The Physical Genius

What do Wayne Gretzky, Yo-Yo Ma, and a brain surgeon have in common? Malcolm Gladwell tells us in a truly remarkable article published in The New Yorker in 1999. Three excerpts:

Wayne Gretzky, in a 1981 game against the St. Louis Blues, stood behind the St. Louis goal, laid the puck across the blade of his stick, then bounced it off the back of the goalie in front of him and into the net. Gretzky’s genius at that moment lay in seeing a scoring possibility where no one had seen one before. “People talk about skating, puck-handling, and shooting,” Gretzky told an interviewer some years later, “but the whole sport is angles and caroms, forgetting the straight direction the puck is going, calculating where it will be diverted, factoring in all the interruptions.”

*****

On his days in the operating room, at the height of his career, [neurosurgeon Charlie] Wilson would run his morning ten or twelve miles, conduct medical rounds, operate steadily until six or seven in the evening, and, in between, see patients, attend meetings, and work on what now totals six hundred academic articles.

*****

The most successful performers improvise. They create, in [Yo-Yo] Ma’s words, “something living.” Ma says he spends ninety per cent of his time “looking at the score, figuring it out–who’s saying this, who wrote this and why,” letting his mind wander, and only ten per cent on the instrument itself. Like [Michael] Jordan, his genius originates principally in his imagination. If he spent less time dreaming and more time playing, he would be Karl Malone.

Link via Baseball Musings.