personal qualities: page 2...... .Talent Development Resources -..home page...site map*

Part of the problem for someone like me is that I spend a great deal of my time trying to develop an inner, imaginative life, and often that development takes me further and further away from an ability to live practically, or to be practical, in the world.  I can spend my day playing the piano or reading or drawing or thinking or researching, but if the lights went off I wouldn't know what to do; and I don't know how my car got me to my house.  It's a sense of dislocation that's dealt with in the book and that seemed to me to be one of its strong suits -- one of its warnings. In fact, my own soul rests closely with Ada's because these are issues she struggles with. The book made me feel sort of humiliated, and that's always a good place to start. Anthony Minghella - about adapting and directing the film Cold Mountain [with Nicole Kidman as Ada]  [from interview by Ingrid Sischy, Interview, Dec/Jan 2004]

.. .. ...Cold Mountain : A Novel -- by Charles Frazier Stephen Lowenstein. My First Movie : Twenty Celebrated Directors Talk About Their First Film       [Amazon]   [Powells] "..a collection of filmmakers as diverse as the Coen brothers and Ken Loach, Ang Lee and Kevin Smith, Anthony Minghella...

 
...related article:....Creativity and Flow Psychology - by Douglas Eby

  ~ ~ ~ ~

 

A healthful hunger for a great idea is the beauty and blessedness of life. poet, novelist Jean Ingelow...(1820 - 1897) [quote from newsletter of  National Association of Women Writers naww.org]

~ ~ ~ ~

Does she know how unusually creative she is? Does she know that she has the gift of perceiving accurately? She can ignore the obvious and impose her inner sense of ordered excitement, of aesthetically vibrant structure on the world. What an amazing wealth of visual imagery and what conceptual originality! Her relatedness to life is that of a true artist. She finds contradictions and proceeds to reconcile them creatively. excerpt from responses to a set of drawings created by Valeria Golino - responses by psychologist Michel Radomisli, PhD - from book: Celebritest by Alix Goldsmith

~ ~ ~ ~

Paul Moore [Peter Hackes]: It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you're the smartest person in the room. Jane Craig [Holly Hunter]: No. It's awful. from movie: Broadcast News (1987)

~ ~ ~ ~
 

Mensa Bulletin interviewer: "Mensans sometimes talk about feeling sad because no one
in the universe can entertain them or make them laugh as much and as often as they
themselves can. And, on top of that, much of their very best humor is lost on others.
It just doesn't seem to translate. Can you relate to that?"

 "Absolutely!... I feel it constantly." Scott Adams  [creator of Dilbert comic strip and books]
 

~ ~ ~ ~
 

"Few realize that the real Pocahontas was only eleven years old. Hollywood turned the incident
into a love story, but the real story is one of profound moral courage of a gifted child."

Linda Silverman, PhD, from Advanced Development Journal, 1995
 

~ ~ ~ ~
 

*

"When you consider something like death... then it probably doesn't matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly."****Diane Ackerman**[O, the Oprah Mag., Sept. 2000] **book:**A Natural History of the Senses

   ~ ~ ~ ~

"I'm a polyglot free agent. I don't feel like a model, or actress, or anthropologist, or writer -- but I do all those things." Lauren Hutton      [paraphrased from Bravo TV profile]     Lifetime Intimate Portrait video:**Lauren Hutton

~ ~ ~ ~

As for my own failure as a social creature, my mother did attempt to make me less openly critical of people's false faces. 'Now, dear, try to be more popular', she told me. 'Try not to make people so mad!' I would watch my mother, pretty and charming, as she laughed and made people feel clever and pleased with themselves, but I could not act that way.  And so I have remained, in cruel pursuit of truth and excellence, an inhumane executioner of the bogus, an abomination to all but those few who have overcome their aversion to truth in order to free whatever is good in them."  Louise Brooks - in her book Lulu in Hollywood

~ ~ ~ ~

"A bright girl, she left one school after another 'for disruptive behaviour'. .. at St Paul's she failed her first year of A levels. ... her English teacher got her into Cambridge. She started a theatre company... Success led to success." from Film Unlimited article (03.22.99) about Rachel Weisz

~ ~ ~ ~
 

The gifted are by nature emotionally sensitive. In our studies at the Gifted Development Center,
we have found that this characteristic appears in the first few years of life and remains
with the individual throughout life.

from article Sensitivity by Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D.
 

