How to be Brilliant - an hypothesis

10,000 hours will make you amazing

I was reflecting on a recent post from Andrew Taylor regarding Gladwell's new book Outliers, about people with extraordinary talent.  The gist of it, seems to be that you have to work fanatically at what you are doing to be great - put 10,000 hours into it and you are made in spades.

There is a lot to this.  I see how friends who have had this kind of dedication to their work have been amazingly successful.

but wait there's more... Andrew points out that there might be more to it then that...

"Of course, the trouble with outliers is that they are outliers. When we observe and analyze those who have risen to extraordinary heights, we tend to miss the thousands or millions who had similar circumstances and talents but did not rise so far (or vanished entirely). Just because highly effective people share seven habits, does not mean those seven habits lead to being highly effective."

I'm pretty certain, that anyone who puts 10,000 hours of real effort into something, is going to produce results unless they sabotage themselves with their mind.

Brilliancy as innate essence

Here's another other idea.

Almaas, in his book, Brilliancy - The Essence of Intelligence, talks about "brilliancy" as a kind of intelligence -  a fundamental aspect of our innate essence.  This rings true to me, especially in the context of Gardner's multiple intelligences.  I've only just started to read it, so don't know all the secrets yet, but what I get is that if we can tap into our true nature, we can access brilliancy or the ability to be brilliant.  Maybe it takes 10,000 hours to learn how to do that :>).  But maybe not.

When we are able to get out of our own way, stop second guessing,  we can do amazing things, have great insights.  This is a key part of the creative process.  Open up to the channel and we can have great ideas.   Haven't you had moments like that?  When you get flashes of ideas, or say things even though you are not sure why?

We need both inspiration and the technique to articulate it.

My horn teacher, Martin Smith, used to talk about playing horn beautifully in an analogy of 'seeing this beautiful island that we wanted to get to.  The views of it were amazing, and so inspired us.  But it was over on the other side of the water. How to get there.  Well we have to build a bridge.  Then when we have finished building the bridge we have to remember why we built it'.  

I will revisit the Brooklyn Museum in this context in a separate post, because I think they are on to something in their 'organic process' of social media.

Any of this making sense?  What else are we missing?