Monday, October 01, 2007
You don't need lessons, pt. 2
(Read part one of this series here!)Vincent Van Gough took ONE art class during his entire life.
The rest was self-taught.
Pretty shocking, huh?
Similarly, many notable innovators have agreed that lessons weren’t critical to the successful execution of their ideas.
Take Edison, for example.
He went to school for only three months. His teacher thought he couldn’t learn because he had a mental problem!
From that day forth, Edison realized, everything he needed to know about science would be learned from reading books and tinkering with chemicals and telegraph equipment.
Lessons, shmessons!
Now, I don’t mean to reduce the value of having a solid foundation in your area of study. Inventors, innovators, artists and entrepreneurs still need to be brilliant at the basics.
The challenge is to maintain balance.
I like what pacemaker inventor Wilson Greatbatch said:
“I don’t think the problem is too much training. The problem occurs when your training is too narrow and you get yourself on a rigid path of thinking and lose flexibility. Me? I got a masters degree, but the rest was osmosis.”
I also like what Apple founder/creator Steve Wozniak said:
“Teachers were largely a negative influence on me. I read very widely when I was a small kid, and that had the greatest influence on me. We live in a culture that makes it difficult for creativity to express itself properly. I believe in life long learning and self-education. After all, if you could solve all problems with textbooks, there wouldn’t be any real invention.”
LET ME ASK YA THIS…
How do you balance lessons and being self-taught?
LET ME SUGGEST THIS...
You don't need lessons. Just go.
* * * *
Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
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Lessons are good for the getting the basics down. My biggest growth has come from the mistakes made along the way. Along with the ability to learn from those mistakes.
Experience is a hard teacher. You get the test first and the lesson after.
I've always been better at self-study than in formal classes. The trick is to jump in, learn enough to get started, digest it, then keep adding more. Don't be overwhelmed by what you don't know. People are happiest when they're challenged the right amount. I majored in physics in college, so I understand the value of drill, drill, drill in the fundamentals. It's a fun way of being in the world...I wouldn't change it for anything. Just thinking about it lifts my spirits and warms my heart. Thanks for the reminder.
Scott, I'm usually with you, but I don't entirely agree on this point.
As a culture we're increasingly sure that our autodidactic tendencies will serve us just as well as directed study, but the end result is a lot of half-assed web designers, artists, and home repair gurus who got brilliant at their basics but never mastered their nuances.
Anecdotally, I've been singing and playing guitar on my own and in the company of more talented friends for over a decade now. I've seen much much self-initiated improvement, which is documented across hundreds of hours of audio on my webpage. However, I've received more compliments on my voice from friends and strangers in the past three months of vocal study than I have in the past 10 years in total.
It wasn't that I didn't know the basics before - it was that I never had someone to add a personalized new layer to them every week. For the first time ever I feel as though my guitar playing pales in comparison to my vocals.
Your Greatbatch quote got the closest to my position - solid learning requires flexibility. A good instructor will respect that. In the case of your other examples I think you're mistaking an educational paradigm's failure to address the specific needs of the gifted for a reason to avoid the paradigm altogether.