Flummoxed by Failure - or Focused?

Many people think of intelligence as static: you are born with lots of brains, very few, or somewhere in between, and that quantum of intelligence largely determines how well you do in school and in life.

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.

 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.

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn has always been an author who has exposed me to many obscured and important facts about the United States, and though I do not agree with his pacifist politics, I hold him in high esteem of being a political author who has changed the way Americans view their previous history. And he is upfront about his intentions too, giving the important thesis in the beginning of his book A People's History of the United States with "...this book will be skeptical of governments and their attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest." In an oceanic abyss of bias and predetermined agenda when writing history books, his statement is quite admirable in that he doesn't disguise what point of view he is trying to present.

This year has already proved to be quite a vibrant battleground for the advancement of myself and the things I would like to accomplish in life, and Zinn's book is one that although I first came to read during my high school years, never finished, and that is something which will be accomplished in MMXII. Skepticism is not something which will be necessary for me to remember to utilize, it is already embedded in my nature. I am prepared to read history from a particular point of view, but what sets Zinn apart from other historians is his honesty and lack of fear to present unpopular facts about our nation's background.

Sometime in the future I would also like to read another version of American history, but for a starting point, the dissemination of obscured knowledge is a good introduction. I do not seek information - I want hardcore knowledge, and here lies the bedrock of government coverups and systematic Darwinian attempts of national expansion and population control.

Now, if you excuse me, I have a lot of reading to do...

Beyond Good & Evil

A Morning In Quotes

"First you have to give up, first you have to know, not fear, that someday you're gonna die."

"The first soap was made from the ashes of heroes, like the first monkey shot into space. Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing."

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. "

"Fuck off with your sofa units and green stripe patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may."

"The things you own end up owning you."

"You have a kind of sick desperation in your laugh."

"Fuck Martha Stewart!"

"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."

"If you wake up at a different time, in a different place... could you wake up as a different person?"

"On a long enough timeline, the surviving rate for everybody drops to zero."

"Tyler was full of useful information."

"A nice big COCK!"

"You are not special. You're not a beautiful or unique snowflakes. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else."

"We just had a near life experience!"

"I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every panda that wouldn't screw to save its species."

"You wanna make an omelette, you gotta break some eggs"

"Sooner or later, we all became what Tyler wanted us to be."

"In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway."

"All the ways you wish you could be, that's me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not."

"You don't know where I've been. You don't know where I've been. Just let us have the basement, Lou!"

"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

"You know, man, it could be worse. A woman could've cut off your penis while you were sleeping and toss it out the window of a moving car."

"Beautiful. We were selling rich women their fat asses back to them."

"No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide."

"There are things about you that I like. You're smart, you're funny, you're... spectacular in bed... But you're intolerable! You have very serious emotional problems. Deep seated problems for which you should seek professional help" and he said, "Now a question of etiquette... as I pass, do I give you the ass or the crotch?"

"Fuck damnation, man! Fuck redemption! We are God's unwanted children? So be it! "

"Faith of My Fathers"

"Your father is a big admiral," he shouted. "Now we take you to the hospital." It was hard not to see how pleased they were to have captured an admiral's son and I knew my father's identity was directly related to my survival.

I began to recover my wits and my interrogators came to the hospital to resume their work. The beatings were of short duration because I let out a hair-raising scream when they occurred and my interrogators appeared concerned that hospital personnel might object. Eventually I gave them my ship's name and squadron number. When asked to identify future targets, I recited the names of north Vietnamese cities that had already been bombed.

In late December, they decided to discharge me. To my great relief I was placed in a cell with two other prisoners, Air Force majors "Bud" Day and Norris Overly. There has never been a doubt that Bud and Norris saved my life. They later said their first impression of me, emaciated, bug-eyed and bright with fever, was of a man at the threshold of death.

Because of his injuries, Bud was unable to help with my physical care. Norris, a gentle, uncomplaining guy, cleaned me up, fed me and helped me on to the bucket that served as our toilet.

In April 1968, Bud was relocated to another prison. Norris had been released under an "amnesty" and I would remain in solitary confinement for more than two years. It's an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment. Having no one else to seek counsel from, you begin to doubt your judgment and courage.

The first few weeks are the hardest. The onset of despair is immediate, and it is a formidable foe. I reconstructed from memory books and movies I had enjoyed. I tried to compose books and plays of my own, acting out sequences in the solitude of my cell. I had to carefully guard against my fantasies becoming so consuming that they took me permanently to a place in my mind from which I might never return.

In mid-June 1968, the camp commander, over an inviting spread of biscuits and cigarettes, asked me if I would like to go home. I wanted to say yes: I was tired and sick and I was afraid. But the Code of Conduct was explicit: "American prisoners cannot accept parole or amnesty or special favors."

Despairing of any relief from pain and further torture, I tried to take my life. After several unsuccessful attempts... I gave up. I signed a confession that "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pilot". The guards ordered me to record my confession on tape. I refused, and was beaten until I consented.

Vietnamese prized us as bargaining chips in peace negotiations and they usually did not intend to kill us when they used torture to force our co-operation. I was released and flown home at the end of the war, in March 1973. I had been incarcerated for 5 1/2 years.

We were told to have faith in God, country and one another. Most of us did. But the last of these - faith in one another - was our final defense, the ramparts our enemy could not cross. This was the faith I had embraced at the Naval Academy.

It was my father's and grandfather's faith. In prison, a filthy, crippled, broken man, all I had left of my dignity was the faith of my fathers. It was enough.

- John McCain, adapted and extracted from "Faith of My Fathers."

Parents & Independence

I hate people who wear the illusion that they are independent. Idiotic kids who turn 18 and think they are entitled to do whatever they want because they are now "adults." It infuriates me to see them talk about how big they are, when they provide no means for themselves and are still dependent on their parents for support.

I resent those given jobs by their parents. Their claims of having a "rough family life" make me want to spit in their face. Sucking Daddy's cock for a nice job, when others struggle day by day to raise themselves up without any cum slurping.

I resent those with the luxury of being able to move to another state for their simple pleasure of discovering something new. Their emotional "adventure" is seen as a hard task by them, instead of the glorious rewarding option that it is.

I hate 26 year olds who still live with their parents, and go snowboarding every other weekend. They spend their money on luxurious things and don't even go to school. At the end of things, they will probably fellate their father as well for a job, and wear the image that they found this hard job by themselves.

I hate smug whores who grab claims to independence yet they don't have a real job. They talk enormously about what important people they are, and how they don't need anybody, yet they don't have money for their own school or other necessities.

I hate the bastards who are able to collect financial aid. In California, the state stupidly assumes that you are financially supported by your parents until you are 24. I have been on my own since I was 18 and I don't qualify because I can't provide a parent's tax information. A parent? As if I had one.

When I go to war, I will take pride in the fact that although I don't receive any help or assistance, I was able to take care of myself and go forth. And if I die, equally, knowing that I was pushing myself to my own limits and entered into a compromise that would give me a better future.

So, little bitches, go ahead and continue thinking that you're what you say you are. Meanwhile real men are walking the talk.