The best consolidation of those ideas, and the one that hit closest to home, is this paper from Carol Dweck, a professor at Stanford. I initially found it through a posting on boingboing, but ended up putting a diagram from her piece on the back cover of all the new training manuals for the CNN assignment desk.
Dweck says that some people have a "fixed mind set" for intellect or achievement - meaning that you are either born with a certain ability or you aren't, and there's not much you can do to change your circumstance. Some athletes believe that the talent they have is innate, and practicing too much is foolish...what's the point when nothing you do will affect whether you have the inborn ability or not.
Others, she says, have a "growth mind set" towards intellect or achievement - meaning that applying the right kind of practice and effort can improve your ability and outcomes. These people may fail, but they take lessons from that failure, and use those lessons to strengthen their abilities for the next attempt.
These different outlooks are both hard-wired, and the your personal view will be plainly obvious on just a tiny bit of self-evaluation.
I think that what separates the truly special intelligent people out there is this difference - the growth mind set. The growth mind set, if you have it or can find a way to cultivate, means that anything in the world is really possible. The other kinds of people may succeed, but deep down they'll never feel that they did the work needed to earn what they got, only that the inborn characteristics they happened to have carried them to success.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.