~ ~ ~ ~

"PCS [Professional Children's School] supported, developed and brought to harmony my different selves -- the passionate romanticist, the curious intellectual and the conceptual and visceral artist."     Terrence Wilson, Concert Pianist  related pages:***characteristics***nurturing talent: teen/young adult

~ ~ ~ ~

"I get really bored if I don't have more than one thing going on." ... I have to be constantly learning; I have a very insatiable appetite. I feel if I'm not on the edge of failure, I'm probably not being challenged sufficiently."***Jewel

 

~ ~ ~ ~

"I'm a 48-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles -- a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive." Octavia Butler

~ ~ ~ ~

 "'I don't want to be a whiner.'  'Then you'll need to learn how to accept your superiority' I retorted.
'My what? What do you mean?' Jane was dumfounded. 'I'm not superior.'

'All your complaints -your whining, if you will - center around your probably accurate assessment that your
dates aren't as smart as you, professors aren't as humble, and fellow students aren't as interesting as you.'"

**book: **The Road Less Traveled and Beyond by M. Scott Peck

~ ~ ~ ~

"When I was growing up, not only did my family walk around spouting sesquipedalians, but we viewed all forms of intellectual competition as a sacrament, a kind of holy water as it were, to be slathered on at every opportunity."  from Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman

 

~ ~ ~ ~
 

"Sometimes known as 'the mother of all programmers,' Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace,
wrote what is now known as the first computer language and predicted its use in music, poetry and art.
Born a female original thinker in the Victorian era, Ada's passions and perversions forced her to live
a double life. The duality of her existence as mother/visionary, lover/fiercely independent thinker,
wife/schemer is acknowledged in the film..."

         Lynn Hershman Leeson
  (director: "Conceiving Ada") [ from film website http://www.ted.net/ada/ ]
 

~ ~ ~ ~

 
 

This feeling of being outside, or sympathizing with the outsider, is actually such a common condition for all human beings. And because it's this thing I'm obsessed by, it gives me this really strong starting point, and takes me away.  So I find it's a gift of a perspective, as opposed to a curse.     Caroline Thompson      (director and screenwriter: "Buddy" etc.)    from interview

 

related page:*giftedness: characteristics

  ~ ~ ~ ~

 

Are you relentlessly curious and creative, always willing to rock the boat in order to get things done... extremely energetic and focused, yet constantly switching gears...  intensely sensitive, able to intuit subtly charged situations and decipher others' feelings... pushes toward perfection, driven by a senseof personal mission..? If these traits sound familiar, then you may be an Everyday Genius, someone who shares qualities with figures as diverse as Bill Gates and Mother Teresa.

These are people who break the mold and change the world, who actualize their singular talents, who don't hesitate to "think different."  They are not a tiny group of rocket scientists or profoundly brilliant prodigies, nor are they all former straight-A students. They are real people of unusual vision who share one overarching characteristic: They push progress forward. *from book: **Liberating Everyday Genius

~ ~ ~ ~

Many studies have emphasized that successful creators in all domains have certain personality attributes in common.  Among the personality attributes are androgyny, creativity, imagination, insight, intuition, the presence of overexcitabilities..., passion for work in a domain, perceptiveness, perfectionism, persistence, resilience, risk-taking, self-discipline, self-efficacy, tolerance for ambiguity, and volition, or will. from book: My Teeming Brain: Understanding Creative Writers by Jane Piirto. related pages:**   *courage***Dabrowski***emotion***intuition***perfectionism

book cover painting: "The Muse"  by  Robert Stinson - from Jane Piirto site

~ ~ ~ ~

.. Whisper of the Muse, 1865

Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron

.. Ellen Terry at Age Sixteen 1864

A common trait of great talent in whatever sphere seems to be an exceptional tolerance for, or perhaps blindness to, self-contradiction. Cameron's work embodies the paradoxes of a nature that was tyrannical and benevolent, gushing and steely, flamboyantly eccentric and devoutly Christian.  Her best portraits seem to challenge the Victorian pieties that her lesser work exalts. One might almost call her a closet feminist, except that she excluded women fairly systematically from her album of geniuses (Carlyle, Darwin, Herschel, Browning, Arnold, Trollope, and Longfellow, among others) and saw little interest in the face of any female older than eighteen.  There was room in her pride for only one lioness: Julia Margaret Cameron. from "Angels and Instincts" by Judith Thurman, The New Yorker - newyorker.com Feb 17 2003 ...Julia Margaret Cameron: The Collected Photographs by Julian Cox, et al

