It must not be left to genes and parents to foster greatness; spurring individual achievement is also the duty of society. Every culture must strive to foster values that bring out the best in its people.
That whole philosophy of persistence … is one that I’m going to be emphasizing again and again in the months and years to come, as long as I am in this office. I’m a big believer in persistence. I think that … if we keep on working at it, if we acknowledge that we make mistakes sometimes and that we don’t always have the right answer, and we’re inheriting very knotty problems, that we can pass health care, we can find better solutions to our energy challenges, we can teach our children more effectively … I’m sure there’ll be more criticism and we’ll have to make more adjustments, but we’re moving in the right direction.
—PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, MARCH 24, 2009
Leonardo da Vinci, painter of Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, exceptional engineer and anatomist, conceptualist of the automobile, helicopter, and machine gun, and also part-time geographer, mathematician, musician, and botanist, considered by some historians to be the most diversely talented person in the history of humankind, could also be a bit of a jerk. According to the sixteenth-century artist and writer Giorgio Vasari (a direct witness), da Vinci sported a public “disdain” for his younger peer Michelangelo Buonarroti—a hostility so strong that the great Michelangelo eventually felt compelled to leave Florence so that he and Leonardo wouldn’t have to share the same town. Da Vinci also pointedly criticized the art of sculpture—Michelangelo’s forte—as a messy, easier, and obviously inferior craft that requires “greater physical effort [while] the painter conducts his works with greater mental effort.”
Not that Michelangelo treated his elder rival any better. His general disposition toward Leonardo was said to be resentful and mean-spirited. On one occasion when the two men happened to be in the same vicinity, a bystander’s comment led to a rather nasty exchange:
Walking with a friend near S. Trinità, where a company of honest folk were gathered, and talk was going on about some passage from Dante, they called to Lionardo, and begged him to explain its meaning. It so happened that just at this moment Michelangelo went by, and, being hailed by one of them, Lionardo answered: “There goes Michelangelo; he will interpret the verses you require.” Whereupon Michelangelo, who thought he spoke this way to make fun of him, replied in anger: “Explain them yourself, you who made the model of a horse to cast in bronze, and could not cast it, and to your shame left it in the lurch.” With these words, he turned his back to the group, and went his way. Lionardo remained standing there, red in the face for the reproach cast at him; and Michelangelo, not satisfied, but wanting to sting him to the quick, added: “And those Milanese capons believed in your ability to do it!”
Today, we gaze at the Mona Lisa and the statue of David as phenomenal works rendered by singular geniuses, and we pay little mind to the gritty human process behind their creation. In so doing, though, we often overlook what may be the central cultural lesson of great achievement: that it is rooted in comparison and rivalry. “Every natural gift must develop itself by contests,” wrote Nietzsche. While we tend of think of achievement as an individual phenomenon, no human is an island. At its essence, humanity is a social and competitive enterprise. We learn from one another, share with one another, and constantly compare and compete with one another for affection, accomplishment, and resources.
It cannot, then, simply be left to genes, vitamins, and parents to foster greatness; spurring individual achievement also must be the duty of society. Every culture must strive to foster values that bring out the best in its people.
Cultural differences matter enormously. In the seventh and eighth centuries, the Islamic Renaissance radiating from Baghdad sparked great advances in agriculture, economics, law, and literature. Mathematicians used spherical trigonometry and the new science of algebra to develop a more precise calculation of time, latitude and longitude, the earth’s surface area and circumference, and the location of the stars. Europe at the time had nothing like this same inventiveness; it would have to wait until the twelfth century for its analogous culture of innovation. (Among other developments, there were twelfth-century European advances in printing, timekeeping, astronomy, navigation, lenses, ships, and guns.)
History is filled with hundreds of such achievement clusters and achievement black holes.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, France revolutionized Western cooking with dramatic new sauces, soufflés, soups, and pastries, while nearby England rested with its sweet and savory meat pies. In the twenty-first century, the United States is home to eleven of the fifteen top-rated universities in the world; the entire African continent doesn’t have even one university in the top 150.
Around 1900, the single city of Vienna incubated the work of Gustav Klimt, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Otto Wagner, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the 1980s and ’90s, the modest region known as Silicon Valley, just south of San Francisco, turned out so many innovations in computer hardware and software that it rapidly transformed the very character of human society. Cultural clusters of innovation and excellence can be as regional as New Orleans jazz, as period-specific as mid-twentieth-century Eastern European physics, and as vital to the betterment of humankind as New Haven pizza.
