Leaders' Playground
What if work could feel like play? Join Irene Salter PhD for stories, science and strategies that help leaders thrive, not just survive.
Leaders' Playground
11: How to become a master (Hint: hone your brains uniqueness!)
Can anyone truly become a master, or is it a talent reserved for the naturally gifted? This episode of the Leader's Playground promises to shatter the myth that genius is inborn by drawing upon Robert Greene's book "Mastery" and the lives of icons like Zora Neale Hurston, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Ben Franklin. We'll reveal the hidden truths behind their extraordinary achievements—truths rooted in relentless dedication, practice, and the honing of unique talents.
And of course we'll dive into the neuroscience of mastery! Are new neurons are born in adult brains? How did bird brains help change the minds of an entire field? What actually happens to a master's brain as they hone their craft? How long does it take?
Ultimately, we find that mastery is within reach for all of us.
For complete show notes, transcript, and free downloadable resources go to: https://www.irenesalter.com/podcast
Welcome to the Leaders Playground. Today, we're going to be talking about mastery. How does a person become a master of their craft? We will learn about great writers like Zora Neale Hurston, budding tinkerers like my son and ignored scientists like Joseph Altman. All of this is to explore what happens in the brain as someone gains mastery and answer the question what might you be the master of? Keep listening, hi. Thank you for listening to the Leader's Playground, the podcast for leaders who wish their work to feel more like play. Leadership can be lonely, overwhelming and just plain crazy-making. We are here to rekindle your spark. I'm Irene Salter, your host and a PhD neuroscientist and science educator with a passion for helping people thrive, not just survive. Please click that follow button so you don't miss a single episode.
Speaker 1:My book club recently read the book Mastery by Robert Greene. The main idea behind this book is that masters of their field are not born, they're made, and they're made in a very specific way. Robert Greene looks at masters from across time and history, ranging from scientists like Albert Einstein and Marie Curie to musicians like Mozart and John Coltrane, to engineers like Yoki Matsuoka and the Wright brothers. He talks about architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Santiago Calatrava. He writes about writers like Zora, neale Hurston and John Keats, and he even looks at masters who can't possibly be boxed in with a single label people like Ben Franklin or Temple Grandin. In looking at all of these masters from across time and history, they are all famous. Many have been called geniuses. When we, everyday people, look at people like that, we go wow, where did they get their gift from? How did they develop their talent and what makes them so amazing? How could such incredible talent as Mozart and Einstein not have been born that way? How could Robert Greene have any other idea? Well, greene argues that, yes, these individuals think differently, but it's not because they are geniuses. Their brains don't have some inherent power that my brain and your brain doesn't also have. Rather, he says that they have trained their brains to think differently in a way that follows their uniqueness.
Speaker 1:This uniqueness is the core of his book and I love how he talks about it. In chapter one, he says All of us are born unique. This uniqueness is marked genetically in our DNA. We are a one-time phenomenon in the universe. Our exact genetic makeup has never occurred before, nor will it ever be repeated.
Speaker 1:This primal uniqueness wants to assert and express itself, but some experience it more strongly than others. With Masters, it is so strong that it feels like something that has its own external reality, a force, a voice, a destiny. In moments when we engage in an activity that corresponds to our deepest inclinations, we experience a touch of this. We feel as if the words we write or the physical movements we perform come so quickly and easily that they come from outside of us. We are literally inspired, the Latin word meaning something from the outside breathing within us. Thinking different is a process that anyone can do. Masters gain mastery by identifying their uniqueness and honing it with hard work and practice. Masters gain mastery by identifying their uniqueness and honing it with hard work and practice. Essentially, masters use the brain's built-in process of learning and rewire their brains to be able to think different.
