Motivation, Aptitude, and Skill – The Three Facets of Success and Excellence

The title sounds really cheesy, I know, but this is a subject near and dear to my heart. This post has been on my to-do list since at least October of 2011, possibly earlier. I also want to preface this by saying that I don’t know that this is an original idea — I don’t claim it to be, but last time I looked I couldn’t find anything tying these three concepts together in this way. I welcome comments pointing me to other, better work.

Disclaimers made, here we go. I think that to succeed in any endeavor, you need three things: motivation, aptitude, and skill. Briefly, I will define these as I think of them.

  • Motivation: The inherent drive to do something. This could be for any reason.
  • Aptitude: The inherent or natural ability to do something.
  • Skill: The learned ability to do something.

I have the urge to make a triangle diagram, but I’m going to fight it for now. Basically, you won’t want to do something unless you are so motivated, which is something of a tautology. You may not be able to unless you have the aptitude. A good example of aptitude is the proverbial one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest. No matter how much he practices, he’s still going to have a very hard time. Finally, skill is the development that occurs on top of aptitude. There’s a common misconception that Mozart was simply able to play the piano and compose because he was a whiz. He may have had a ton of aptitude, but he also had a skilled composer and musician for a father, who drilled him from an early age on the skills required to realize that aptitude.

That last point is what really got me thinking about this in the first place. I was a smart kid. I had a lot of aptitude at certain things. I didn’t learn until I got to college that I’d never really learned to properly develop a skill to realize that aptitude. I think there’s a common cultural perception in America, or maybe even the West in general, that some people are just naturally really good at something, and therefore they end up excelling at it. This is a really poisonous notion, because then when people try to realize an idea they become frustrated, decide that they’re just “not any good at it” and quit. Culturally I wish we could shift to really recognize that a skill must be developed in order to realize aptitude.

Let me give you an example that I hope applies to you and will illustrate what you want. It could really apply to any artistic endeavor — this problem seems to be most manifest with regard to art. If, as a kid or even as an adult, you had a vision of something you wanted to draw, and then you sat down to try to draw it, you probably found that you could not make what was in your head appear on the paper. To me that artistic vision was part of the aptitude, but the skill was missing. Obviously if you were trying, you had the motivation. If you were like me (at least at one point), you may have become frustrated and given up. This is because your motivation was being channeled into merely trying, not developing the necessary skill, perhaps because you believed that you just weren’t naturally good enough at it. If drawing doesn’t apply to you, maybe it was playing guitar, or playing basketball, or learning to program.

Before I close this initial essay on this topic, let’s examine what happens when you only have two of the three components of this triangle-I-will-not-draw:

  • Motivation and Aptitude: Skill is lacking, and so as in the example above, this often results in frustration. If you recognize that skill must be developed, then that frustration can be channeled productively.
  • Aptitude and Skill: No motivation, so you never get it done. Could be considered “wasted talent”, but there are many good reasons to not be motivated to do something.
  • Motivation and Skill: This is tough. This is the one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest. Like the first situation, it’s going to lead to frustration. In this case probably the only reasonable response is acceptance.

So there you have it, motivation, aptitude and skill. The next post on this topic will probably relate these three concepts to the concept of a “challenge”. I welcome additional thoughts as well as criticism.

Password-protected VNC access to Macs from Linux with more than 8 character passwords

The Vinagre VNC viewer included in GNOME on Linux does not currently allow more than 8 characters in a password due to historical limitations of the VNC protocol.

Apple has somehow (and I don’t pretend to understand this) extended the protocol to use both a username and a password, including passwords longer than 8 characters.

Someone provided a patch to the Vinagre project to fix this over six months ago, but they blew it off. I went ahead and patched the source and rebuilt the package on my x86_64 Debian Wheezy/Sid system. You can download it from here, and go pester the developers to accept the patch in mainline.

Finally I can use my ScanSnap S1500 in Linux!

I have been using Fujitsu ScanSnap double-sided auto-feeding scanner for years. I started with a Mac model (S300M I think? no Windows drivers?) and then moved to a Windows model, the S1500.

For the last couple of years I’ve been running a Windows virtual machine in VMWare Workstation primarily so that I can use my scanner and the included OCR features (turn scans into text).

Recently, I’ve been having a lot of trouble with VMWare Workstation, and I run libvirt/qemu-kvm on my web server, so I decided to try it on my workstation as well. It works pretty well for Windows 7, not a fast as VMWare when it worked properly, but the scanner will not function correctly using it.

Last time I looked into using the S1500 on Linux I found almost nothing. I could scan stuff but it wasn’t very useful for a paperless office workflow, the whole reason I have such a scanner.

I am happy to say that, on Debian Wheezy/Sid, gscan2pdf with the libsane-perl backend and tesseract for OCR seem to work nicely. Some caveats:

  • I downloaded the newest version of gscan2pdf and installed it. At the moment that is 1.0.6.
  • The ‘Page Options’ tab of the ‘Scan Document’ window only works properly when I choose options that don’t make much sense. I selected ‘ADF Duplex’ in the ‘Standard’ tab, and then in the ‘Source document’ section of the ‘Page Options’ tab, I have selected ‘Single-sided’ and ‘Side to scan: Facing’. Otherwise, the page numbers come out strange. I do still get double-sided scanning, though.

I couldn’t find a lot about this on the web, so I hope it helps someone else in my position. Happy scanning!

EDIT 2012-10-28 Strangely enough, I was able to get the scanner working just fine in my Windows VM using Spice USB redirection. It’s good to have the fallback, but I’ll try to stick with Linux, it’s much more convenient and removes a dependency.

Melatonin for Jet Lag: The short and simple answer.

I am going to be doing a few red-eye flights in the near future, to time zones far from my own. I decided to review the scientific recommendations around melatonin for jet lag. Unfortunately, most of the articles that have the needed information are behind paywalls, so I bit the bullet and bought a review article. Now I can share the important information with you, dear readers. Here it is:

  • Take 2-5 mg of fast-dissolving or liquid melatonin about 30 minutes before sleep.
  • Do this when you’re ready to sleep on the red-eye flight
  • Do this every day at your destination for the first 3-4 days
  • Maybe avoid caffeine and alcohol
  • Do NOT take melatonin earlier in the day, or at any other day or time beside what is listed above. This includes not taking any in the days before your flight.
  • Try to get dark when you should be sleeping and light when you should be awake (by the time zone you’re adjusting to).

That’s it. Lots of long-winded discussion exists on the internet. Many abstracts tease at this information but don’t give it. But now you have it. Happy travels.

Retiring Virtually Shocking

I started Virtually Shocking when I had dreams of becoming the web’s foremost cardiac electrophysiology blogger, especially as it relates to simulation. As it turns out, I didn’t really have the interest, drive, or time required to achieve such lofty status. I would much rather blog about whatever interests me. Some of that relates to cardiac simulation, some does not.

I’ve therefore moved the blog to http://blog.brocktice.com. I’ve set up redirects and all of that good stuff, so old links should all still work.

I’ve taken down my fancy Virtually Shocking theme and replaced it with an oldish-looking default wordpress theme. This blog is about content, not presentation. At some point I’ll spiff it up a little.

I’m sad to see Virtually Shocking go, but if I’d been honest with myself, this should have become blog.brocktice.com a long time ago. I may still post Cardiac Electrophysiology stuff over at http://cardiosolv.com/blog/.