Transcription
Welcome to Great Minds. I'm Howard Gardner. I am a research professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
As a researcher, I decided to look in great depth and detail at a number of highly creative people and find out who was judged from the 20th century as being exceptionally creative. There was Picasso, the painter; Virginia Woolf, the writer; Martha Graham, the dancer; and Albert Einstein, the physicist.
The first question I ask is, what intelligences did they have? The people were selected in part because I thought they were outstanding in one intelligence. I found out that every one of them was exceptional in more than one intelligence, but nobody was exceptional across the board. The closest was Igor Stravinsky, a composer who was also trained as a lawyer. He had both traditional IQ intelligence and, of course, musical intelligence as well.
On the other hand, while Picasso, the painter, wrote plays, nobody wants to read or see his plays. His talent was really in the visual-spatial area. So, they had different intelligences in which they excelled, but nobody was good across the board, and nobody was good in just one intelligence. It was more a set of intelligences that they put together, and that's what made them very, very unusual.
The poet T.S. Eliot was very good with language, but he also had what I called existential intelligence. He liked to ask very, very big questions, and his poetry is known for that. So, my first question was answered: they all have more than one intelligence, but they don't have intelligences across the board.
The second thing is, for each of them, it took about 10 years for them to develop their gift, their talent. This is often called the 10-year rule. They all spent 10 years developing their area of talent, their area of creativity. Interestingly, most of them did not live in cities; they lived in villages or out in the country. But by the end of the 10 years, they almost all moved to the city.
At that time, it was Paris, Zurich, or London. They needed to find other people who were like them—what we call conspecifics—people who sort of come from the same species, people who are very talented in a certain medium, in a certain area, in a certain intelligence. They found people who were like them; they found friends from whom they could share their abilities.
Einstein had a group called The Olympiad of people who were very interested in big questions in physics. But the more their ideas became very unusual, very creative, and very off the beaten track, the more isolated they became because suddenly their group of friends didn't understand what they were talking about. At that point, it was extremely important for them to have support from somebody else.
We talk about four levels of creativity: big C, middle C, little c, and mini c or tiny c. Big C creativity is a wonderful thing to study and understand, but most of us are not going to be big C creators. There is a reasonable chance that we'll do middle C creativity, which means something where we are recognized by other people as doing something in our medium, something in our subject matter, something in our discipline, something in our art form, which people notice and say, "That's good; that might even change the way I do things, the way I understand."
These are people who may write best-selling books or may get a prize, but they probably won't be studied 100 years from now, so they're middle C. Then, a much larger group is little c. This is where almost all of us can aspire to. When you have little c, you can plan a great party or a wonderful vacation or switch from one job to another and do it in a way that really works.
But then, in the age of computers and social media, we've created the term tiny c or mini c because that's what a tweet is or a TikTok photo or something that you do on Facebook or some other kind of social medium. You have fun doing it; maybe a few people notice it, but it's evanescent. It doesn't last, and it probably makes very few changes in what anybody else thinks.
The word of advice I would give is it's much better to spend 10 years mastering something than to spend 10 years in social media. It may be more fun to master social media, but you're very unlikely to become even middle C, let alone big C creative, if you're spending most of your life in social media.
So, let me talk about a few other features of leaders. One is that, as with creative people, they're not afraid to confront, they're not afraid to take chances, and they're not afraid to lose. My favorite story is of George Marshall, who was in the Army and was also part of President Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet. One day, there was a meeting, and whenever Roosevelt said something, George Marshall argued with him. He didn't argue viciously, but he pointed out where Roosevelt was wrong.
As they left the meeting, the Secretary of Treasury said to George Marshall, "Well, goodbye, you're not going to be here again because you're not supposed to challenge the leader." But in fact, the opposite happened. Roosevelt was very impressed by General Marshall's leadership, and eventually, he was put in charge of the army during the Second World War. I believe he was both Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State thereafter.
So, the ability to confront, but in a way that doesn't destroy other people, is a very important part of being an effective leader. Another thing, which I hadn't thought of but became clear to me, is that leaders have to master the media of their time. Roosevelt mastered the fireside chat.
It's well for us to remember that this America of ours is the product of no single creed. You could walk down the street in the United States in the 1930s, from one house to another, and you'd hear Franklin Roosevelt on the radio. John Kennedy, many of you will know him, mastered television. He was made for television, and the way he debated on television was part of the reason why he became presidential.
