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Extraordinary Minds: Portraits Of 4 Exceptional Individuals And An Examination Of Our Own Extraordinariness (Masterminds
Fifteen years ago, psychologist and educator Howard Gardner introduced the idea of multiple intelligences, challenging the presumption that intelligence consists of verbal or analytic abilities only -- those intelligences that schools tend to measure. He argued for a broader understanding of the intelligent mind, one that embraces creation in the arts and music, spatial reasoning, and the ability to understand ourselves and others. Today, Gardner's ideas have become widely accepted -- indeed, they have changed how we think about intelligence, genius, creativity, and even leadership, and he is widely regarded as one of the most important voices writing on these subjects. Now, in Extraordinary Minds , a book as riveting as it is new, Gardner poses an important question: Is there a set of traits shared by all truly great achievers -- those we deem extraordinary -- no matter their field or the time period within which they did their important work? In an attempt to answer this question, Gardner first examines how most of us mature into more or less competent adults. He then examines closely four persons who lived unquestionably extraordinary lives -- Mozart, Freud, Woolf, and Gandhi -- using each as an exemplar of a different kind of extraordinariness: Mozart as the master of a discipline, Freud as the innovative founder of a new discipline, Woolf as the great introspect or, and Gandhi as the influencer. What can we learn about ourselves from the experiences of the extraordinary? Interestingly, Gardner finds that an excess of raw power is not the most impressive characteristic shared by superachievers; rather, these extraordinary individuals all have had a special talent for identifying their own strengths and weaknesses, for accurately analyzing the events of their own lives, and for converting into future successes those inevitable setbacks that mark every life. Gardner provides answers to a number of provocative questions, among them: How do we explain extraordinary times -- Athens in the fifth century B.C., the T'ang Dynasty in the eighth century, Islamic Society in the late Middle Ages, and New York at the middle of the century? What is the relation among genius, creativity, fame, success, and moral extraordinariness? Does extraordinariness make for a happier, more fulfilling life, or does it simply create a special onus?
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
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963 people want to read
About the author
Howard Gardner
141 books664 followersHoward Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds positions as Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. He has received honorary degrees from 26 colleges and universities, including institutions in Bulgaria, Chile, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, and South Korea. In 2005 and again in 2008, he was selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. The author of 25 books translated into 28 languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be adequately assessed by standard psychometric instruments.
During the past two decades, Gardner and colleagues at Project Zero have been involved in the design of performance-based assessments; education for understanding; the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy; and the quality of interdisciplinary efforts in education. Since the middle 1990s, in collaboration with psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, Gardner has directed the GoodWork Project-- a study of work that is excellent, engaging, and ethical. More recently, with long time Project Zero colleagues Lynn Barendsen and Wendy Fischman, he has conducted reflection sessions designed to enhance the understanding and incidence of good work among young people. With Carrie James and other colleagues at Project Zero, he is also investigating the nature of trust in contemporary society and ethical dimensions entailed in the use of the new digital media. Among new research undertakings are a study of effective collaboration among non-profit institutions in education and a study of conceptions of quality, nationally and internationally, in the contemporary era. In 2008 he delivered a set of three lectures at New York's Museum of Modern Art on the topic "The True, The Beautiful, and The Good: econsiderations in a post-modern, digital era."
from http://www.howardgardner.com/bio/bio....
During the past two decades, Gardner and colleagues at Project Zero have been involved in the design of performance-based assessments; education for understanding; the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy; and the quality of interdisciplinary efforts in education. Since the middle 1990s, in collaboration with psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, Gardner has directed the GoodWork Project-- a study of work that is excellent, engaging, and ethical. More recently, with long time Project Zero colleagues Lynn Barendsen and Wendy Fischman, he has conducted reflection sessions designed to enhance the understanding and incidence of good work among young people. With Carrie James and other colleagues at Project Zero, he is also investigating the nature of trust in contemporary society and ethical dimensions entailed in the use of the new digital media. Among new research undertakings are a study of effective collaboration among non-profit institutions in education and a study of conceptions of quality, nationally and internationally, in the contemporary era. In 2008 he delivered a set of three lectures at New York's Museum of Modern Art on the topic "The True, The Beautiful, and The Good: econsiderations in a post-modern, digital era."
from http://www.howardgardner.com/bio/bio....
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 2, 2009
For many years psychologist and McArthur Prize winner Howard Gardner of “seven intelligences” fame has studied extraordinary people. This book summarizes his conclusions as of the mid-nineties. He divides “extraordinary minds” into four categories and identifies an exemplar for each. The four categories:
*The Master—“A Master is an individual who gains complete mastery over one or more domains of accomplishment; his or her innovation occurs within established practice.” Exemplar: Mozart, who completely mastered all the musical styles and genres of his day.
