Genius

Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.
Edgard Varese, US (French-born) composer (1883 - 1965)

A week of oscillation between laser-like focus in blitz mode to headless chicken distraction in snail mode. The great truth, demonstrated time and again, is that blitz mode does expand time and create new possibilities. The trick is to sustain it and attract it more often. This applies not just to work but to all aspects of life where accomplishment is the order of the day. It shall form the thrust of my research over the coming weeks. The other aspect of blitz mode is that it appears to connect us with our genius...

There is something about high speed mental activity that appears to ultimately release a higher level of performance. Speed readers experience an increased comprehension as they read faster. Blitz chess players achieve a greater understanding of the position than sometimes occurs in normal chess. That, in itself, is surprising, given that chess is a game of calculation and evaluating various sequences of moves and possibilities. So why should going faster make any difference? Why, more pertinently, could things possibly get better?

Well, let's return to the speed reading example. Part of the magic of speed reading is that you begin to engage the dormant parts of your brain, which are usually not engaged during normal reading. You have plenty of spare capacity to think about other things, or get distracted. When you are speed reading, there is no capacity for anything else. When you are driving really really fast, there is no capacity for putting in a new CD or even adjusting the climate control - your attention is totally on the road ahead. So that is one element - focus. However, I suspect that a deeper more powerful aspect is also at play...

Throughout your day, your body is performing millions of tasks seamlessly, keeping you alive and safe. All of this occurs without your conscious attention. You may also have noticed that after much practice at something you become able to do it "without thinking". Stephen Covey talked about four levels of performance - unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence and unconscious competence. Unconscious competence is the highest level precisely because you are engaging a much more powerful computer - your unconscious mind.

The unconscious mind is like a child with super powers. It needs direction from an adult, but can achieve far more than the adult is capable of. So the trick is to get your conscious mind to provide direction to the unconscious mind without taking over the tasks and limiting you to a normal performance. In reality, this happens naturally with practice as you go through the four levels of performance. It is particularly striking in blitz chess, where initially you lose and don't really know why. Then you get better and start to understand why you are losing, either on the board or on the clock. Then you start to win some games but you are having to put in a monstrous mental effort (calculation, evaluation etc) and you often may have seconds left on your clock. Finally, you begin to have games where it becomes effortless and the essence of the changing position is crystal-clear to you without really thinking about it - you just play the right moves and it is natural and flowing.

That is the state of mind that we aim to experience more consistently, the realm of genius that alas for most people, does not last very long. The beacon of hope is that we can train oursleves to operate in that mode, simply through practice. In the same way that playing lots of blitz chess games can get us into the blitz-mode of unconscious competence, we can expect that invoking blitz mode in other ways (e.g. I use a stopclock while I'm working and give myself no more than 10 minutes for a task) will help us attain this state - the mental superhighway, where time seems to expand as we go faster and more becomes possible...