I think that very few people see the words
'excellence' or 'consensus' as anything other than the most positive of words. These are the habits that most people seek
to cultivate. They wish to be part of the consensus. They wish to be excellent in both their behavior
and hope for excellent outcomes. I think the problem is that, we didn’t realize
that excellence so far as it goes is fine but it’s involved in a trade-off. And that trade-off has to do with the fact
that excellence is really about quality control. It’s about the fact that if I’m going
to go for, let’s say, a classical music concert, I want to assume that the piece will
be played flawlessly and I will concentrate only on the interpretive aspects of the piece
above that. But, in fact, quality control can be deadly. For example, if in a jazz date where an improviser
takes few risks the music may be pleasant enough as background music but it’s scarcely
the sort of thing that would have animated the bebop generation who played live dates
under open-mic conditions never knowing what would happen next. Perhaps the most famous jazz album of all
time was Miles Davis’ 'Kind of Blue', and if you look at the sheet music for that date
almost nothing was written down. It was just a question of bringing the most
amazing minds together. And you can even hear a few flaws on that
album which make it so exciting. So I think that the problem is that, we have
to realize that excellence is about hill climbing. It’s about the fabled 10,000 hours. It’s about practice making perfect. And this is something that, to the credit
of excellence, it’s something we do know how to teach. Perhaps we don’t know how to teach everyone
how to achieve it but there’s always a class of people who through dedicated repetition
will be able to bring their variance under extraordinary pressure so that they are reliable
members of our society. We want this in our surgeons, often. We want this in our classical music performers. But the question is: do we want it everywhere? And because we do know how to teach excellence
we’ve blinded ourselves to the role that a different thought process is involved in,
which I would associate with genius. The key question is: who are these high-variance
individuals? Why are our schools filled with dyslexics? Why are there so many kids diagnosed with
ADHD? My claim is these are giant underserved populations
who are not meant for the excellence model. They are meant to be the innovators, the people
who bring us new forms of music that others will seek to perfect and hone in their performance. But these are the sorts of people who bring
us new scientific vistas, who explore new terrain, and what we’ve done is we’ve
created a system which effectively demonizes these different patterns. We even call these things learning disabilities
when, in fact, if you look at the learning disabled population they very often are the
most intellectual, accomplished members of society. But we put them through a torture chamber
of K through 12 education where we attempt to convince the teachers, who have no idea
how to serve this population—we try to make sure that there’s no indication that there
are teaching disabilities by pushing the responsibility onto the students. These are the learning disabled but in no
real terms is this population learning disabled. It’s a different and a somewhat alien population
that we have tried to machine to a point where they look as close to the excellent population
as possible. So it’s not really that I’m against excellence. What I’m really against is the idea that
we’ve absorbed the concept of excellence into the very fabric of our society so that
all those who don’t function within that idiom feel that they are somehow abhorrent
and less than, when, in fact, these are the people who are going to cure our cancers. These are the people who are going to create
new multi-billion dollar industries. And, in fact, the problem is, is that we don’t
realize that genius is really about adaptive valley crossing. It’s about taking on risk, taking on cost,
doing things that make almost no sense to anyone else and can only be shown to have
been sensible after the fact because, in fact, and I think, you know, Jim Watson said this
beautifully, he said if you’re really going to do anything big you are by definition unqualified
to do it. So the entire culture of credentialism, of
professionalism, is really a culture of excellence. But, in fact, society is run by power laws. The very thick tails of these distributions
suggest that life isn’t normally distributed but distributed by power laws. And we need a special class of people to play
those tails, to get us the returns, to power us forward and advance society. And so what I’m really interested in is
not being blinded by excellence to the prospects for other modalities, in particular genius.
