http://michaelgr.com/2007/04/15/fixed-mindset-vs-growth-mind...
Still one of the most popular posts there.
I really wish this concept was taught to young children. I bet it could really make a difference.
I wondered if he was familiar with some of this research. And also whether it made a difference in class performance.
I've posted it on my LiveJournal blog with pointing to your article and my translation on Google Docs, here: http://vslashed.livejournal.com/9110.html
Since I've never been translated to Russian before, could you drop me the URL once it's up? There's a "contact" page on my site (from the homepage, on the right). Thanks!
Happy to have shared them on my twitter stream @victusfate, look me up anytime.
Encouraging children to aim beyond their means is a very bad idea.
They will have very ambitious goals and will not settle for what they consider beneath them.
This is a recipe for unemployment in the vast majority of cases.
First, it seems that it is by being ambitious and trying to do hard things that we as humans improve. I would rather try to do something hard and fail than set out to do something easy and succeed. Also, often failing at something hard will result in something short of your goal but still far better than you would have gotten by going for the easy goal.
Second, it is very hard to know what your means or someone elses means are, or even what is possible. A great many things that people used to think were impossible have been achieved.
And finally:
They will have very ambitious goals and will not settle for what they consider beneath them.
First, most people will eventually settle if they hit repeated failure (but perhaps settle for more than they would have gotten by aiming low...). I know one person who dreamed of acting and is now programming, whether this is "settling" is debatable, but it wasn't their stated goal. If a person truly refuses to settle, then they have a couple of choices:
1. They can refuse to give up and keep trying without end. This can be good. They may eventually succeed, and even if they won't, they will probably get further than they would by settling.
2. They can try to cheat and use unethical means to get what they want. But the answer to this one is not to make them less ambitious, but to help make the children more moral so they will never resort to this and stick with #1.
3. They can give up in some extreme way such as living on welfare or ending their own life. But I don't think many ambitious people will take this route, and again the answer is not make the children less ambitous but to make them more moral and more stable so they would stick with #1.
In short, I think it is a very good idea to encourage children to be ambitious and work to improve themselves.
There's a huge difference between saying "You don't seem to be very good at math, why don't you stop trying and do something easy instead" and "This seems to be hard for you, keep working hard at it and it will get easier over time. A brain is like a muscle, it gets stronger when you use it"
This idea recognises ability can be tempered by circumstance ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025431
There is no scientific consensus that the brain is malleable in any significant way.
Aiming within one's apparent means will likely result in employment.
Rats that are kept in cages devoid of adornment have smaller, less dense, brains than rats that have toys and varied sonsory stimulation. It's simple, the more things we have with which to think, the better and more complex our thinking can be.
Think Orwell's Newspeak and Herman Hesse's Glass bead games.
What is awful here is that you seem to be convinced that mediocrity is a worthwhile tactic for people and for children... and I think this rips the heart from the very idea of what it means to be alive and better oneself.
YC readers are understandably strongly biased against such values of take-it-easy life. I don't subscribe to such values either, but they can not be straightforwardly discounted as inferior just like that. I would argue that understanding your limitations is just as important as developing your abilities.
[1:Einfuhlung, Johann Gottfried Herder, Isaiah Berlin]
.... ugh, I feel a blog post or some poetic vitriol coming on.
Failure is the result in most cases.
It's worse with children though because it is hard for them to "undo" their excessive ambition as adults.
Ask anyone who regularly teaches both adults and children (musical instrument instructors, foreign language instructors, etc) and they'll tell you that one of the main thing that separates their adult students from their child students is that the children learn much faster because initial failure doesn't bother them. Adult students are paralyzingly frightened of failing, and this significantly impedes their progress in learning new skills. But children seem to understand and be more comfortable with the reality that failure is part of the learning process. You can't learn to play piano (as an example) without first playing the piano very, very ,very badly. :-)
BTW, I think this is why the currently popular advice to "fail early and often" is good advice. Yes, success is better than failure, but the fear of failure and the unwillingness to accept the possibility of failure can be crippling, and IMHO is a major differentiation between those people who do eventually succeed at great things, and the vast majority of us who just dream of doing great things.
Who cares if they fail? If they do, they shouldn't - that's the lesson. If you do, they will - you're a poor teacher.
I don't agree with your assertion. Do you have any per reviewed studies to back up your assertion?
To put it another way, are the many HN articles about starting your own business encouraging potential entrepreneurs to reach "beyond their means"? Who is to decide what another persons "means" are? How do you know?
I ask this in all seriousness, because to my knowledge there's been very little success in finding any early childhood characteristics that have a strong positive correlation to adult success. If I'm incorrect on that I'd love to see some links to studies that do show that adult success can be pre-judged in childhood with a high degree of accuracy.
Besides, as Thomas Edison supposedly said.. "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". By encouraging children to pursue very ambitious goals and to NOT settle for what they consider beneath them, perhaps we can help them to develop the drive needed for that 99% perspiration.
The Stanford Marshmallow study is one that springs to mind - delayed gratification in children correlates strongly with adult success: http://www.sybervision.com/Discipline/marshmallow.htm
Of course, one of the really interesting conclusions of that study was that children can improve their capacity for delayed gratification through practice.
For children, you wouldn't expect them to break down their big overwhelming goals into small subtasks for themselves - you'd do that for them. You wouldn't even mention the big overwhelming goals, or indeed necessarily even have them.
Same goes for adults - except we've got to break it down ourselves.