we start looking for its personal, individual components. Of no less importance was the realization – which had come to me more strongly on leaving academia for the law – that we are at our best when we call upon our own resources as individuals, rather than always looking to society for answers.

  When my work began, I started out looking at the nature of exceptional creativity. As I dug deeper, that extended into all areas of human activity. What is truly of interest, I concluded, is the fortuitous coming together of multiple factors that constitutes the common wellspring of human productivity. This I call ‘generativity’, and it has been the task of this book to explore it.

  I believe this needs to be done holistically. But how? Well, sometimes great people are kind enough to tell us how they did it: they leave autobiographies, or interviews, or other records. Here, you will find me raiding biographies of Pablo Picasso and Muhammad Ali, for example, as well as interviews with free soloist John Bachar and diary extracts from Van Gogh. Sometimes we have research – psychological, sociological, biological, and historical. So here you’ll also find me delving into a good number of research findings on the ‘new’ unconscious, selective perception, scientific lineage, cognitive complexity, expertise, life span, and cumulative advantage, among others. Last but far from least, sometimes we have insight from traditional wisdom and classic literature. And here, you will find me drawing upon a diverse range of sources from scholars and philosophers to poets and artists and the tellers of folktales.

  In addition to being done holistically, I also believe this needs to be done selectively. We live in an era of information overload. We are not starved of information, but gorged with it. The role of the writer, the scholar, and the public intellectual has changed; it is no longer primarily to transmit knowledge, but to organize it. The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal said in one of his Lettres Provinciales: ‘I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.’ It has taken a lot of time to get the book you hold in your hands as short as it is now.

  Chapter One deals with what I call ‘inner state’. The ancient Zoroastrians, I suggest, had it right: we are best served by starting from the ‘inside out’ – going from good thoughts to good words to good deeds – rather than the other way around. We will find here that experts have a cognitive advantage over non-experts and quite literally see their respective fields differently – and with more precision – than the rest of us. We will explore Muhammad Ali’s great surprise triumph over George Foreman in Zaire in 1974 and what it tells us about the power of strong internal sense of reality (or ‘frame’). We will then go on to consider what Dostoevsky’s The Idiot has to say about the relative merits of imagination and intention. Truly generative people, we will discover, have found ways of interpreting and manifesting their own reality in ways that
are most productive to them.

  In Chapter Two, our attention shifts to a neglected aspect of human activity – the regulation of energy. In the words of the great revolutionary poet and artist William Blake, ‘energy is eternal delight’. There are at least two reasons to think Blake may have been on to something. The first is that we know creativity has Darwinian aspects: it happens through a trial-and-error process that rewards boldness and lack of initial inhibition. And the second is a result of the inner resource we draw upon when exercising willpower or making choices. Self-control, we find out, has its costs: it’s a limited resource that needs to be conserved. Highly generative people know how to do that.

  Chapter Three is all about the effect of other people. It explains why husbands and wives come to look like each other and why you’re more likely to be overweight if you have overweight friends. More importantly, it reveals how scientific and artistic generativity is determined by mentors and patrons as well as influential predecessors several generations back in time. There could have been no Goya without Velázquez and Rembrandt, I suggest in this chapter, and Wordsworth wouldn’t have been Wordsworth had he not been inspired by John Milton from almost two centuries before.

  In Chapter Four, it is not the resting state but the engaged state that we consider. Our focus here is on the ‘now’. We see that artists, climbers, and mystics (among others) share a common absorption in the immediate performance of what they are doing. This is a state that has been identified in religious texts already thousands of years old and restated more recently in the terms of modern science.

  Chapter Five concerns the intellect. In this chapter we see how eminence has historically been related to advocating minority viewpoints: great men and women have tended to be unrepresentative of the spirit of their age, inconsistent, and reactionary. We also see how successful political leaders show high levels of ‘cognitive complexity’ – they are able to see the merits of multiple points of view at the same time. And we agree with Søren Kierkegaard that the secret is all about cultivating a habit of seeing things with fresh, unsullied eyes.

  In Chapter Six, we discover how to become an expert. We look at how much time it takes and the life span curves that tell us at what point we’re likely to do out greatest work. Here we probe right into the nature of expertise by looking at chess masters to identify the ‘cognitive advantage’ experts have over the rest of us. We close by considering the achingly beautiful Sorrow and The Roots of Van Gogh – in the light of what he has told us in his diaries about the circumstances of their creation – to identify what is necessary to take the step from ‘mere’ expertise to undisputed genius.

  We end in Chapter Seven on the topic of ‘serendipity’, asking why some people, seemingly as a result of chance or arbitrary good fortune, do so much better than others. We find an answer in the operation of cumulative advantage, a process by which small advantages snowball into great differences in outcome. We see – by reference to the performance of American schoolchildren and by reference to the success story of the Jewish people – how this deep principle underpins the lives of individuals and peoples alike.

  Writing on this topic was always bound to be a humbling experience. While we can increasingly trace many of the causes and conditions of personal achievement, its very deepest roots remain shrouded in mystery. That is as it should be. Part of the beauty of a Mozart concerto or a Michelangelo painting is in the miracle of it all. Attempting to explain them as we would explain the workings of a combustion engine or a clockwork doll would only cause some of that magic to be lost.

