The “rage to master” is one of the most important ideas in the study of talent and giftedness. The term was coined by Ellen Winner, I believe, in her 1996 book, Gifted Children: Myths and Realities. To paraphrase her definition, it describes the intrinsic motivation of gifted and talented children to master an area of interest; it’s absolutely obsessive in nature, driving the child to focus intensely on that subject matter and voraciously consume new information and skills. If that sounds a bit dramatic, well… it is. A child with the rage to master can happily spend – and often would spend, if allowed – whole days at a time focusing on their chosen domain. These are the type to work into the early morning hours on a regular basis every time they’ve discovered a new facet of that domain, to hell with the consequences.
(I can put a face to all of that, since I happen to be one of those to “suffer” from a rage to master, myself – but unlike my much more focused peers, my domain constantly changes. I may devote a week to learning everything there is to know about the Zodiac killer of San Francisco, then drop it and spend a couple of months mastering natal astrology. I can attest to the intensity described above – each obsession is inevitably full of long nights, hours and hours of devotion to that area, and the consuming of all my thoughts throughout the day. Very good for developing a wide knowledge base, very bad for school and my sleep cycle.)
When you combine the rage to master with something called “deliberate practice,” you may get a child prodigy. “Deliberate practice” is a recent term coined by Professor K Ericsson, one of the leading experts on expertise. Deliberate practice is meaningful practice. It means focusing on improving areas of weakness, using different techniques to learn deeper, and concentrating intently on the acquisition of new skills and knowledge, among other things. An example of deliberate practice in schoolwork would be not to study an entire unit for a test, but assessing the student’s weakest areas in that unit and focusing on studying those ones more intensely; similarly, in music, it can mean focusing on a single area of weakness in a piece instead of playing a whole song through several times for practice.
But why is this so important, really?
I think the rage to master can help solve the problem of anti-intellectualism today. The rage to master, sometimes with the added benefit of deliberate practice, can solve two mysteries that might have added to it: it explains how child prodigies can break the “10-year rule” (forty hours a week for ten years to master any field), and it explains why some people just seem to know everything.
1. How child prodigies break the rules.
When the 10-year rule was first published, psychologists were confused; if it took a decade of full-time labor to master a domain, why could child prodigies less than ten years old still perform at an expert level? The answer is the rage to master, along with deliberate practice. Child prodigies have it; their older counterparts don’t. Whereas an expert may start later in life and practice – not always deliberately – for the alloted amount of time until they gain expertise years later, child prodigies start earlier and do the same amount of practice more quickly. For a potential prodigy with the rage to master, their chosen domain enters every facet of their lives. They have the intrinsic will to completely immerse themselves in that area and almost all of that time is spent on deliberate practice. Child prodigies are not born with their amazing gift; they do the same amount of work any other potential expert would, but they do it faster.
The rage to master explains why the rest of us aren’t prodigies, too. It’s easy to be jealous of a child prodigy if they happen to excel in your adult domain, but consider: if you knew that to reach that same level so early, you had to devote every waking moment of your life for the next few years to intense, exhaustive practice in that domain, would you? Who has the kind of iron will you need to do that but a child with the rage to master?
2. “You’re so smart!”
I think one of the reasons anti-intellectualism is so dominant in western culture is that some people just seem to know everything so effortlessly. For the most part, that’s a lie. Like the case of the child prodigy, there is just as much work involved; the only difference is that it’s not necessarily done faster… it’s just not always seen. No one has the superhuman ability to just know things. “Know-it-alls” do work hard to know what they know. And the reason that we all don’t “know everything” is, similarly, that most just aren’t motivated enough to put in the work – they simply lack the rage to master. Anyone can seemingly “know everything” if they can devote hours a day to learning new things, but many aren’t willing to put in the time and effort.
(Some people do just learn easier than others, but that’s often a result of deliberate practice, whether they realize it or not. There are unconscious techniques that such people use to absorb information that most don’t, and they’ve “practiced” these techniques to their most efficient. Alternatively, it can be a minor anomaly in brain development, like a milder form of savant syndrome.)
The rage to master needs to be more widely understood, I think, to help counter today’s widespread anti-intellectualism. It’s just not socially acceptable to be gifted, or a prodigy. Call me idealistic, but if the rage to master was better understood, I think it might help to change that. There is work involved in becoming highly talented or intelligent, whether it can be done in ten years or two. Those with the rage to master focus on learning and improving in their chosen field to an extent that most people just don’t have the will to. There’s nothing particularly superhuman or ‘unfair’, per se. There is a lot of work and devotion involved that most people don’t usually see, and maybe if that were better understood, we wouldn’t have as much of a problem with anti-intellectualism as we do now.
Do you think that it is possible to mimic this rage to master? I’m interested in improving my own faculties and I have a ton of books on self-improvement lined up. Half of them are popular psychology books such as those by Ericsson while the other half are pop-psychology books from authors like Harry Loryane.
