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Comment by S_A_P | Hacker News Reader

One of the first articles I remember reading on HN was back in 2009. The gist of the article was that you shouldn’t praise your kids for being smart, praise them when they work hard. Rewarding hard work will better serve them in the long run since being smart will plateau at some point.

I have a 9 and 11 year old and I still bristle a little bit when my mom says y’all are so smart.

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It's what Pratchett said: “If you trust in yourself... and believe in your dreams... and follow your star... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

This has truly bit me in the ass. I was 'gifted' and never had to study in high school, or college really. But I was also lazy and it makes learning new things so much more difficult, at least without a structured school curriculum (I do think I might have adult ADHD too, but that's not what this is), despite wanting to make a career change. It's frustrating at times being stuck in that rutt. Oh, well, looks like a new masters for me next year.

On the other hand, those who work hard and aren't lazy aren't having any fun either.

I would disagree completely. Good work is its own reward, as is the respect that comes with it after years of doing the right thing. Its not something you flirt with, its intergity.

Dare I say you're both right and missing each others point?

Doing a good job at everything you do personally and professionally is (like you say) integrity and drives self-respect.

At the same time, the work you're doing can be menial/meaningless to you and thus may take time from tasks that have greater meaning, or it may even be mentally unhealthy (stress) or impact your relationships (long hours) that is sometimes required TO do a good job.

Not everything we do in life is going to matter, I'm not arguing we need to have meaning in everything. However there is a point I think where people do need some sort of personal meaning/connection to some of what they're doing. For many people its family, others charity, volunteering or working in fields where they are passionate and connected to or any/all of the above/other.

Too often people take the admirable approach of trying to do the best job they can at everything, and burn themselves out on tasks and jobs that don't provide them personal benefit in their lives otherwise in my opinion, its a cultural issue that seems to be getting worse.

There are absolutely times where hard work is a grind and not fun or all that rewarding. However I have had experiences where hard work is so fun and fulfilling that I almost hesitate to call it work. Being a consultant has given me both sides of the spectrum.

It does not necessarily have to do anything with laziness. The further you get the fiercer your competition. Most people around here were probably the best in elementary school and high school, perhaps even university. But if you go further up the intelligence or economic ladder, you will compare yourself to peers who are at the same step or next step. And the competition is much fiercer. You are 'competing' with people who are at least as intelligent or more intelligent. You are competing with people who have an even stronger work ethic. And then there is a certain factor of luck whether you'll be successful or not. I struggled with this for quite a while, because I always compared myself to (especially better) peers, and it makes you feel like a failure.

I have learned to accept more who and where I am and to enjoy it. Though it can still be hard at times (that's ego).

This forum in particular attracts a certain type of ‘lazy intellectual’: people that value thought and introspection above constant action. They were the type of children that easily mastered early school subjects without working, but are so fascinated by ideas that mere action bores them. I think it’s important to recognize the advantages and limitations of this mindset. I’ve considered the possibility that it is similar to any other obsessive/addictive disorder, and perhaps we’d be more successful in life if we treated it this way.

Interestingly thats exactly how I thought about the cohort on very early reddit too.

On the pop-psych Jungian scale they (we) would represent the INTP type.

Apply your own logic on yourself. Have you consideed that the arbitrary demand for constant action could itself be a mental disorder?

I used the first person plural specifically because I was applying this logic to myself. I also used third-person in an attempt to de-personalize the observation, but really it's a first-person account.

I've always liked :-

> Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. - Picasso

Yeah like Edison (and Tesla).

Hard work in itself isn't necessarily valuable. Smart work is.

It's vital to learn early on that you have to put in the work if you want to achieve anything at all. Merely being gifted or naturally good at something certainly is not enough.

However, I'd say it's just as important to understand the purpose behind any kind of work and to be able to question how things are usually done.

Achieving the same or better results with less work is what will set you apart.

I challenge the distinction between hard work and smart work. You cannot be smart without hard work. Amassing knowledge and mental ability requires years of effort and work. It is easier for gifted/clever people, but not inherent.

gifted =/= smart

I'd read that as 'pick your battles well'. You can work hard at things and get nowhere, you can work hard at other things and make a ton of progress, and these things can sometimes be estimated beforehand.

You can keep churning out spaghetti code (hopefully the uncooked kind) or you can learn and apply better methods, for example.

If you're working in a bubble self reflection is definitely important. If you have colleagues hopefully they will help you.

When people are too much hung on hard work, they do stupid innefective things. Like, studying that much that you sleep deprive yourself, long crunch in work, sleeping under table in work as proof of commitment etc. Training so much that you get injury from it.

Are you sure? Doesn't work have value under any scenario, if only a residual educational value: a lesson for you and/or others? That would reduce "hard" and/or "smart" to multipliers of that value.

I would make a small change: hard work isn't sufficiently valuable. Smart work without hard work doesn't achieve nearly as much.

On the flip side, you have to challenge them and give them the opportunity to work hard. I think schools get lazy with gifted kids. Gifted kids deserve to be challenged and put to the limits of their abilities the same as non-gifted children, but schools just don't do that. Tracking children by ability in the US has been labeled elitist. Funding often isn't there for enrichment programs. Parents are expected to provide enrichment for these kids outside of school, but it's not always possible either financially or time-wise.

I'm just going to keep posting this when the subject comes up...