How do some cultures motivate superb achievement while others leave potential geniuses uninspired and inert? In his study of the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche imagined Plato declaring, “Only the contest made me a poet, a sophist, an orator!” Competition, Nietzsche observed, was central to that culture, where rivalries were encouraged not only in sports but also in oratory, drama, music, and politics. Other Greek historians concur. “The ancient Greeks turned competition into an institution on which they based the education of their citizens,” explains Olympic official Cleanthis Palaeologos. “They presented the victory at major games as a godsent blessing, a joy and pride for the city, its fame and prestige, and they recognised the victors as men worthy of respect and honoured them with great distinctions.”
The ambitious goal was to assist as many Greek citizens as possible (though not women or slaves) in their aim to attain the human ideal. To achieve this, public spaces and customs were designed to encourage public education, mentorship, achievement, and the competitive spirit known as “agonism.” The key emphasis was on contest as a means, not an end. “Agonism implies a deep respect and concern for the other,” explains political theorist Samuel Chambers. “Indeed, the Greek agonrefers most directly to an athletic contest oriented not merely toward victory or defeat, but emphasizing the importance of the struggle itself … marked not merely by conflict but just as importantly, by mutual admiration.”
With this ideal, the Greeks planted a seed that has sprouted from time to time in cultures enlightened enough to understand its promise. Dutch historian Johan Huizinga suggests that without the agonistic spirit, human beings would simply be incapable of rising above mediocrity.
Which brings us back to the Italian Renaissance, one of the most concentrated periods of creativity in history. Not coincidentally, it was also an era of planned cultural combat in which patrons and artists constantly competed against one another for the best ideas and works. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Correggio were all open-eyed adversaries who learned from, mimicked, advised, critiqued, annoyed, one-upped, and desperately admired one another. Aesthetic rivalries also flourished on a political level. Interspersed between actual life-and-death battles, cities fought artistic wars, competing against one another for the finest public monuments. As soon as Florence began to build a new colossal duomo, for example, Siena immediately set out to exceed it.
In fact, the Italian Renaissance actually began with a specific contest, according to Rutgers art historian Rona Goffen. In the year 1400, Florence’s Merchants Guild launched a competition to create grand new doors for its octagonal baptistry. The contest winner, Lorenzo Ghiberti, later reported that seven combattitorihad competed for the commission and that “to me was conceded the palm of victory.” After that, such contests gradually became commonplace, and the increasingly competitive arts culture fueled both public interest and artistic achievement. Artists were pitted against one another like gladiators; bruised feelings were as much a part of the scene as religious inspiration and bold new ideas. In 1503, Piero Soderini, the newly elected chief executive of the Republic of Florence, commissioned Leonardo and Michelangelo to work literally side by side on the walls of the council hall. Da Vinci was asked to depict the battle of Anghiari, Michelangelo the battle of Cascina. The rivalry was exploited to the fullest: the contract specified that they were to be “in competition with each other.” The public was expected to enjoy the spectacle. “Artists have always borrowed from each other,” writes Goffen. “What is different about the sixteenth century is that the great masters … often knew each other’s major patrons; and they knew each other, sometimes as friends and colleagues, sometimes as enemies—but always as rivals.”
And yes, this rivalry even extended to the great Sistine Chapel. Today, one can stand beneath the majesty of Michelangelo’s ceiling frescos in the chapel and take in the full sweep of their glory. At the time of its inception, though, Michelangelo was convinced that his commission from Pope Julius II—which he tried to refuse but could not—was a dangerous sidetrack to his career plotted by the politically savvy Raphael, a much more experienced painter. (Leonardo, meanwhile, was not even invited to compete for the prestigious assignment, which provoked a different sort of resentment.)
The lesson is clear: when we celebrate a great achievement, we are not just celebrating hard work, but also a competitive process where some have won and others have lost. This would be a brutal feature of humanity if we didn’t also know—from chapter 3—that given the right mind-set, failure is good for us.
The problem is that different people have very different attitudes toward competition. In 1938, Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray proposed that human beings could be separated into two distinct competitive personalities: HAMs (“high in achievement motivation”) and LAMs (“low in achievement motivation”). HAMs enjoy and perform better under directly competitive conditions than they do under noncompetitive conditions. LAMs dislike competition, do not seek it out, and are less happy and productive when pushed into it. They do better when pursuing so-called mastery goals—improvement of a skill in comparison to oneself rather than to others.
In Western societies, a higher proportion of men are HAMs and a higher proportion of women are LAMs. Interestingly, though, it turns out that this gender divide is not universal or genetically hardwired. In 2006, economists Uri Gneezy, Kenneth L. Leonard, and John A. List compared competitive instincts in two very different societies: Maasai in Tanzania and Khasi in India. Among the patriarchal Maasai, men choose to compete at twice the rate of women. But among the Khasi, which is rooted in a matrilineal culture where women inherit property and children are named from the mother’s side of the family, women choose to compete much more often than men.