Speaker 1:One of the examples that Robert Greene talks about is Zora Neale Hurston. As a child, zora grew up in an all-black township protected from racism, and there she fell in love with books and stories, particularly falling in love with myths of every kind. She knew that her destiny had something to do with storytelling, but at the age of 13, her mother died and her father shipped her off to a school, far from home, soon after her dad stopped paying tuition, abandoning Zora to fend for herself. It was the time of the Great Depression and the only jobs Zora could find was as a house cleaner or a lady's maid. And yet she still followed that passion and created opportunities to learn In the homes of the houses she cleaned. She read every book she could get her hands on. She memorized passages of Milton's Paradise Lost so that she could go over it in her head. In her free time or when she was working. She listened intently to the ladies' stories while she did their nails.
Speaker 1:Zora's uniqueness was to gather and tell stories so timeless and heart-wrenching they seemed like mythology. But she knew that in order to do this well, she would have to get a formal education. At the age of 25, she cut off her hair, imagined 10 years away off of her age, and applied as a freshman at a free, public high school. From there she made it to Howard University and then to Harlem, where leading Black writers and artists of the time had gathered. And then she went to Barnard College as the first and only Black student there. All the while, she read more books than was required. She worked harder than she had to. She gathered story after story, engaging with professors and thinkers and other writers. She was honing her craft and ultimately became a skilled anthropologist, writer and folklorist.
Speaker 1:Zora refused to let poverty, race or sex and other people's expectations define her. She saw her brain's uniqueness and curated learning experiences for herself to sharpen her mind into mastery. She listened, she read, she wrote, she collected and ultimately she honed that uniqueness and became the first Black woman to earn her living as a storyteller. I remember the college summer where I read her book their Eyes Were Watching God and I was utterly entranced by her writing. I didn't want to read about the heartache she described, and yet I couldn't put her book down. Green describes countless other masters in their apprenticeships Ben Franklin studying diplomacy, charles Darwin studying the natural world, marie Curie studying chemistry. How is it that these masters learn their craft? What is happening inside Zora's teenage brain as she gathers stories as a maid? Or what's happening in Leonardo da Vinci's brain when he was 14 years old as an apprentice to Verrockyo learning how to paint?
Speaker 1:Neuroscientists have long known that brain cells die off over time. It's always like the saying goes, use it or lose it. Well, scientists suspected baby and toddler brains could add more neurons, but adult brains, no way. Up until the last 20 years, everybody thought that adult brains couldn't possibly add new neurons. So how is it that masters do this? Well, the debate about human adults and whether they could grow new neurons was incredibly fierce. Overturning that dogma was a huge, long saga.
Speaker 1:The person who started the study and broke through that ice was Joseph Altman. Started the study and broke through that ice was Joseph Altman. He was a curious observer. He loved books, brains and behavior. He survived the Holocaust with his Jewish family in Budapest, then moved to Australia and New York, becoming a librarian. A lot like Zora, he was constantly reading books, but his books were about animal behavior, neuroscience and psychology. Eventually he made it as a graduate student in psychology at New York University and then became a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia.
Speaker 1:He had access to a way of staining neurons that previous neuroscientists did not. He used a technique called auto-radiography. It places this little special tag onto the DNA of brand new dividing cells, so scientists could now see where new neurons in the brain come from. It was like issuing a birth certificate at the time of birth and the time and place where those new neurons are born. Scientists could now witness the birth of new neurons and it could issue a birth certificate saying here and when this new neuron came to be.
Speaker 1:Most neuroscientists embraced the new methodology but only applied it to early development. After all, who thought that any new neurons could be born in adulthood? But not Altman. He used that new technique on adult rat brains and he saw new neurons being born in the hippocampus, the olfactory bulb, the cerebellum and the cerebral cortex in rats and cats and guinea pigs. His results were published in the most prestigious journals Science and Nature. But who in the world is this upstart slinging pebbles at the Goliaths? How dare he challenge the dogma? He was denied tenure at MIT and he went and continued his research. He almost left science but he was unable to get grants and so he resorted to creating these elaborate brain atlases to support his work.