..more on Cameron : ...photography : page 2

~ ~ ~ ~

Ackerman's own model is Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932), an English gardening authority who compensated for poor eyesight by developing "astonishing senses ... she could hear rustling in the grass and know whether it was a bird, lizard, mouse or snake.

She could identify most birds by the sound of their flight. She could identify trees by the sound of the wind in their leaves, even as the seasons changedand the leaves dried or hardened.... She had a breathtaking gift for sensuality equaled only by Helen Keller's....  But perhaps the greatest of her gifts" -- and itwas no less a gift for her having worked at it, says Ackerman, who clearly knows a little about this herself -- "was her capacity for delight."   from review by Michael Harris [LA Times, October 30 2001]  of book: Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden by Diane Ackerman

*******~ ~ ~ ~
 
 

[In your book... you profile many of the world's most innovative people in the arts, sciences, and public leadership... What's at their core that generates such creativity?] "Oh, they're quite different from one another in many ways, but one thing they have in common is their tremendous curiosity, which leads to a kind of unfettered openness in experiencing the world. There are people eighty, ninety years of age who are like children of six or seven; they're still open and curious about the world. ...  The important thing is not to confound success -- recognition -- with the creative experience. We can all experience creativity, but unfortunately not all of us can be recognized as artists. Recognition comes only to a few people... But if we're talking about the experience itself -- then, yes, we can all live much more creatively."   Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  [from closertotruth.com program: Can You Learn to Be Creative?] ...book:*Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery

~ ~ ~ ~

******

"Nervous habits? Of course I do. My worst nervous habit is having too many ideas; things like writing a children's' book, making a CD, giving a concert at Carnegie Hall; all of which I have done in the past year." John Lithgow   [talkcity.com chat, 1999]

~ ~ ~ ~"All that I shall ever write will only be a feeble part of what I feel." Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

~ ~ ~ ~

 

"It's hard for me to stay still. I could be in a beautiful moment in a beautiful place,
on vacation, and feel like, God, I'm caged. I have to do something now."  Angelina Jolie

~ ~ ~ ~

"My sensitivity level is high, but I think that's one of my assets as an actor."

John Turturro [Lazar Productions interview, 1995]
 

related page:**intensity / sensitivity

~ ~ ~ ~

"You can look at this piece of work as a whisper of a lot of the things that Gillian wrestles with that are important to her: spiritual conflict, science, surrender, judgement." actress Colleen Flynn - about an X-Files episode that Gillian Anderson [right] wrote and directed. [Los Angeles Mag., Nov.00]

~ ~ ~ ~

 

"That consciousness of quality, and the need to demand it can galvanize your energies,
not just in your work, but in a rigorous exercise of mind and heart in every aspect of your life.
I firmly believe that this engagement in the attempt for excellence is what sustains the most
well lived and satisfying, successful lives."     Meryl Streep

~ ~ ~

"I do intimidate people sometimes. I hate it when I do it unintentionally. I basically suffered for years from chronic shyness. I've gotten over that since I've had children, although I can still be gauche and very reserved."

Kristin Scott Thomas  [Women.com interview, Oct.99]

  more on page:**introversion / shyness

~ ~ ~

"That part of me that tends toward being contemplative, being a writer, living that rich internal life isn't always matched up with the thinking that enables me to run a large-scale business. I sometimes kick myself and think it's both a blessing and curse to be able to have these two talents equally. It's a difficult balancing act."

Beth Sullivan, creator/executive producer of "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" [from WGA journal Written By, July 1994]

~ ~ ~

"..extremely determined, very courageous, patient, disciplined... they have this scary sense of authenticity. There is absolutely nothing that separates the person from what they do... nothing stands in their way. They're never satisfied. .. people that do it better than anyone in the world, but it's always about this next thing and how they're going to do it better... they had this sense of generosity. They all felt that they were given these gifts to share with others."

