Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [176]
Our current research with talented teenagers shows that many fail to develop their skills not because they have cognitive deficits, but because they cannot stand being alone, and are left behind by their peers who can tolerate the difficult learning and practicing required to perfect a talent (for a first report on this topic, see Nakamura 1988 and Robinson 1986). In the latter study, equally talented high school mathematics students were divided into those who by objective and subjective criteria were still involved in math by senior year, and those who were not. It was found that the involved students spent 15 percent of their waking time outside of school studying, 6 percent in structured leisure activities (e.g., playing a musical instrument, doing sports), and 14 percent in unstructured activities, like hanging out with buddies and socializing. For those no longer involved, the respective percentages were 5 percent, 2 percent, and 26 percent. Since each percentage point corresponds to about one hour spent in the activity each week, the figures mean that students still involved in math spend one hour a week more studying than in unstructured socializing, whereas those no longer involved spend 21 more hours a week socializing than studying. When a teenager becomes exclusively dependent on the company of peers, there is little chance to develop a complex skill.
The description of Dorothy’s life-style is based on personal experience.
For Susan Butcher, see The New Yorker (Oct. 5, 1987, pp. 34–35).
Kinship groups. One of the most eloquent essays on the civilizing effects of the family on humankind is Lévi-Strauss’s Les Structures élementaires de la Parenté (1947 [1969]). The sociobiological claim was first articulated by Hamilton (1964), Trivers (1972), Alexander (1974), and E. O. Wilson (1975). For later contributions to this topic see Sahlins (1976), Alexander (1979), Lumdsen & Wilson (1983), and Boyd & Richerson (1985). The attachment literature is now very large; the classics in the area include work by John Bowlby (1969) and Mary D. Ainsworth et al. (1978).
Primogeniture. For the effects of inheritance laws in Europe see Habakuk (1955); in France, see Pitts (1964); in Austria and Germany, see Mitterauer & Sieder (1983).
Monogamy. According to some sociobiologists, however, monogamy does have an absolute advantage over other mating combinations. If we assume that siblings help each other more in proportion to the genes they share, then children of monogamous marriages will help each other more because they share more genes than children whose parents are not the same. Thus under selective pressures, children of monogamous couples will get more help, and thus might survive more easily, and reproduce proportionately more, than children of polygamous couples growing up in a similar environment. Moving from the biological to the cultural level of explanation, it seems clear that, other things being equal, stable monogamous couples are able to provide better psychological as well as financial resources for their children. Just from a strictly economic point of view, serial monogamy (or the frequency of divorce) seems to be an inefficient way of redistributing income and property. For the plight of one-parent families, economic and otherwise, see, for instance, Hetherington (1979), McLanahan (1988), and Tessman (1978).
Cistothorus palustris. The marital practices of the marsh wren are described in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1985, vol. 14, p. 701).
Cicero’s quote about freedom was printed in my seventh-grade school assignment diary, but despite several attempts I have been unable to find its source. I sincerely hope it is not apocryphal.
Family complexity. Following the lead of Pagels’s (1988) definition of complexity, we could also say that a family whose interactions