Tess+Jacobson+RP+Post+5

RP Post 5

[] gladwell has a fascinating perspective on the definition of failure. rather than going about defining failure by the resulting events, he describes two different types of failures – choking and panicking. choking is a “paradoxical failure,” where a person would revert to instinct and do something really dumb because they are NOT THINKING and only trying to, say, stay alive. panicking is essentially OVERTHINKING. a separate point gladwell emphasizes has to do with stereotypes: sometimes people fail in a way that aligns with a particular stereotype. when is “sometimes”? well, recent studies show that when a test-taker believes that the results of their test will be used to prove/disprove a stereotype, the stress causes him/her to test according to that stereotype. when subjects are simply given a test with no information about the test-giver’s intention, there is no correlation to the stereotype.

[|http://www.carlkingdom.com/why-do-so-many-musicians-fail#.U44plpRdX9p] this article is a little less interesting and a little more speculative, so i’m just going to bullet the info that i found useful:
 * king focuses on trying to explain how most musicians end up the way that they do
 * he suggests that the musicians who “burn out” are those who are stuck in the musical mindset of their teenage years and “used their guitar as an escape pod”
 * i really loved his application of puer aeternus (eternal boyhood)

[] this was a very psychology-oriented article. although all the claims it made were valid, i personally cannot accept woody’s overall conclusion that musicians can’t overthink performances. as musicians practice and learn music, they go through three phases- cognitive, associative, and autonomous. the goal is to have all the technical skills in the autonomous phase by the performance so that the expressiveness and other purely performance related skills can be managed in the cognitive phase. whereas gladwell is convinced that overthinking is a very human way to fumble, woody maintains that overthinking is simply not what happens.

[] If— by Rudyard Kipling in one of kipling’s most famous poems, he instructs the audience (a father to his son, really). in a didactic manner, he emphasizes different character traits. i was the most drawn to his advice to “meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat these two imposters just the same.” in this, kipling addresses the false assumption that failure and success are separate concepts and encourages the reader to recognize that they are simply one event disguised as two.