[magice]

sigh Yet-another-worshipper-of-god-given-creativity.

I lost all respect for the article the moment the author drew difference between chess/music/sport and writing/drawing/teaching/"creativity". Frankly, the way I read it, this is just another hero-worshipping article by consultants whose main contribution to the economy involves destroying R&D and shipping jobs oversea. And it truly saddens me that Hacker News keeps this on my front page.

Why did the difference irk me?

First, find me, seriously, find me 2 basketball matches that are exactly the same. Or 2 golf days that are exactly the same. Or 2 music performances that are exactly the same. Or 2 chess matches that are exactly the same. It's ridiculous to claim that somehow chess and music playing and sports are not creative.

Second, if a person claims that somehow long period of deliberate practices do not matter on engineering, my personal opinion is that all engineers should spit at that person. Such insult! True, each engineering situation has different challenges. However, the principles of engineering (applied sciences, basically) are finite. Same things for writing or drawing. The materials & techniques (even styles!) are finite. Creativity refers to the adroitness of solving the infinite (problem space) with the finite (tools and principles). Without an intimate understanding of the finite (tools and principles), how can one bring it to bear on the infinite?

Third, most of new works are old. Let's take Shakespeare. His works are lovely and creative, no? But consider this: most of his plots are derivative (similar motifs, if not outright fully-formed plots, already existed and popular); most of his language already formed. Shakespeare created at most 10% of his language. He must gain expertise of the other 90% to show case these 10%. Similarly, think of any art or design or product or whatever creative result. Most of such art/design/whatever already follows some popular styles and employs existing and popular techniques. Creativity is only the little extra. Sure, the extra sets it apart. But without the expertise of the 90%, such "extra" can't exist.

Finally, creativity is very inefficient without deep expertise. Many people say things like "I am most creative when xyz" (popular xyz: in shower, on a walk, relaxed, reading, etc.). However, this actually means is that people come up with the 10% (see above) extra during this time. Since the person must create the other 90% to top off the little newness, without expertise, 10% will remain fantasy.

Now, I am not saying "expertise/practice is everything!" Expertise and practice are foundation of the creativity house. Even when you have solid foundation, you don't have a roof yet, and rain will still wet you. However, without foundation, you simply can't build a house. Expertise and practice are a requirement, but alone are probably not enough.

Parting words: people love stories of outsiders winning. However, why don't we talk about outsiders losing? There are vastly more of those. Let's take a simple field: web programming (1. it's appropriate here; 2. outsiders seem to look down on it). You know who built Google? Graduate students from prestige schools. You know who built Microsoft? Students with years of programming experience. You know what outsiders build? The millions of badly written websites, ready to be SQL injected or attacked by a already-patched bugs. That's outsiders' works.

[jezclaremurugan]

Not saying you are entirely wrong, but maybe that article isn't totally off either.

For ex. > You know who built Google? People who weren't working in Yahoo or AltaVista.

> Who built Microsoft? Again outsiders out of the Unix or IBM world.

Further, while basketball matches are not same, the skill part - shooting/dribbling/tackling etc. is definitely same.

I am not arguing against expertise though - I know how critical a proper knowledge of algorithms and data structures is to programming.

What I am saying is that while expertise is important - creativity is fundamentally different from expertise.

However you do need expertise to be creative, I have no dreams of making any discoveries in quantum physics any time soon.

[crpatino]

> You know who built Google? People who weren't working in Yahoo or AltaVista.

It was not people trying random shit either. It was a pair of PhD students, who were already experts in how information is indexed in libraries, and who understood how citations work in academia, who applied this knowledge to the novel domain of crawling the WWW.

If you look at the biographies of really creative people, you will see a pattern emerging. Practically all the grand masters of the Reinassense specialized in a single art, but dabbled with 2 or 3 more (i.e. Michel Angelo's magna opus is the Sistine Chappel, but he was a master sculptor and a moderately competent architect). Many fiction writers do start their careers as journaists. Great hackers have a tendency to pick up hobbies that have little or nothing to do with computers.

Maybe the problem with the 10-thousand hours is not that it kills creativity, but that people gets obsessed about a single topic and do not try their hand at enough different things for their creativity to flourish.