The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has never liked this view. "I hardly ever use the word intelligence," says Mr. Tyson, who directs the Hayden Planetarium in New York. "I think of people as either wanting to learn, ambivalent about learning or rejecting learning." He speaks from experience: As a young man, he was booted from one doctoral program but managed to get into another and complete his Ph.D.
Over the past 25 years, social scientists have produced some key insights into how successful people overcome their unsuccessful moments—and they have found that attitudes toward learning play a large role from a young age.
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| Warlock Byrd and his creation. |
In a 1978 study, the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and a colleague gave a series of puzzles to children, all of them about 10 years old. The first eight problems required some careful thought, but none was too demanding. The next four, however, were far too hard for anyone that age to solve in the allotted time. On the first eight, all of the youngsters solved the exercises and appeared to enjoy them. But everything changed with the impossible second set.
Reactions differed enormously. One group of students said things like, "I can't solve these problems. I'm not smart enough." They wilted in the face of failure. Children in the other group took a different approach: They kept telling themselves that they could solve the difficult problems with more effort.
Dr. Dweck and other psychologists have assigned labels to these two types of students. Students of the first sort are called "helpless" because they develop the idea that they just can't do something. If they continue to believe that they are generally smart, they still often become helpless because they are afraid to try anything new for fear that failure will undermine their self-image as "one of the bright ones."
Kids of the second sort, however, are said to have a mind-set of "mastery" or "growth." They believe that they can expand their abilities if they try. If they don't succeed, they look for new strategies rather than giving up.
Are these students just smarter than their "helpless" peers? Not according to Dr. Dweck. She has found that children in the two groups have roughly the same natural abilities. In fact, sometimes the "helpless" ones demonstrate greater native powers.
Where do helpless students get the notion that intelligence is fixed? In part from our culture, which bombards them with the idea that IQ tests measure how bright they are. Even well-meaning parents and teachers can foster this view. Melissa Kamins, who worked with Dr. Dweck, discovered that children who primarily receive personal praise ("how smart you are") rather than kudos for their efforts are more likely to develop fixed views of intelligence. A growth mind-set can be learned. In a 2007 study by psychologists from Columbia and Stanford, nearly 100 seventh graders (most of them struggling in math) participated in an eight-week workshop on studying. The subjects were secretly divided into two large groups. Both groups received instruction on how to use their study time most effectively and how to organize and remember new material.
But then came the difference: One of the groups read aloud an article titled "You Can Grow Your Intelligence." It explained research on how nerve cells in the brain make stronger connections after we learn something new. Students in the other group spent that time reading an article about how memory works and learning new strategies for recalling material.
Most of the students went into the sessions generally believing that intelligence was fixed for life, but the group that read about the brain's growth emerged from the experience with much stronger notions about improving intelligence with effort. That group generally showed greater motivation to do well in math class in the weeks and months after the experience.
As the researchers noted, someone's theory about intelligence may not make much difference when times are easy. But when failures accumulate, those who believe that they can improve their basic abilities are far more likely to weather the storm.
—Adapted from Dr. Bain's book, "What The Best College Students Do." Article from The Wall Street Journal.
After reading this article, I enjoyed seeing my own views on intelligence be mirrored. The overall sentiment of focusing on overcoming challenges as the correct path for growth, focusing on what could be not what is, was inspiring. Childhood is a very protected, almost sacred, part of Satanism in where limitless potential is present and upon proper growth and direction, can make an individual rise to great heights. But even if you did not arrive from an ideal background, the article exemplifies the importance and beauty of focusing on new challenges and the fire to attempt to overcome obstacles.
We are examining the very core and primal ways of advancing yourself. It doesn't matter how many times you have failed in the past, or how many times you have won, but the ability and yearning to discover new things and challenge preconceptions from the past. By not being afraid of making new mistakes, and not allowing the ones from the past to bring you down, you have more of a chance of achieving new victories by closely analyzing the present to see how things could improve at their present stage.
It sounds very similar to my philosophy of "upward and onward."
And I would hate to give some sort of impression that just because a popular journal publishes an excerpt from a book it is automatically a fact, but rather I wanted to express my joy in reading something that is very closely aligned with my own mentality and principles.