*The Maker—“A Maker devotes energies to the creation of a new domain.” Exemplar: Freud, who redefined the domain of psychology.
*The Introspecter—“Of primary concern to [The Introspector:] is an exploration of his or her inner life.” Exemplar: Virginia Woolf, who developed a new fictional method for expressing human consciousness.
*The Influencer—“[The Influencer:] has as a primary goal the influencing of other individuals.” Exemplar: Gandhi, who pioneered in bringing about political change non-violently.
Gardner points out that extraordinary minds do not emerge from a vacuum. To flourish, extraordinariness requires a convergence of gifted individual, appropriate “domain,” and fertile “field.” “Domain” he defines as the area in which the extraordinary individual is interested—physics, politics, painting, etc. “Field” he defines as the people who dominate a domain at a given time, and who will judge the work of the budding genius. Presumably Gandhi would not have been extraordinary as a painter (wrong domain), and perhaps Freud would have failed if it weren’t for the widespread disillusionment engendered by World War I (persistently hostile field).
What characteristics do all extraordinary minds (EMs) seem to have in common? According to Gardner there are three:
*Reflecting—EMs tend to reflect continually on their experience, evaluating and re-evaluating where they’ve been and where they want to go. They do not simply plod steadily ahead independent of changes in their lives and domains
*Leveraging—EMs identify their strengths early and play to them—and avoid competing where they are weak. For example, Freud avoided the domains of physical science and mathematics because he knew he was weak in spatial relations
*Framing—To an unusual degree, EMs have the ability to reframe failures into successes—to construe all experience as positive. (Henry Ford: “Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”) Though Mozart was a prodigy, Freud and Woolf did not succeed until their forties, and Gandhi not until his fifties. All experienced many failures along the way—and turned them to account. And even Mozart, who fell on hard times toward the end of his short life, continued to be positive about his music and even in adversity produced high-quality work at a prodigious rate.
Gardner sprinkles the book with interesting tidbits:
*“It is generally said that it takes about ten years of deliberate practice to become a full-fledged expert; and that experts have about fifty thousand ‘moves’ or schemas at their disposal.”
*The high IQ kids studied for many years by Terman and his followers on average have done quite well in life, but have been “least impressive in terms of creative accomplishments.”
*Kids with IQs above 170 are twice as likely to read by age four than those with IQs below that level.
*Kids with IQs over 180 tend to be unhappy—they are just too different from other people.
*“Genes prove a more potent contributor to measured intelligence than does environment.”
*“Having a blissfully happy childhood may be understimulating.”
*“Except for times when creators are actually incapacitated, the creative drive continues unabated, through emotional thick and thin.”
*All creators combine to an unusual degree the “childlike and the adultlike—indeed, many feel that this fusion constitutes an indispensable aspect of their genius.”
*Most creators are not successful in their personal lives because they are obsessed with their work. The ancient Romans thought one had to choose between libri (books) and liberi (children).
*“Evidence has accumulated that a higher proportion of bipolar disease [manic-depression:] exists among the relatives of writers than is found in other populations.”
*“Studies of political leaders have revealed that the most charismatic have little understanding of economic issues.”
*“Certain wounds recur in the lives of extraordinary individuals. Prominent is the loss, during early childhood, of one or both parents.” [Jean-Paul Sartre: “The best gift a father can give to his son is to die young.”]
*Possible tie-ins between genius and pathology: 1) writing mania and hyper-religiosity are often symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy (experienced, among other extraordinaries, by Dostoevsky); 2) unusual powers of “shutting out the world” when concentrating are perhaps akin to autism; 3) unusual energy levels and voracious appetites of many EMs—related to hyperactivity or Tourette’s syndrome?; and 4) do some spatially and artistically gifted EMs experience the “pathology of superiority,” in which deficits in the left hemisphere are overcompensated by hypertrophy of the right hemisphere?
*“Most of the extraordinary individuals I’ve studied have turned out to be very difficult people.”
*Milieu features that seem to promote extraordinariness: 1) an orderly bourgeois life; 2) love and support conditional on achievement; 3) good role model(s) in the relevant domain; 4) opportunity to consort with other talented people in the same domain; 5) for all except Influencers, advanced training and in some cases the appropriate credentials; and 6) for Influencers, the opportunity to challenge authority without being totally rejected.