  If what you want is a mechanical ‘how to’ guide, then, please put this book down now – you will only be disappointed. If, on the other hand, what you are seeking is an open-minded and curious exploration of the many hidden wellsprings of human generativity – then read on.

  This book may just be for you.

  1

  Inner State

  The Secret Gospels

  In Zoroastrianism, the old Persian religion predating Islam, there is a saying: humata, hukhta, hvarshta – ‘good thoughts, good words, good deeds’. What on the surface seems like a simple statement of basic morality actually carries with it a profound message. Humata is defined as the primeval creative thought of Ahura Mazda, the supreme creator god. Hukhta stands for holy words of prayer that contribute to the ongoing creation of the world. Hvarshta are the acts that move us forward to our life’s purpose.1 The gist is clear. Thoughts and words, as much as actions, are creative: they set in motion chains of cause and effect the outcome of which can be far-reaching. ‘Watch your thoughts, for they become words,’ goes the modern equivalent. ‘Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become your character. And watch your character, for it becomes your destiny. What we think, we become.’

  The Zoroastrian saying highlights a principle that has long been at the heart of several of the great spiritual traditions of mankind – although it is admittedly more commonly encountered in neglected, heretical, or esoteric circles than in the religious mainstream.

  It can be found in the secret gospels of gnostic Christianity, for example, the most significant of which were unearthed by accident in 1945 where they had been buried near the city of Nag Hammadi on the west banks of the Nile. Gnostic Christianity postulated not one but two gods: the good, true God far above and a lower, evil deity and maker of this world, identified as the God of the Old Testament. Gnosticism stressed direct inner experience of the divine light within, which was to be freed from its enslavement in the material world. In the Gospel According to Thomas, which had been found at Nag Hammadi, the Gnostic Christ expressed the core of his philosophy this way: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’2

  Sufism – the inner mystical tradition of Islam – expresses a similar vision. For the Sufis, mankind is engaged in a struggle with the lower dimension of his existence – the animal energies called nafs. As described by the great Sufi poet Rumi, the nafs are like a dog in a doorway who not only attacks visitors coming in but also prevents the owner moving freely too. Fighting this inner battle is what Rumi elsewhere has called the ‘lesser jihad’. To do that effectively means controlling thoughts, moods, reading, conversation, and whole intake of mental ‘food’. Whatever we keep hidden in our hearts God manifests in us outwardly. ‘Whenever you entrust your heart to a thought,’ wrote Rumi in the Masnavi, ‘something will be taken from you inwardly.’3

  The principle is even reiterated in certain of the remote schools of Tibetan Buddhism – for example, in the Madhyamika (‘Middle Way’) school founded by Nagarjuna based upon sutras said to have been the words of the Buddha lost to mankind for many centuries. According to the Madhyamika, the very base of human experience is nothing more than the fugitive contact by our senses with one stimulus or another. There are, accordingly, two worlds: the world of pure contact not coloured by the screen of memories, and the world created by mental formations known as samskaras. The second of these is the world that we live in. ‘It is thus that a kind of illusory reality is given to the world which we build up in holding it to be exterior to ourselves, whereas it emanates from us and dwells in us in dependence on the illusion of which we are the victims.’4

  The message of this chapter draws upon these realizations but extends them in a new direction. We will find that people of unusually high levels of generativity work, like our good Zoroastrians, from the inside out. They are able to comprehend that the world is part perceived and part created. As the part that does the creating is under their own control, they then regulate their underlying state. The very best of them at the highest level become meaning-makers, transforming the way that they understand the world so as to thrive when times are good and survive when they are not.

  The Cognitive Advantage of Experts

  Exceptional peo
ple focus, whether knowingly or unknowingly, on aspects of their reality that help them and interpret that reality in ways that are productive. The phenomenon can be seen broadly, but there’s nowhere where it has been demonstrated more definitely than in sports. This isn’t just a matter of positive thinking. It’s a matter of literally perceiving reality differently – in a way that is fresh and beneficial. The shift in perception that occurs at elite levels in sports can be readily illustrated by recent work on what makes a top performer in cricket.

  * * *

  At its highest levels, cricket is a ferociously demanding game. At international levels the ball can be bowled at speeds of up to 160 km/hour – that’s almost 45 metres per second. What that means is that the ball can travel the distance between bowler and batsman in less than 500 ms. To put that in perspective, the sum total of the reaction time of the batsman (perhaps 200 ms) and the movement time of legs and bat (perhaps 700 ms) is approximately 900 ms.5

  And it’s not just about the speed. Professional bowlers have an arsenal of balls they can throw at you. The ball can be made to deviate in the air as it approaches (outswinger/inswinger) or after it bounces (leg-spinner/wrong-un). Balls can be thrown full length (so that they bounce close to the batsman) or short (so that they bounce closer to the bowler). Whatever the ball, the batsman has to be there for it: positional errors have to be kept beneath 5 cm and timing errors beneath a miniscule 2 to 3 ms for successful bat-ball contact.

  None of that, though, should distract from the central problem: it takes 900 ms to respond to an event that occurs in the space of a mere 500 ms. You don’t need to be a mathematician to see that – at some level – the best professional batsmen have mastered the art of the impossible.