So far, the most similiar ‘artifical’ system that’s like this ‘rage to master’ is one I found from ‘The Neuropsychology of Self-Discipline” whereby you list all the rewards and advantages in accomplishing a certain goal and you create a vivid mental picture of your accomplishing that goal and enjoying its rewards. So you flood yourself with this image, of tasting, of smelling, of seeing, of hearing, of feeling your goal, 10x, 200x a day. This creates the emotional fuel, the passion, the obsession that drives you to work hour after hour, week after week, month after month towards your goal. It’s easier said than done.
I really envy this rage to master! It also leads to the desirable state of ‘flow’.
I can understand the rage to master. As a child, but not so much as an adult I would be consumed with conquering things. Much like the Author states, it wasn’t a gift so much as motivation. I could not stop. I began programming in BASIC at 10 yrs old. I would sit for hours consumed with figuring out programming problems. There were times in the summers where I would sit in front of a computer for weeks with minimal breaks. I would get so consumed that I wouldn’t eat.
As far as gifts or natural talents, I tend to remember just about everything I read. I didn’t realize it, but my wife pointed it out. She teaches and has a masters in Early Childhood Development. She says that if I read it, then it’s in there for good; something about being a visual learner. I never really thought about it, or noticed it.
Life and marriage duties have since tempered the rage a bit, but figuring out a problem is my last, uncontrollable rage. It’s terrible. If I have something that I cannot figure out, I lose all sense of time, hunger, place. I don’t feel sleepy, so I do not sleep at all. On occasions, I will even feel disembodied, as if I’m up in the air and looking down at my problem. It is almost disorienting because I can see my body sitting (through my eyes), but I feel like I am in the air, floating.
Probably the good side-effect of the rage is that I feel like I can master anything if I try to. I do not necessarily think that there is any ‘gift’ to this at all. I think anyone can do it, but for whatever reason they don’t want to invest the time. Maybe the real gift here is patience and perseverance.
I realize I’m reviving an old post, but I found it fascinating.
As a gifted kid myself previously (now adult), and possibly qualifying as child prodigy too (in programming), I spent a lot of time thinking about how learning worked, for me and for others around me.
A major factor that I don’t see in your list here is the ability to rapidly build mental models – internal construction of “how it all works and fits together” that relies on comprehension, not memorization. Sure, there are basic facts that have to come in to that, but the key is that understanding the complex interrelations of a functioning real-world system means that I don’t have to remember all the subtleties and details… I can figure them back out logically from the big picture and how it -must- work in order to be consistent and possible.
There’s also what seems to be a physical brain component (probably genetic), in that my brain will spend its off-times optimizing itself for whatever new task I did that day. For instance, after my first day playing a competitive bumper cars ball game, that night as I drifted towards sleep I noticed my brain was rerunning the physical motions of that game, and my muscles were twitching along with it; it felt like I was back in the game. I wasn’t consciously intending to think about it. I wasn’t pushing or struggling; heck I wasn’t even planning to play again in the future. But instinctively my brain was reviewing memories and learning from them. And I know from similar experiences with video games, that the next time I went to play it, my skill would have improved, despite not actually playing it in the meantime. This isn’t a conscious process. It seems to be automatic nervous system tied. It’s a subconscious form of deliberate practice that seems like it might have to do with optimizing neuron connections in the brain.
Conscious deliberate practice relies on the ability to form complex questions about areas of incomplete understanding… which relies on many aspects of memory, model building and testing, and abstraction or meta-analysis. Giftedness seems to provide for traits which aid the development of behaviors of deliberate practice, especially in situations where a kid is self-teaching without a tutor. But there’s also an ease of acquiring the skill and information, that goes beyond the time put in.
And that pushes societal taboos. It’s not safe to say that hard work alone is not enough to be Number One. I’m not knocking its value – too many people bemoan their inability but then refuse practice – but I think it’s also unfair to gifted people to presume that “oh, anyone could do what you just did, if they cared to try.” Some people simply learn faster, and that should be respected for what it is too.
Overall fascinating articles you have on giftedness; it’s one of my pet topics and you are writing some things that are truly new for me to encounter… that’s rare. :) Good writings.
[...] is the “rage to master”? To quote from a quite interesting blog post on the topic from Wandering Ink: “it is the intrinsic motivation of gifted and talented children to master an area of [...]
I’m a multi-talented person and people always tell me how skilled I am. But I am not “skilled”, I am “willed”. I will myself to practice doing the things I’m interested in. It’s a measure of my will power and not some inherent “gift” that I was born with. Though I’ve never been a prodigy by any means, I was intrigued by this concept of a “rage to master’. I too feel this inner compulsion to practice, and better myself, and perfect things. By no means do I think that only children can possess a rage to master. A rage to master is not just some esoteric learning skill/style that only a select few gifted children possess. Anyone can do it. It’s harnessing what moves you from within, and letting that fuel your efforts that is the key to understanding the rage to master.