Producing Excellence: The Making of Virtuosos

"That was a direct quote from one of her interviewees, from a violinist who had gone through that training. I think this book does a really good job of showing the next stage of the competition: this machine that mostly produces losers. We only think about the winners, the 0.5 out of 10 or whatever who become the soloists, but the vast majority of these people are discarded, and the amount of work they put in first is just huge. Wagner’s book is split into how much work they’re putting in and how they all fail. I think it does a really good job of reframing how we think about achievement, high achievement. We always talk about the winners, and we never think or talk about the people who are putting in just as much work, who are working just as hard as the winners, and get nothing. This book is really good at that. Yeah, well we didn’t come up with it. It’s definitely the one that’s been passed down. Education is job training, it’s about your future. We don’t tell kids anymore, and adults don’t tell each other, that school is for intellectual exploration, or developing your interests, or focusing your creativity, or developing your imagination, and if we do talk about those things, it’s only in the context of how those are useful skills in the future for future employment. Like: ‘Oh, actually, employers want creative workers, so we should really get some creativity back into school because now they’re complaining that workers aren’t creative enough.’ It shows the relationship between education and industry."