Ken Carbone , author of The Virtuoso : Face to Face With 40 Extraordinary Talents

~ ~ ~

"I believe a 'talented' person is one who has learned how to effectively cultivate and polish any of the many desirable capabilities with which most of us are born but few of us nurture. One cannot inherit a talent for the violin -- there are no violins in nature. Instead, one must be motivated, able to benefit from practice, and persevering."

 Marilyn vos Savant [in "Guinness Book of World Records" as "highest IQ"]

~ ~ ~

I set such high standards for myself that I'm always on the edge of panic. I've done it ever since childhood.
I was always the new kid in town, so I had to exceed to prove myself. ...

I try to be a positive person... I can't imagine having such a high expectations of myself and being negative.
I definitely wouldn't have lasted."

Julianna Margulies

~ ~ ~

more on perfectionism
 

~ ~ ~ ~

   self-criticism; sense of being a fraud
 
 

"As a youth, I hated myself for not being good enough. All my inadequacies and failures, not being kind enough,
generous or understanding enough, would assail me at night. It became a habit to be guilty and self-castigating,
not liking myself because I was unworthy... I really tortured myself."      Mira Sorvino

~ ~ ~

"I have self-loathing in that I am frequently disappointed in myself. I don't work hard enough, don't write enough,
don't donate enough to charity, don't read enough. But I don't have low self-esteem. I am a confident person...
I don't abuse myself in a major way. I just grind my teeth." Janeane Garofalo

~ ~ ~

"I'm very hard on myself. I've relied heavily on that way of thinking..
I've struggled not to fall into that habit again." Claire Danes

~ ~ ~

"I just never know if I'm going to pull it off. I have terrible, grave concerns about my own ability."

Matt Damon  [Premiere, Jan.00]

