Is success about learning or proving you are smart?

Carol Dweck offers some insight in her book Mindset:

Benjamin Barber, an eminent sociologist once said, I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures... I divide the world in to the learners and nonlearners."

What on earth would make someone a nonlearner? Everyone is born with an intense drive to learn. Infants stretch their skills daily. Not just ordinary skills, but the most difficult tasks of a lifetime, like learning to walk and talk. They never decide its to hard or not worth the effort. Babies don't worry about making mistakes or humiliating themselves. They walk, they fall, they get up. They just barge forward.

What could put an end to this exuberant learning? The fixed mindset. As soon as children become able to evaluate themselves, some of them become afraid of challenges. They become afraid of not being smart. I have studied thousands of people from preschoolers on, and it's breathtaking how many reject an opportunity to learn.

We offered four-year-olds a choice: They could redo an easy jigsaw puzzle or they could try a harder one. Even at this tender age, children with the fixed mindset - the ones who believed in fixed traits - stuck with the safe one. Kids who are born smart "don't do mistakes," they told us. 

Children with the growth mindset - the ones who believed you could get smarter - thought it was a strange choice Why are you asking me this, lady? Why would anyone want to keep doing the same puzzle over and over? They chose one hard one after another. "I'm dying to figure them out!" exclaimed one little girl.

So children with the fixed mindset want to make sure they succeed. Smart people should always succeed. But for children with the growth mindset, success is about stretching themselves. It's about becoming smarter.

One seventh-grade girl summed it up. "I think intelligence is something you have to work for... it isn't just given to you... Most kids, if they're not sure of an answer, will not raise their hands to answer the question. But what I usually do is raise my hand, because if I'm wrong, then my mistake will be corrected. Or I will raise my hand and say, "How would this be solved?" or "I don't get this. Can you help me?" Just by doing that I'm increasing my intelligence."

When assessment becomes an exercise in encouraging kids to show off how good or smart they are, kids come to see mistakes and failures as things that should never happen.

This is at odds with what we know about truly successful people.

We know that a healthy and resilient attitude towards mistakes and failures is a mandatory characteristic for anyone who wishes to get really good at anything. But when teachers become more of a judge-in-waiting than a safe and caring ally, then kids can't help but confuse being right with learning.

I won't claim to prescribe the recipe for nurturing a growth mindset in children, but I have a feeling teachers who understand that assessment and measurement are not the same thing have considerable more success than those who confuse the two.

We inherit - and we also become

The nurture vs nature debate is a timeless one. Many people tend to polarize to one or the other and then dig their heals in and debate.

I was reading David Shenk's The Genius in All of Us and was blown away by this photo:

Otto and Ewald are identical (monozygotic) twins. That means they were born from twin embyos derived from  the same fertilized egg. They share the same DNA.

If you look closely you can see some very subtle differences.

Otto trained as a long distance-runner, and Ewald for strength events. Together, they trained for two very different athletic advantages.

Some would have us believe that we don't become. We are.

And while it would be ridiculous to suggest that anyone can literally do or be anything they want to, it is equally as foolish to see our abilities as set in genetic stone. David Shenk explains:

But the whole concept of genetic giftedness turns out to be wildly off the mark - tragically kept afloat for decades by a cascade of misunderstandings and misleading metaphors. In recent years, a mountain of scientific evidence has emerged that overwhelmingly suggests a completely different paradigm: not talent scarcity, but latent talent abundance. In this conception, human talent and intelligence are not permanently in short supply like fossil fuel, but potentially plentiful like wind power. The problem isn't our inadequate genetic assets, but our inability, so far, to tap into what we already have...

So where is this hidden talent?

How do we unlock this long lost source of success?

In her book Mindset, Carol Dweck points towards our minds:

Physical endowment is not like intellectual endowment. It's visible. Size, build, agility are all visible. Practice and training are also visible, and they produce visible results. You would think that this would dispel the myth of the natural. You could see Mugsy Bogues at five foot three playing NBA basketball, and Doug Flutie, the small quarterback who has played for the New England Patriots and the San Diego Chargers. You could see Pete Gray, the one-armed baseball player who made it to the major leagues. Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time, who was completely lacking in grace. Glenn Cunningham, the great runner, who had badly burned and damaged legs. Larry Bird and his lack of swiftness. You can see the small or graceless or even "disabled" ones who make it, and the god-like specimens who don't. Shouldn't this tell people something?

Rather than seeing ourselves as prisoners of our genetics, it would be far more wise for us to realize that we can't even begin to quantify our unactualized genetic potential.

David Shenk summarizes this all nicely:

Our abilities are not set in genetic stone. They are soft and sculptable, far into adulthood. With humility, with hope, and with extraordinary determination, greatness is something to which any kid - of any age - can inspire.

