Open your mind to personal growth
Posted on September 20th, 2009 by Paul McArdle – 2 CommentsFor those who found value in the previous post about the 10,000 hour prerequisite required to achieve “Guru” status in your chosen field, there was a related article in the AFR recently.
The article “Open your mind to growth” (15th September) was written to promote the release of the book “Mindest: the new psychology of success” by Stanford psychology professor, Carol Dweck.
The book has been added to our Amazon shopping cart, and will be read and reviewed in due course.
In the meantime, employees can access the AFR article here:
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It’s a short article, but the even shorter form is here – people tend to gravitate to either of two mindsets:
1) I’m talented (or dumb) hence success (or failure) will come naturally; OR
2) I need to work bloody hard, in which case I have a chance at achieving success.
In the article, Carol is quoted as noting that this paradigm then affects how people approach life, and hence the success that they eventually achieve. Hence, to paraphrase:
Type 1A = “I’m naturally dumb, therefore I will always be just a [insert derogatory term here, like rocket scientist or brain surgeon etc…] – based on this belief system, they don’t try and hence the belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Type 1B = “I’m naturally gifted, therefore I don’t need to work hard and success will come anyway” – if success is achieved, it is a result of luck.
Type 2 = “I’m going to work hard, and hence have a chance at success” – hence, these people have a chance of making their own luck.
No prizes for guessing which of those paradigms is mine – and what I am striving for all of our employees & active shareholders to be!
This logic applies to how we see ourselves (and the language we use to see ourselves) and, just as much, how we see others (and the language we use to describe them).
As some of you would know, I see only limited value in behavioural/performance models that tend to put people in particular boxes - they can do far more damage than the benefit they provide.
As someone who has tutored a number of students in high school maths, someone who did extremely well at high school and someone who only just scraped through university I have mixed feelings as to the truth of this.
I do believe that there is a natural inherent component to intelligence and ability that is either innate or developed shortly after birth. Certainly I knew that some of the students I tutored in maths were naturally more capable than other students. Likewise I personally put a LOT of practice into developing my skills as a cricketing batsman in high school - more hours than I put into a number of subjects that I excelled at - and yet I was (and still am) a terrible batsman. Technically correct, yes, but still not going to score a lot of runs. This natural component is more like a learning-rate capacity than an absolute limiter.
I believe that this capacity is, in many cases, never even nearly reached by most people. The reason that I was such a successful tutor was that I got the students believing that they could do the maths if they applied themselves - and then motivated them to work. This is where “type 2″ thinking really can help. The willingness and motivation to learn new things is something that will make an individual successful.
Unfortunately our education system promotes “Type1″ thinking. Until our education system rewards hard work and stops trying to dumb everything down then we will continue to produce adults who believe that they either are smart and therefore know everything or dumb and therefore can never be successful. A lack of challenge at high school and some “type 1B” thinking meant that when I got to university I was significantly behind a number of students who were not as “gifted” as myself.
I guess that the purpose of this was not to contradict what Paul has written here, but to paint what was said in shades of grey rather than as a black and white divide. All said and done, the most important factors are motivation and belief. You can have all of the self-belief in the world, but if you are not motivated to improve you never will (the reverse is also true).
[...] Back in September 2009, when Carol was quoted in the AFR coincident with the release of another of her [...]