Do you see what you believe, or believe what you see?

My teenage daughter, like most kids her age, loves the look of fast sports cars. She is particularly amused by the fact that she shares the same name with a Lotus sports car, the Elise.

One morning recently, as I was driving her to the school bus stop, she excitedly pointed out the car in front of us. “Look dad, it’s an Elise.” Until then, she had only seen the car in magazines and online. I gently pointed out that the car was not an Elise, but a Corvette. But she was not to be deterred, as she insisted it was an Elise. That is, until we pulled up next to the car and she could clearly see the Corvette badge.

Later I reflected on this incident and wondered what it was that made a teenager who had never seen (or had a live experience with) a Lotus Elise, believe her own mental image of the car more than the feedback from someone three times her age, who has actually seen (had an experience with) the car in question. Was it youthful self confidence, or worse? And, I wondered how often the same phenomena occurred in business settings. I have seen managers reviewing market data and completely disagreeing on the potential opportunities. I have seen financial data which suggested financial deterioration, interpreted in a favorable light. And I wondered, were these people really seeing the same things?

I did not get very far with my exploration of these questions until I came across a piece written by Daniel Levitin:

The word pitch refers to the mental representation an organism has of the fundamental frequency of a sound. That is, pitch is a purely psychological phenomenon related to the frequency of vibrating air molecules. By “psychological,” I mean that it is entirely in our heads, not in the world-out-there; it is the end product of a chain of mental events that gives rise to an entirely subjective, internal mental representation or quality. Sound waves – molecules of air vibrating at various frequencies – do not themselves have pitch. Their motion and oscillations can be measured, but it takes a human (or animal) brain to map them to that internal quality we call pitch.

We perceive color in a similar way, and it was Isaac Newton who first realized this. (Newton, of course is known as the discoverer of the theory of gravity, and the inventor, along with Leibniz, of calculus. Like Einstein, Newton was a very poor student, and his teachers often complained of his inattentiveness.)

Newton was the first to point out that light is colorless, and that consequently color has to occur inside our brains.

Excerpts From This is your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin

In essence, Daniel is saying that things like color and sound are not absolutes, people hear and see the same thing differently. Thus, some see a glass with some liquid and by focusing one way or the other can see a half-empty or half-filled glass. Several people might be listening to the same CD, but concentrating on different elements of the music and subsequently liking or disliking what they are hearing.

In a business setting, the implications are stunning. If everyone is seeing your markets, customers, performance, numbers the same way, and there are no opportunities for alternate explanations, you very well may be missing important elements. You might be looking at data that shows revenue growth, but nuances such as whether the growth was in line with the rest of the market, with targeted segments, due to lucky wins, or fundamentally based on purposefully managed activities delivering better value to customers are incredibly important distinctions. Management teams that lack diversity of thought, or avoid honest questioning of the facts, will almost always be blind-sided by an alternate reality.

Are there alternate realities or interpretations that can be inferred from the same set of facts? Absolutely! Just examine the optical illusion above. Some people see the young girl, others an old lady. They are both present in the same set of facts. What you choose to see is a matter of where you are looking. You can only see both pictures when you shift your perspective, an activity that might serve you well in your business.

“This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession” (Daniel J. Levitin)

Where does talent come from?

Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.

Their work, compiled in the “Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance,” a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Ericsson’s research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t “good” at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.

Excerpt From A Star Is Made – New York Times referencing the research of Dr. Anders Ericsson

When we first moved to Florida in 2004, our good friend Barbara Wall, who runs the local Prudential office, invited us to lunch at the Eau Gallie Yacht Club. While there, she introduced our daughters (then 6 and 9) to a wonderful young girl just ten years old. Bre was friendly, charming, beautiful and made it really easy for our daughters to make the transition to their new home. It turns out, Bre Morgan is also a very talented young artist. In 2006 she won a national singing contest, and has recorded her first album at age 13.

The same year we first met Bre, my cousin Wilfred and Juliet welcomed their first grandchild. Kaitlyn is a lovely young girl born to wonderful parents, Allison and Reuben Maher. It’s 2008, now just four years later, and this last week, Kaitlyn was selected to be among the top 10 of the popular show America’s got Talent.

Ten years, four years, charming, beautiful and loaded with talent. But, where did the talent come from? Was their talent born, or made? I suspect these two young ladies were born talented, but the good news for the rest of us can be found in the work of Dr. Anders Ericsson. He attributes most expert performance to something he describes as “deliberate practice”. In other words, “practice does make perfect”. Turns out, you are more likely to practice something if you enjoy doing it. In case you are wondering, these two young ladies, they love what they do, and they practice a lot.

Want talented performance at work? Then your teams must love what they do, and they must practice at getting better!

Importance of Education to your future

Education is the key to prosperity. There’s simply no way to sugarcoat that fact. Communities without a strong educational foundation — good public schools, community colleges, a local college or university — are at a severe disadvantage in the competition for good-paying jobs with a future.

Employers need intelligent workers who can grasp new ideas and concepts quickly, who can think for themselves, who can visualize the big picture. It used to be that a high school diploma was the ticket to the middle class. Nowadays, one in four adults over the age of 25 possesses at least a bachelor’s degree, and in some metros — Boulder, Colo., for example — that figure exceeds 50 percent.

From Research Studies: Knowledge Worker Quotient

Proud

An appropriate title for my first post.

The word reflects how I felt when our thirteen year old returned from her mission trip and informed us over our dinner about her new endeavor. She had seen a movie about the children of Uganda – “Invisible children”, and was so touched, she was compelled to do something for them.

She would use her talents to make jewelry and sell to her friends. All profits would go to the children. She built her own website: Jewelry for Joy and she recruited her little sister. They are making some beautiful stuff and are off to a great start!