The first point to take away from this study is that there is clearly no fixed male or female competitive biology. How men and women act is dependent on cultural circumstances and gene-environment interaction. “Our results have import within the policy community,” Gneezy and colleagues concluded. “If the difference is based on nurture, or an interaction between nature and nurture … public policy might [best] be targeting the socialization and education at early ages as well as later in life to eliminate this asymmetric treatment of men and women.”
The much larger point is that a person’s internal motivation is highly malleable and is closely tied to social reality. Our cultural landscape directly affects whether and how people challenge themselves and others to achieve.
The trick, then, is to sculpt a culture that encourages healthy achievement and that can accommodate different personality types and levels of motivation. How can we best create classrooms, offices, and communities where competitive instincts are rewarded but where less competitive individuals also feel energized rather than suffocated?
Not surprisingly, the answer turns out to be making sure that near-term tasks are clear and meaningful. If short-term tasks can be made relevant to long-term goals, researchers have found, then even LAMs will dive in and relish the challenge. This fits perfectly with Ericsson’s “deliberate practice”—the satisfaction of working hard to master near-term goals, learning to enjoy the process rather than focus on the large gulf between current abilities and the far-off ideal.
It also points clearly to a new direction for schools, which must recognize that abilities are achievable skills and not innate entities (à la Carol Dweck, chapter 5) and must find a way to motivate every child.
Sound too ambitious? Toronto writer and educator John Mighton might have agreed before he became a math tutor in his late twenties. But after a short time working with so-called learning-impaired students, Mighton was shocked to learn how far and fast they could progress with the right teaching methods. He realized that countless numbers of math students get left behind at one point or another simply because they can’t quite grasp one small concept; they then quickly lose confidence in their ability to go forward, and their abilities stagnate. Mighton’s response to this problem was to break down math concepts into the most easily digestible form and help students build skills and confidence in tandem. He called his new program “Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies,” or JUMP. “With proper teaching and minimal tutorial support,” he writes in his book The Myth of Ability, “a Grade 3 class could easily reach a Grade 6 or 7 level in all areas of the mathematics curriculum without a single student being left behind. Imagine how far children might go (and how much they might enjoy learning) if they were offered this kind of support throughout their school years.”
Mighton does not claim his particular teaching method as the only approach, or even the best. But “whatever method is used,” he insists, “the teacher should never assume that a student who initially fails to understand an explanation is therefore incapable of progressing.”
We know—thanks to Carol Dweck, Robert Sternberg, James Flynn, and others—that Mighton is absolutely correct. In fact, countless students fall behind in math and other subjects for exactly the same reason others generally hate to compete directly in any field: it makes them feel that their permanent limitations are being exposed. People stop striving in a certain area when they receive the message that they simply don’t have what it takes. “I wasn’t quite suited for the educational system,” Bruce Springsteen has said of his early days. “One problem with the way the educational system is set up is that it only recognizes a certain type of intelligence, and it’s incredibly restrictive—very, very restrictive. There’s so many types of intelligence, and people who would be at their best outside of that structure [get lost].”
Schools can adapt to the reality that different people have different ways of learning. It is not a contradiction to maintain high expectations of every student andto show compassion and creativity for those who, inevitably, do not immediately meet those expectations. Failure should be seen as a learning opportunity rather than a revelation of students’ innate limits. “If non-linear leaps in intelligence and ability are possible,” writes John Mighton, “why haven’t these effects been observed in our schools? I believe the answer lies in the profound inertia of human thought: when an entire society believes something is impossible, it suppresses, by its very way of life, the evidence that would contradict that belief.”
Set high expectations, but also show compassion, creativity, and patience. This same set of principles applies to other sectors of society and culture. It’s how the government should treat its poorest citizens and how the legal system should treat its transgressors. It’s how bosses should treat employees and how businesses should treat consumers. It’s how the media should treat its audience.
There is a much uglier alternative. We can instead embrace a rawer, purer competitive atmosphere—a winner-take-all system. “Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others,” Ayn Rand wrote in 1962. “He must exist for his own sake … The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.” This is the laissez-faire ideal, the belief that pure self-interest and market efficiencies will create the most productive society.
A laissez-faire society will bring great achievement. The most competitive will rise to the top, at the expense of others. Competition will know no moral boundary. Society will, in every way, become more and more extreme, producing some great achievers and many unfortunate losers. Recall Sports Illustrated’s Alexander Wolff’s analysis of the Kenyan running culture: with a million Kenyan schoolboys running so enthusiastically, Kenyan coaches can afford to push their athletes to the most extreme boundaries, knowing that they will lose many to exhaustion and injury, but that enough will thrive to make their teams successful.
But this sacrificial ethos is not the sort of humanity we seek. Instead, we embrace the agonistic ideal: healthy rivalry, high expectations, respect and compassion for all.
The genius in all of us is that we can all rise together.