Barack Obama was the person who first understood the importance of the internet and tweeting and things like that. Back in 2015, when not that many people knew him, Donald Trump decided to run for president. The media asked me what kind of intelligence Donald Trump has, and I didn't know him, and I still don't know him.
So, I don't know how he would do in music or in logic or math, but I said he has media intelligence because he understood how to use both the conventional media, which was television, and rallies, which are a kind of media. "We are going to make America great again." Even though I don't think he has insight into individuals' personalities, he understands the personality of the crowd. He knows how to deal with a riot, so to speak.
Trump, who I don't admire at all, is, for better or for worse, a leader. Being able to master the medium means you have to be able to tell stories in the media of your time.
So, what intelligences are involved in being a leader? I think they're basically two: linguistic and interpersonal. If leaders are storytellers, whatever medium is available, leaders are not going to be very effective unless they can tell a story. I used to joke that President George W. Bush had Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as his linguistic intelligence because she often put into words what he wasn't very articulate at.
Interpersonal intelligence is extremely important because if you want to convince an audience of something, you have to be able to empathize with the audience and see what it is that they listen to, what it is that they like, how you can connect with them.
What I haven't spoken about until now, what I hadn't really thought about until recently, was how do people use their intelligences? You can use any intelligence benignly, or you can use it malignantly. Both Goethe, the German poet and author, and Goebbels, the German propagandist, had excellent control of the German language. Goethe used it to write great works of art; Goebbels used it for propaganda and to produce hatred and even genocide.
As a social scientist and psychologist, I think it's not enough to understand how things can work; it's important to understand whether they're being used in a benign way or in a malignant way. With two treasured colleagues, William Damon and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, we began to study what eventually became known as good work.
Good work, as I've implied, is work that isn't just skillful but work that has benign and positive ends. We didn't just think about this; we interviewed about 1,500 people in nine different professions. These were people who were selected because they were admired by their peers.
Whether they were lawyers, doctors, professors, teachers, engineers, or actors, these were people who, to their peers, seemed to be doing good work. I'm not much for visuals, but to understand the rest of the talk, you need to understand that good work is composed of three E's, what we call the triple helix.
The triple helix are the components of good work, and they all begin with the letter E. Good work is technically excellent; that means people really know their stuff. It's personally engaging; that means people look forward to work. They like to go to work; they don't just count the minutes until the weekend or until holidays.
This is what I want to focus on for the rest of this talk: good work is carried out ethically. You can't always be ethical, but you can always try. It's people who try to be ethical, people who try to do the right thing even when it's difficult to do, who get a gold star for being ethical.
I referred to DNA, Watson, and Crick. We call this the triple helix of DNA. So again, work that is technically excellent, personally engaging, and carried out in positive, pro-social ways—we call this good work. Since doing this study some years ago, we have tried to figure out how best to encourage good work in young people and in people who are not so young.
Let me make one terminological distinction, which is important to us: the distinction between neighborly morality and the ethics of roles. Neighborly morality is what human beings have done for thousands of years. It's what's in the Bible: honor your parents, respect other people, don't kill, don't lie, don't cheat.
Neighborly morality is also the Golden Rule: treat other people the way you want to be treated. We do not have anything new to say about the Golden Rule or the Ten Commandments. These are lifelong principles that have existed for centuries.
When we talk about the ethics of roles, we're talking about a relatively new situation—a situation where you have professionals: people who are doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists—people who have advanced training. The ethics of roles means that when you're a journalist, or a lawyer, or a doctor, it's not always clear what the right thing to do is.
It isn't enough just to follow the Golden Rule; there may not be any easy answers. In the ethics of roles, you try to figure out what's the best thing you can do in a situation. You reflect on it, you talk to other people, you maybe read some books or look at some canons. You may dream about it, and then you try to make the best decision you can, knowing that you won't always be right, but that it's worth trying to achieve doing the ethical thing.
This paradigm can also be applied to citizenship, though we haven't focused on citizenship the way we have focused on work. What is a good citizen? In our definition, a good citizen is somebody who knows the laws, knows the rules. That means they are excellent, they are engaged, they care. They bother to vote, they bother to write letters, they bother to go to meetings.
But they're also ethical. They don't just say what's good for me; they say what's good for the wider society, what's good for the neighborhood, what's good for citizens. So, the three E's, which were designed particularly to focus on professional work, also focus on what it means to be a good citizen.