~ ~ ~

related pages:**impostor feelings***self-esteem / self concept***

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

 eccentricity

  ~~~

"I hope I'm becoming more eccentric. More room, you know. More room in the brain."
  Tom Waits [LA Weekly, April 23-29, 1999]
 

"I'm from the Delbert Home for the Unusual"  Jonathan Winters
 

"I've always been very aware that I'm different.. I've been treated as a bit of a -- not freak, but an eccentric.
I decided very long ago that I prefer to be who I am rather than obey narrow-minded, small-town mentality
and become what I'm supposed to be instead of what I am."   Bjork
 

"There's not enough eccentricity in my life now... it's important to keep that eccentric spirit alive,
because when that goes, I think the work will go." Nicolas Cage
 

"Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world." Kathleen Norris ["The Cloister Walk"]

~ ~ ~

related article:**Eccentricity and Creativity

~ ~ ~ ~

the concept of asynchronous development:

"There is nothing wrong with being an adult out of sync with your age. I have been like that for years.
Since as far as I can remember my body has completely defeated my age. If you think it is bad to think
like an adult as a child let me tell you it was a whole lot worse when you LOOK about 7 years younger
than you are.

Being 26 now, I look 19 and I talk like a 35 year old. The only explanation of this is that I have learned so much
within my 26 years of life that I have a knowledge base much bigger than the average 26 year old that spent
all her time chasing boys in high school (I didnt) watching TV (I was in the books) getting married and doing what
she was "supposed" to do.

Thankfully in todays world you can do so much more. Had I been born in the 30's I would have ended up some kind of
womens lib advocate. You never outgrow your psycho-chronological age, you always are going to think light years
ahead of the people in your age group. you don't outgrow it. I never did.

There is nothing wrong with it, except for the fact that people have a hard time adjusting to you
because of it. It too can get rather frustrating. Again, there is no need to fix it, nothing wrong with it,
I believe this is a common trait of gifted people."

       [from a note on the Gifted and Talented Adults list]
 

~ ~ ~ ~

"The more I thought about it, the more absurd it became. I couldn't take all those rules seriously...
I was the one person who had trouble with the rules. Everybody else accepted them. Was this a mark
of my madness?... Was I crazy or was I right?

In 1967, this was a hard question to answer. Even twenty-five years later, it's a hard question to answer."

Susanna Kaysen -- from her book : Girl, Interrupted

related page:**mental health

~ ~ ~ ~

"It means that if you hunger for a deep change in your life that moves you in the direction of less stress, more health,
lower consumption, more spirituality, more respect for the earth and the diversity within and among the species that
inhabit her, you are not alone."... You are one of a growing number of people who want to see deep, integral change in
the cultures that have evolved in industrialized nations."

Paul H. Ray, co-author of The Cultural Creatives :  How 50 Million People Are Changing the World

~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~

"Since I first gained the use of reason my inclination toward learning has been so violent and strong
that neither the scoldings of other people nor my own reflections have been able to stop me from following
this natural impulse that God gave me."

 Sister Juana Inés de La Cruz, 1648 - 1695
 

~ ~ ~
 
 

"People often define genius as a set of character traits or as a way of being ("Eight Ways to Think Like Einstein," etc.).

I prefer to think of genius as the fulfillment of our true calling in life, as the flowering of our unique potential, whatever it happens to be.
What good is thinking like an Einstein if you're a Charlie Chaplin, or a Picasso, or a Bobby McFerrin?

What good is acting like a Mozart if you're a Pele, or a Maya Lin, or a Garry Kasparov?

Every genius inhabits a universe of his or her own making, so imitating the behaviors of others is pointless."

   Scott London [host and producer of public radio program "Insight & Outlook"]

~ ~ ~
 

   The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.   anon
 

~ ~ ~ ~

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels... The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules.And they have no respect for the status quo...

They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward...
It's the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, who actually do. Think different

  [Apple Computer, Inc. ad campaign]

AppleMasters program   "an international group of visionaries from various fields: educators, artists,designers, writers,
producers, architects, inventors, scientists, business leaders, musicians, athletes, and other world-changers."
 

~ ~ ~ ~

******************

"In research on intelligence, creativity, school performance, and professional achievement within a field, professional achievement turns out to be not highly correlated with school performance or IQ.

"Suppose, for example, that you are studying physics. Without a doctoral degree and an IQ high enough to help you do the academic work to get it, you're probably not going to become a professional physicist. But once you get the degree, how well does your grade point average or your IQ predict your professional success as a physicist? Not very well. The correlations are around zero.

"In other words, while IQ contributes to mastering relevant academic knowledge and while credentialing is an important way to filter out those who just can't hack the physics, how high your IQ is or how well you did academically is not very predictive of your success as a creative professional physicist. The same appears to apply to other fields-doctor, business person, teacher."

David N. Perkins, PhD [Co-Director, Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education]
[from article: Schools Need to Pay More Attention to "Intelligence in the Wild"]

book:   David Perkins. Outsmarting IQ : The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence
 

 
We have only one formalized process for accessing our brain and increasing our brainpower:
only rational intelligence has been trained and validated. Yet in different individuals we can
easily observe the many different capacities of the human being: exquisite visual and musical
capabilities, spiritual sensitivity, emotional profundity, the ability to take action, to move and survive --
all indicating that there is much more than rational intelligence in our human capacities.

Elaine De Beauport [Science of Mind, March, 2002]

**book: **The Three Faces of Mind : Think, Feel, and Act to Your Highest Potential
 

~ ~ ~ ~

**books

C Diane Ealy  The Woman's Book of Creativity
Dr. Ealy notes in her book that repressing creativity can lead a girl to "become very conforming, to lack confidence in her thinking... overly dependent on others for decision-making... The adult who isn't expressing her creativity is falling short of her potential. ... experiencing a vague sense of dissatisfaction intruding into everything she does."

David Keirsey  Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence
[from the back cover:] "For the past twenty years Keirsey has continued to investigate personality differences -- to refine his theory of temperaments and to define the facets of character that distinguish one from another.... [and] how the temperaments differ in the intelligent roles they are most likely to develop. Each of us, he says, has four kinds of intelligence -- tactical, logistical, diplomatic, strategic -- though one of the four interests us far more than the others..."

Marylou Kelly Streznewski . Gifted Grownups: The Mixed Blessings of Extraordinary Potential

 
~ ~ ~ ~

*personal qualities : page 1****more articles, sites, books:  giftedness: resources******

   giftedness : front page**----giftedness:*self-test***giftedness characteristics ***

  *** -Dabrowski / excitabilities***intensity / sensitivity***perfectionism**

***home page :: Talent Development Resources***site contents*****books etc

*********sections :---Women & Talent ------Teen / Young Adult talent