David Shenk - The Genius in All of Us

B aseball legend Ted Williams was one in a million, widely considered the most gifted hitter of his time. in The New Yorker in 1960. It went over the first basemans head and rose meticulously along a straight line and was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit.

In the public imagination, Williams was almost a god among men, a superhuman endowed with a collection of innate physical gifts, including spectacular eye-hand coordination, exquisite muscular grace, and uncanny instincts..

But all that innate miracle-man stuffit was all , said Williams. He insisted his great achievements were simply the sum of what he had put into the game. Nothing except practice, practice, practice will bring out that ability, he explained. The reason I saw things was that I was so intense It was [super] discipline, not super eyesight.

Is that possible? Could a perfectly ordinary man actually train himself to be a dazzling phenomenon? We all recognize the virtues of practice and hard work, but truly, could any amount of effort transform the clunky motions of a whiffer or a chucker into the majestic swing of Tiger Woods or the gravity-defying leap of Michael Jordan? Could an ordinary brain ever expand enough to conjure the far-flung curiosities and visions of Einstein or Matisse? Is true greatness obtainable from everyday means and everyday genes?

Conventional wisdom says no, that some people are simply born with certain gifts while others are not; that talent and high intelligence are somewhat scarce gems, scattered throughout the human gene pool; that the best we can do is to locate and polish these gemsand accept the limitations built into the rest of us.

But someone forgot to tell Ted Williams that talent will out. As a boy, he wasnt interested in watching his natural abilities unfurl passively like a flower in the sunshine. He simply wantedneededto be the best hitter baseball had ever seen, and he pursued that goal with appropriate ferocity.. He always had that bat in his hand And when he made up his mind to do something, he was going to do it or know the reason why.

wasnt going to let anything stop me from being the hitter I hoped to be, Williams later recalled. Looking back it was pretty near storybook devotion.

In other words, he worked for it, fiercely, single-mindedly, far beyond the norm. He had one thought in mind and he always followed it, said his high school coach Wos Caldwell.

Greatness was not a thing to Ted Williams; it was a process.

This didnt stop after he got drafted into professional baseball. In Williamss first season with the minor league San Diego Padres, coach was always the first to show up for practice in the morning and the last to leave at night. And something more curious: after each game, Williams would ask the coach for the used game balls.