Over the past four years, I’ve been working on a book about polymathy and how we can nurture multi-talentedness to improve happiness and mental wellbeing. I had been fascinated by a research finding that, compared with ordinary scientists, Nobel prize-winning scientists are more likely to also practise some art or craft and also more likely to be competent at acting, dancing or performing magic. These specialists were, in fact, multitalented. The polymath’s central ability is a lack of fear in learning something new. The specialist’s secret pessimism is: “I’ll be crap at that, so why bother?”
I studied how children learn, how we learn when we teach ourselves and I also used my experiences in Japan training in a martial art. There, the subject was broken up into moves that were complete in themselves but led to greater mastery if you so chose. I called these micromasteries. I quickly found dozens: make a perfect omelette, learn a tango walk, do an eskimo roll in a kayak, make a perfect IPA beer, do a 720-degree turn on a skateboard, make a 15-minute speech with no preparation, sing the Marseillaise in French … it was hard to narrow it down to the 30 or so for my book.
Doing a passable illustration seemed like a good art micromastery. I asked my daughter to show me (she had already done the illustrated maps for a travel book I had written). She said, “It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t look exact as long as it looks good.” Suddenly, I realised that all that pressure at school to make drawings look like something was only half the story. The other half was the decorative aspect of art. If the picture looked good, it didn’t matter if it didn’t quite look like the model. I liked making doodles that were pleasing, repetitive patterns. I added that aspect to my own micromastery challenge: producing drawings to illustrate my new book. And they’re OK. Not brilliant. But OK.
The main thing I got from watching my daughter was to take it slowly. I had seen famous artists doing lightning-fast sketches. Just as there are some fast writers (I’m one), there are brilliant slow writers. If it takes you time to do a good sketch, then slow down. Doing this improved my output immediately. So did copying from any source I could.
I began to ask other artists for tips (asking lots a large number of experts became my preferred method for developing a micromastery) and the equestrian painter Gill Whitworth showed me several sneaky tricks. “Even Rubens used to borrow tracings from other artists to do difficult poses,” she said. From this, came my notion of the micromastery “entry trick”. This is something that instantly elevates your performance and gives you much needed encouragement. Entry tricks could be cunning (for wood stacking, buy a dampness meter) or simple – for better handwriting just hold the pen higher up and increase the height of the long upright strokes on the letters y, l, p and h. And write more slowly.
Children make far better teachers of micromasteries than adults. They don’t overtalk it. They look carefully and take note. They find their own way to do something. This is key. The official way of learning something may not suit everyone. By messing around with a subject we find our own way in. For me, it was about getting a Derwent fineliner pen and drawing very clean lines. I was having fun with art instead of finding it depressing.
Indeed, having fun with something is a kind of expertise in its own right. While writing Micromastery I examined what we think of as an expert. It’s a slippery concept. Many are masters of the explicit. They can give a good talk on their subject and convince others. But tacit and implicit expertise is just as important. Things you can’t necessarily talk about. Stuff you just do. I think of a child who can pick up some electronic device and not even know what it’s for and yet have the expertise to have fun with it.
Getting children to teach is not new. George Stephenson, inventor of the first commercially viable steam train, could barely read or write though he was a skilled metal fabricator and innovator. He paid for his son Robert to go to school and after lessons were over, Robert would have to teach his dad what he had studied. George learned to read and write “proper English” and do mathematics. This method of learning continued until Robert was studying higher aspects of engineering and physics in his late teens.
And George was a true polymath. Not only was he the principal inventor of the steam train, but also he shared with Humphry Davy the credit for inventing a miner’s safety lamp; he was also something of a boxer, an athlete and a gardener. He grew exotic plants in a hothouse and experimented with different ways of increasing agricultural yields. Privately educated Robert went on to build railways all over the world, equalling but not surpassing the man he had taught to write “properly”.
George was a proud man and learning from a child is a great way to avoid the loss of face of admitting you know nothing. Kids don’t want to make you look small, especially if you are their parent and control internet access.
It is also a great way to give attention to a child without it being icky “ooing and ahhing” over anything they make. Involvement is the higher form of attention giving, and working with a child on a project is a good method of exchanging this much-needed nutrition. It’s also good for teaching adults some restraint. Just watch the child, and don’t ask too many questions.
Robert Twigger, Guardian
