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Clara Schumann: Five ingredients for a child prodigy (+video)

3. A 'rage to master'

Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor
A student at The Davidson Academy, a school for profoundly gifted students in Reno, Nev., works on a paper in a middle school composition class.

  • By Eoin O'Carroll Staff

In her book "Gifted Children: Myths And Realities," Psychologist Ellen Winner uses the term "rage to master" to describe the motivation that precocious children have to become experts in their domains.

"They experience states of 'flow,' when they are engaged in their domain" she writes, alluding to a kind of mental state, first proposed in the 1960s by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in which a person is so joyfully immersed in their work that they tune out the outside world and even lose a sense of their own ego.

"The lucky combination of obsessive interest in a domain along with an ability to learn easily in that domain leads to high achievement," writes Winner.

"Composing gives me great pleasure," said Schumann. "There is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound."

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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