Though it by no means explains genius and introduces nothing really startling to anyone familiar with studies of creativity, Extraordinary Minds is a good read on a fascinating subject.
*The Master—“A Master is an individual who gains complete mastery over one or more domains of accomplishment; his or her innovation occurs within established practice.” Exemplar: Mozart, who completely mastered all the musical styles and genres of his day.
*The Maker—“A Maker devotes energies to the creation of a new domain.” Exemplar: Freud, who redefined the domain of psychology.
*The Introspecter—“Of primary concern to [The Introspector:] is an exploration of his or her inner life.” Exemplar: Virginia Woolf, who developed a new fictional method for expressing human consciousness.
*The Influencer—“[The Influencer:] has as a primary goal the influencing of other individuals.” Exemplar: Gandhi, who pioneered in bringing about political change non-violently.
Gardner points out that extraordinary minds do not emerge from a vacuum. To flourish, extraordinariness requires a convergence of gifted individual, appropriate “domain,” and fertile “field.” “Domain” he defines as the area in which the extraordinary individual is interested—physics, politics, painting, etc. “Field” he defines as the people who dominate a domain at a given time, and who will judge the work of the budding genius. Presumably Gandhi would not have been extraordinary as a painter (wrong domain), and perhaps Freud would have failed if it weren’t for the widespread disillusionment engendered by World War I (persistently hostile field).
What characteristics do all extraordinary minds (EMs) seem to have in common? According to Gardner there are three:
*Reflecting—EMs tend to reflect continually on their experience, evaluating and re-evaluating where they’ve been and where they want to go. They do not simply plod steadily ahead independent of changes in their lives and domains
*Leveraging—EMs identify their strengths early and play to them—and avoid competing where they are weak. For example, Freud avoided the domains of physical science and mathematics because he knew he was weak in spatial relations
*Framing—To an unusual degree, EMs have the ability to reframe failures into successes—to construe all experience as positive. (Henry Ford: “Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”) Though Mozart was a prodigy, Freud and Woolf did not succeed until their forties, and Gandhi not until his fifties. All experienced many failures along the way—and turned them to account. And even Mozart, who fell on hard times toward the end of his short life, continued to be positive about his music and even in adversity produced high-quality work at a prodigious rate.
Gardner sprinkles the book with interesting tidbits:
*“It is generally said that it takes about ten years of deliberate practice to become a full-fledged expert; and that experts have about fifty thousand ‘moves’ or schemas at their disposal.”
*The high IQ kids studied for many years by Terman and his followers on average have done quite well in life, but have been “least impressive in terms of creative accomplishments.”
*Kids with IQs above 170 are twice as likely to read by age four than those with IQs below that level.
*Kids with IQs over 180 tend to be unhappy—they are just too different from other people.
*“Genes prove a more potent contributor to measured intelligence than does environment.”
*“Having a blissfully happy childhood may be understimulating.”
*“Except for times when creators are actually incapacitated, the creative drive continues unabated, through emotional thick and thin.”
*All creators combine to an unusual degree the “childlike and the adultlike—indeed, many feel that this fusion constitutes an indispensable aspect of their genius.”
*Most creators are not successful in their personal lives because they are obsessed with their work. The ancient Romans thought one had to choose between libri (books) and liberi (children).
*“Evidence has accumulated that a higher proportion of bipolar disease [manic-depression:] exists among the relatives of writers than is found in other populations.”
*“Studies of political leaders have revealed that the most charismatic have little understanding of economic issues.”
*“Certain wounds recur in the lives of extraordinary individuals. Prominent is the loss, during early childhood, of one or both parents.” [Jean-Paul Sartre: “The best gift a father can give to his son is to die young.”]
*Possible tie-ins between genius and pathology: 1) writing mania and hyper-religiosity are often symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy (experienced, among other extraordinaries, by Dostoevsky); 2) unusual powers of “shutting out the world” when concentrating are perhaps akin to autism; 3) unusual energy levels and voracious appetites of many EMs—related to hyperactivity or Tourette’s syndrome?; and 4) do some spatially and artistically gifted EMs experience the “pathology of superiority,” in which deficits in the left hemisphere are overcompensated by hypertrophy of the right hemisphere?
*“Most of the extraordinary individuals I’ve studied have turned out to be very difficult people.”
*Milieu features that seem to promote extraordinariness: 1) an orderly bourgeois life; 2) love and support conditional on achievement; 3) good role model(s) in the relevant domain; 4) opportunity to consort with other talented people in the same domain; 5) for all except Influencers, advanced training and in some cases the appropriate credentials; and 6) for Influencers, the opportunity to challenge authority without being totally rejected.