Why am I smart

There is a strong line of research that shows us that how people perceive their intelligence or success may be more important than whether they are intelligent or successful.
Let’s pretend little Sally did a ‘good job’. How might Sally explain her success? Here are a number of reasonable responses Little Sally might give:

•‘I worked my tail off for that project.’
•‘I’m just a natural at this stuff.’
•‘I guessed on like half the questions.’
•‘It was really easy.’

Let’s categorize these responses:

•Which are internal factors and which are external?
•Which are stable and which change over time?
•Which are in Sally’s control?


Attempting to identify how little Sally attributes her success or failure in this manner was developed by Bernard Weiner and it has proven to have some striking implications. Take a look at Sally’s responses again. Which response would you rather her attribute her success to? Sally might attribute her success to factors that are external (luck and difficulty), factors that are stable (ability and difficulty) or factors that are out of her control (luck, difficulty and ability). Most parents and teachers that I know would want Sally to attribute her success to effort because it provides a lot of optimism for future growth. The problem arises when we praise kids in a way that encourages them to focus on how well they are doing.

Alfie Kohn points out “When kids are led to focus on how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.” This means kids are very likely to attribute their successes and failures to factors such as luck, difficulty and ability before effort. That is to say, they are likely to attribute their successes and failures to factors that are external, strictly stable and out of their control. Carol Dweck would describe anyone who attributes their successes and failures in this way as suffering from a fixed mindset.

There is a big difference between focusing on showing how good you are and focusing on showing how bad you’re not. And it might be worth reflecting on how much time we should even spend focusing on showing how good we are, when we could be spending our time learning and improving.

Christopher Reeve and SATs

In Carol Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she demonstrates the dramtic difference between a growth and fixed minset. One sees life as always changing and developing while the other see things like intellect as a fixed quantity that you either have or don't have. The following is a moving excerpt from her book:

Sometimes people with the growth mindset stretch themselves so far that they do the impossible. In 1995, Christopher Reeve, the actor, was thrown from a horse. His neck was broken, his spinal cord was severed from his brain, and he was completely paralyzed below the neck. Medical science said, So sorry. Come to terms with it.

Reeve, however, started a demanding exercise program that involved moving all parts of his paralyzed body witht the help of electrical stimulations. Why couldn't he learn to move again? Why couldn't his brain once again give commands that his body would obey? Doctors warned that he was in denial and was setting himself up for disappointment they had seen this before and it was a bad sign for his adjustment. But, really, what else was Reeve doing with his time? Was there a better project?

Five years later, Reeve started to regain movement. First it happened in his hands, then his arms, then legs, and then torso. he was far from cured, but brain scans showed that his brain was once more sending signals to his body that his body was responding to. Not only did Reeve stretch his abilities, he changed the entire way science thinks about the nervous system and its potential for recovery. In doing so, he opened a whole new vista for research and a whole new avenue of hope for people with spinal cord injuries.

My favorite part of this exerpt is where Dweck asks what else, other than attempting rehabilitation, would be more worthy of Reeve's time? Granted, the whole idea of retraining your nervous system to properly communicate with your own body after such a horrific accident is a little far-fetched, but seriously, what else should Reeve's have spent his time doing?

It was worth a shot, wasn't it? What makes it so isn't that he succeeded. Sure it makes for one hell of a story because he did find some success, but even had he not regained movement, the time and effort he placed into rehabilitating himself is nothing short of admirable.

In school, I fear that adults claim to be the all-knowing predicters of the future. As if we can guage how successful our students will be based on the information we observe and measure while they are in grade school.

Don't you see how foolish this is. I mean, if Christopher Reeve's doctors thought they could see his future - one dominated by incapacity, and they were wrong - what does that say about our predictions.

Research has already shown that our almighty tests like the SAT have proven to be horrible at predicting the future. Alfie Kohn writes in his article Two Cheers for an End to the SAT:

SAT's don't predict the future. A considerable amount of research, including but not limited to a summary of more than 600 studies published by the College Board in 1984, has found that only about 12 to 16 percent of the variance in freshman grades could be explained by SAT scores, suggesting that they are not particularly useful even with respect to that limited variable -- and virtually worthless at predicting how students will fare after their freshman year (and whether they will graduate).

We can talk assessment and accountability until we are blue in the face, but until we can come to grips with how utterly meaningless grades and tests really are, our school systems will continue to view a large population of students as drop-outs-in-waiting.

Literally, Christoper Reeve couldn't stand up for himself, but figuratively he stood taller than the doctors who thought they knew better.

It's time teachers and parents stood up for children and the education they deserve.