Speaker 1:15 years later, after Altman, there was another upstart neuroscientist, michael Kaplan. He corroborated and extended Altman's work with even more irrefutable evidence. But bullies bullied him out of science. All these established scientists continued to say there is no way adult brains could have new neurons. Finally, it was in the late 1980s where another researcher did some pioneering work on adult bird song. It was Notabomb. He was curious about how birds learned how to sing. Several of the brain areas that are involved in song production are bigger in male birds, which do most of the singing, than in female birds. They've known this for a long time. Well, notabomb also realized that the size of these brain areas changes seasonally. When he looked really closely, he found that not only the brain areas are growing, but brand new baby neurons are born. That autoradiography technique revealed that at precisely the times the birds are learning new songs, new neurons are being born. This was 30 years after Altman's original work, and it was only after this that scientists began to change their stubborn minds.
Speaker 1:Now today we can see in the brains of humans, and one of my favorite studies looks at London cab drivers. When you consider that nowadays there's Uber and Lyft and Google Maps, london cabbies are really unique because they have to memorize a labyrinth of 26,000 streets in the heart of London, as well as many thousands more in all of the different areas of the suburbs. That feed in this labyrinth is called the knowledge, and in order to pass a London cab driver exam, the knowledge must be completely internalized. You can't use GPS, google Maps or even a physical paper map Prospective London cabbies. Their brains look just like mine before learning the knowledge, but after years of studying the hippocampus literally grows by 20%. Wait, pause here. 20% bigger is the hippocampus of the London cab drivers and drivers who fail their licensing exam. Their hippocampus shows no changes in their brain.
Speaker 1:The same thing happens in musicians. Those with more lifetime hours of instrument practice have more brain mass in regions of auditory and movement processing, and that growth extends not just in brain areas, but there's more connections between neurons. There are more fibers coursing from one side of the brain to the other and those fibers are more tightly aligned and bundled together. Those axons connect auditory regions to movement control centers and it also controls the front of the brain and connects it to the back. When musicians practice their instruments they bulk up on brain mass, just like weightlifters do bulking up on muscle mass. Different kinds of learning spawn growth in different brain areas the parietal cortex for mathematicians, the motion areas in jugglers, the cerebellum in basketball players, the posterior parietal cortex in physicians.
Speaker 1:All of this proves that you don't have to be a musical savant like Mozart. You don't even have to be born into mastery. It only matters how many hours you train your brain. How many hours is that? Well, 10,000 hours seems to be the answer. If you break that down, that's around four hours a day every day for seven years, or eight hours every weekday for five years. Interestingly enough, most PhD programs are for five to seven years long. This is the time it takes to truly become a master of your field. And thus let's circle back In order to answer that question. What is happening inside of the brains of masters as they hone their craft? They are like Nota Bom's songbirds. They are birthing new neurons. They're growing brain areas that are key to their craft, connecting brain areas that need to talk to one another. They are literally rewiring their brains and shaping it to complement their uniqueness.
Speaker 1:I look at my teenage son. He's finishing high school next year and he's a tinkerer. He's been fascinated by all things mechanical and engineering and math and physics since he was a tiny kid. Like his favorite toy all growing up was Legos. I think his first Lego set was at the age of three. Those first Lego creations he made were tiny stacks of the tiniest Legos, brick by brick by brick, taller and taller into these tall towers until the whole thing fell over. He would spend hours and hours in his Lego room tinkering, and then, as he grew into middle school, he discovered robotics. And there he continued to tinker and now he's doing competitive robotics at the high school level. The latest tinkering creation is this Lego robotic walker. It's all these legs and linkages. It looks like a spider crawling around on eight legs. He's hooked it up to a single motor. He designed the gearbox for it. He has a transmission system. All of that shows that this tinkering, the skill that is his uniqueness, those are bleeding over into robotics, computer coding and even math. It's the way that his brain was designed and this is how he's been gathering those 10,000 hours. I love, love, love watching his brain grow.
Speaker 1:Let's take a pause. How is it that you can become a master yourself? Well, the research says study for seven years or work full-time for five years. It seems like a really long time, but I bet that you're already a master at something, maybe even a master at many things. Look at me. So I spent seven years doing neuroscience research. After that, I spent 11 years as a science educator and then seven more years as a school leader. All of those were my training. It is how I honed my brain. All of those were my training. It is how I honed my brain. I became a master of neuroscience, a master in science, education and a master of leadership. This allowed me to be able to now weave those three things together. Ask yourself that question what is it that you have spent your life acquiring mastery of? What areas have you already become a master or are close to becoming one? You don't have to be somebody like Mozart or Einstein. Instead, just look at what you've already achieved. If my high school son can do that, I know you can too. Okay, back to the show.
Speaker 1:Here's my main critique of Green's book. Every example that he shares is famous, and it's really intimidating and hugely imposter, syndrome-y to have to compare yourself to icons who are household names Ben Franklin and Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci. It's just not fair, and it becomes so difficult to imagine one's own path to mastery when you look at examples like that. Thus, I want to end this podcast episode with a homage to everyday masters, people that are in my community, people I know and I've worked with, those people who are absolutely masters of their craft, even though they may not know it, obviously. I look at the teachers that I've worked with, people like Ms Corrine, ms Crystal, mr Casey, dr Pierce, ms Johnson. Each of those people are absolute masters at the craft of teaching students, helping them get engaged and fall in love with learning, helping them get engaged and fall in love with learning. I also think about this butcher that I met at Guerrera Meats in San Francisco, which was around the corner of the house where I used to live. Whenever I visited his butcher shop, he would talk to me about following the lines in the meat. He would talk about that in the same reverent tones of an artist talking about his art.
Speaker 1:My neighbor across the street. Her name is Anne and she is the master of creating living, walkable cities. She brings people together to have conversation and create the kind of community she wants. There's Heidi. She's a speech and language pathologist who works with young kids on the spectrum. Everyone says that she has a gift of working with kids. There's somebody else I know named Chris they're the CFO who can read numbers almost like tea leaves and be able to predict the future of the company. There's a person I know named Vero, a research analyst at a tech company who's creating avenues for low-income families to access high-end tech and better their lives.
Speaker 1:There's people like Bev and Joanne, who are development directors. They tell stories and create experiences so inspiring that donors can't help but break out their wallets. There's Danielle and Yana. There are two gardeners. They're literally plant whisperers. They have mastered the craft of gardening. There's Russ, the scientist, who showed me just how beautiful the scientific enterprise can be Not just the discoveries, but the community that surrounds science. There's Pat, a master weaver, who taught my daughter not just to weave on a loom but to sew with an old-fashioned pedal sewing machine. And there's Dr Nelson, who is the best dentist I've ever had and is utterly passionate about having people take care of their teeth.
Speaker 1:I could go on and on and on. None of these people are famous. None of them are rich. None of them attract publicity for being the masters that they are. Yet every single one of them is an undisputed master of their craft. Now, when you look at anyone that has this kind of mastery, you go wow, how did they do that? It seems like magic, it's a gift. They must be geniuses, but no, what they did is what all of the masters have done. They identified their uniqueness, they honed it with 10,000 hours of study and now they share their gift with the world you can, too.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for joining me for this new episode of the Leader's Playground. I would love to thank Tyler Lockamy for all of the sound production, robin Canfield for all of the graphic design, tessa Borquez for being the chief of ops, who is an utter goddess with all of the back end of inquiring minds. In the show notes you're going to find a link to Robert Green's book, lots of information on neuroplasticity and so much more. Before you go, could you please do me two favors? First, do you happen to know a leader or friend who is surviving, not thriving? Perhaps somebody who would love to understand their own mastery? Maybe they need to learn about what a master they are? If so, could you please text them a link to this show? And secondly, please click that follow button on Spotify, google, apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1:That's going to ensure you find out about the next episode, where we're going to go head to head with the unrealistic ideals that make work awful. Meet the ideal worker who demands a response to emails within 10 seconds and meet the ideal mother who can somehow make dinner from scratch with all organic ingredients. Keep an immaculate health worthy of the cover of Sunset Magazine. And all of this is done with a baby on her hip and two toddlers who always play nicely together. Ever meet those unrealistic ideals? Well, if so, join me next time here at the Leaders Playground.