Though it by no means explains genius and introduces nothing really startling to anyone familiar with studies of creativity, Extraordinary Minds is a good read on a fascinating subject.
November 23, 2021
While reading Mindset, I stumbled across a reference to Howard Gardner’s book, Extraordinary Minds, that intrigued me. It said that “exceptional individuals have ‘a special talent for identifying their own strengths and weaknesses.'” On the basis of that reference, I decided to pick up and study Extraordinary Minds: Portraits of 4 Exceptional Individuals and An Examination of Our Own Extraordinariness. The idea that extraordinary people really are introspective and have a good sense of who they are permeated the book. It was a recurring theme, no matter which of the four great minds Gardner was discussing.
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October 23, 2015
I wanted to like Howard Gardner's Extraordinary Minds more than I did. Having already been exposed to Gardner's basic framework of multiple intelligences which he has written about in at least one extraordinary book, I was expecting more of a continuity of those ideas. Yet despite the shortcomings of this book, which examines the lives of Mozart, Freud, Woolf, and Ghandi, I did like the practical advice Gardner offered at the end of the book. Basically, although most of us cannot be extraordinary people, by definition and per biology, Gardner advises us readers to look to three ways in which these people became great so that in our own little way we can be great with a lowercase g.
All four of these extraordinary people were very reflective about their talents, and Gardner recommends that we too reflect on what talents and abilities we have to offer and how well we interact with certain domains or other people. Next all four people knew how to leverage their talents to achieve what they wanted to achieve; likewise, us ordinary people can find out ways in which we can exploit our talents and abilities to greater effect with other people or with some kind of field of study or what have you. And finally, the extraordinary minds knew how to frame their successes and failures, that is, when they succeeded, they knew how to push themselves harder, and when they failed, they knew how to push themselves harder. These great minds did not like anyone or anything stop them in accomplishing what they wanted to achieve. So when we mere mortals encounter great obstacles, we need not become forlorn, or when we succeed in increments, we need not relish only that moment and fear the future defeat, but rather continue to make progress toward accomplishment. Not bad advice, eh?
All four of these extraordinary people were very reflective about their talents, and Gardner recommends that we too reflect on what talents and abilities we have to offer and how well we interact with certain domains or other people. Next all four people knew how to leverage their talents to achieve what they wanted to achieve; likewise, us ordinary people can find out ways in which we can exploit our talents and abilities to greater effect with other people or with some kind of field of study or what have you. And finally, the extraordinary minds knew how to frame their successes and failures, that is, when they succeeded, they knew how to push themselves harder, and when they failed, they knew how to push themselves harder. These great minds did not like anyone or anything stop them in accomplishing what they wanted to achieve. So when we mere mortals encounter great obstacles, we need not become forlorn, or when we succeed in increments, we need not relish only that moment and fear the future defeat, but rather continue to make progress toward accomplishment. Not bad advice, eh?
September 15, 2024
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Written before the turn of the century, and acknowledging the increasing influence of technology, I could only wish that Mr. Gardner would write it again from our current times - because the times have definitely changed! The 4 extraordinarinesses within include: Master (Mozart), Maker (Freud), Introspector (Woolf) and Influencer (Ghandi).
Written before the turn of the century, and acknowledging the increasing influence of technology, I could only wish that Mr. Gardner would write it again from our current times - because the times have definitely changed! The 4 extraordinarinesses within include: Master (Mozart), Maker (Freud), Introspector (Woolf) and Influencer (Ghandi).
February 14, 2018
Read for education course, interesting stuff.
April 15, 2020
Howard Gardner= genius
August 21, 2023
While it seemed dry at times, the subject and how he defended his arguments was very interesting and I do recommend this reading for the curious.
November 19, 2016
It was alright--nothing too extraordinary either way. The summaries of the 4 individuals he chose to exemplify each category were interesting, and I do think there is value in having each of us find reflection and perseverance in our own ordinary lives. Otherwise, it was a more approachable textbook that I felt like I was reading for a college or grad class.
February 14, 2008
I found this book to be pretty boring and tough to get through.
February 14, 2008
It was a somewhat interesting book, I especially enjoyed the section on Mozart.
July 14, 2008
Nett.
January 9, 2013
Excellent book to better understand individuals that truly make an impact in life, such as Mozart and Gandhi
February 17, 2013
Thoroughly readable, goes along well with Gladwell's OUTLIERS. In fact, I'm kind of surprised more comparisons haven't been made between the two.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews