2837 sats \ 7 replies \ @gmd 22 Jan \ on: How to Fail mostly_harmless
Reminds me of a recent podcast I listened to that really resonated with me about why smart kids often struggle to find success later in life. Growing up in a small pond I was always the top student in every class, Valedictorian, perfect SATs etc and I tied success and my identity to “not trying”.
Once I left that pond and found a lot of people I thought were effortlessly much smarter than me, I think I really sort of gave up on my potential because I had learned to associate working hard with being a failure instead of embracing challenges like I should have.
When you struggle earlier in life you’ve given yourself permission to fail and can be better equipped mentally to work through challenges. I think I could have been a lot more successful in life if I had correctly identified hard work and failure as a virtue rather than immediately labeling myself as not being good enough.
This is basically a re-statement of Dweck's "mindset" research, which has had some trouble replicating but which strikes me as 100% true, based on examples from my own life and things I hear about from other people.
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Reminds me of a parenting tip that we read somewhere. There was a study done comparing the performance of kids doing a new and difficult task. The kids that were told that they were smart struggled because they were frustrated that they couldn't do the task well since they were smart. The ones that were told that they were good learners excelled because they realized that being smart is more about putting the effort in rather than having things come naturally to you.
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I'm the hero that my mother warned me about. I always laughed when she warned me about the wrong kids because I was the ring leader.
I enjoyed this post that you wrote. Contrarian thought is very good. It's a kind of discipline that happens in construction all of the time. We argue, curse, curse each other, blame, cat call, howl and it would seem deliberately try not to work together to achieve results. As intense as our arguments are in the time span of 3 minutes we accomplish more than a carefully orchestrated meeting does. It's brute force and will arguing with reality and then, poof, we have accomplished a better product than someone else who gave up years ago and never pushed through.
Once while finishing concrete on a very hot day my uncle pointed out that I was finishing the surface of the sidewalk too nicely in one small area and that I had 300 more feet to do. He said, "We may loose that battle but we have to win the war." I learned to quickly master the surface in waves of rough to smooth.
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Once while finishing concrete on a very hot day my uncle pointed out that I was finishing the surface of the sidewalk too nicely in one small area and that I had 300 more feet to do. He said, "We may loose that battle but we have to win the war." I learned to quickly master the surface in waves of rough to smooth.
Ha, nice story! That in turn reminded me how I once told my sister that it's not about being clean, it's more about looking clean. Was more in jest but there was some truth in it.
It was more important to me to make everything look clean first and then I would care about the details.
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