"A 20-year longitudinal study has traced the academic, social, and emotional development of 60 young Australians with IQs of 160 and above. Significant differences have been noted in the young people’s educational status and direction, life satisfaction, social relationships, and self-esteem as a function of the degree of academic acceleration their schools permitted them in childhood and adolescence. The considerable majority of young people who have been radically accelerated, or who accelerated by 2 years, report high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading universities, have professional careers, and report facilitative social and love relationships. Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by only 1 year or who have not been permitted acceleration have tended to enter less academically rigorous college courses, report lower levels of life satisfaction, and in many cases, experience significant difficulties with socialization. Several did not graduate from college or high school."

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf

Acceleration has its benefits, but the ideal solution would be to accelerate the educational aspects for the child without accelerating the social side.

I'd rank the options (from most ideal to least) as

1. Gifted kid with other gifted kids, with individualized coursework (ex: Davidson Academy in Reno, Nevada)

2. Gifted kid with other gifted kids, with standardized but accelerated coursework (ex: a g&t magnet program)

3. Gifted kid in general population, with individualized coursework

4. Gifted kid accelerated several grades ahead

5. Gifted kid remains in general population at normal grade level for age

And 3, 4 and 5 are really toss-ups depending on the personality of the child

I was transferred from a poorer middle school and my HS admin prevented me from going into the accelerated classes. I had a bad time in university and have not been able to return.

It hurts me every day. I hope it will get better, but I do not see it happening in this life.

No-child-left-behind really screwed the gifted programs. All the money went to get the marginal kids to pass the tests.

I was in the first big wave of gifted programs in the mid-80s. My teachers had doctorates. There were 10-15 kids in my classes. We did lots of off the wall stuff.

Now, my child is in the same boat, but her class size is 30-35, and the curriculum isn’t particularly special.

Be careful relying on studies in this area. The "growth mindset", like much of psychology over the last several decades, is subject to the replication crisis.

At the very least, the size of the effect is almost certainly quite small.

I think the point is that intelligence is a tool. By itself it doesn't get you terribly far (assuming you want to get somewhere). You need to apply it to something diligently. In other words, intelligence is necessary but not sufficient.

That's why it's fucked up to translate these studies into advice saying "don't compliment your kids intelligence".

Kids will value what you compliment. If you compliment their smarts, they will simply work towards always being "the smartest guy in the room", and making everyone else in that room constantly aware of this in the most obnoxious way they can come up with. If you compliment their work they'll strive to get recognition for that instead, which is a way more functional attitude in the longer run!

Intelligence is like physical beauty. It probably wouldn't be terribly productive to tell your kids all the time how beautiful they are even though attractive people tend to be more successful in life.

Why not compliment both so they know it's an important combination and to take advantage of natural gifts? Breaking rocks is hard work but that is not how I'd want my gifted child spending their time. I'm not saying kids should be showered with compliments either but if my kid genuinely surprises me with their wit I'm not going to be such a stiff piece of shit to think I'm doing them a favor by not complimentin them.

I you watch the TED talk by Angela Duckworth, author of Grit book, she says one thing where they still really have not figured out how to teach resilience to kids.

I was speaking to a high school teacher last week, and they use these grit scores and all the tips mentioned in the grit book. But at the end of the day, they still do not have a sure fire method to teach it or the growth mindset.

Years ago I spoke to a retired mathematics professor on this subject. I remember he pointed out that Évariste_Galois was an interesting case in home education. There was not too much written on this, but he was taught by his mother the classics. What he accomplished at such a young age is still be used today in all sorts of fields.

Kids who went to Sudbury Schools (no curriculum, democratic free schools) report developing high resilience. In these schools kids do what they like: read, videogames, singing, whatever, without any academic pressure or expectations. They try stuff and fail. They have to think about what they actually want to do, rather than looking to the teacher to tell them what to do.

A great book with a similar perspective is Summerhill by A. S. Neil.

We do Sudbury inspired home schooling. My daughter learned to read "late" by most standards (at age 9), but once she decided to it only took her a few weeks to be at the same level as her friends who go to public school. She also learned to read 3 languages at once while her friends can only still speak just one language (part of our home schooling has been language immersion). I feel proud of what she knows, but most proud of her motivation and determination to learn what she wants to.

I am not sure there is one sure fire way to teach kids. Each one is an individual. What works on one child may fail horribly in another. I think that is what we ultimately try to ignore. We want to simplify everything and say we need x or y. When in reality its that this kid needs x and that child y. But doing that is more work, people are lazy. Always looking for instant gratification. I know I have fallen victim to that myself.

What, precisely are you cautioning against? Merely against folks who excessively bristle at "you're so smart?" Or are you cautioning against the growth mindset in general?

I only happened upon the growth mindset in the past year or so, and it's changed (or is changing) my life. I don't see how it's not possible that it's not profoundly true. That doesn't mean that you have to use one author's books or terminologies, but the point of it is a relatively profound truth. It resonates so strongly with me, and explains so many things about my anxieties and emotions, as it apparently does with others. And there's nobody pushing the opposite.

That’s also how you’d raise a plough horse.

The toughest thing in life for a smart person to figure out is often what’s worth working hard at and what they truly want.

It seems as rare to find a person who has gone through the steps to decide if they truly want and value the outcome they’re working towards as it is to find a smart person who doesn’t apply themselves fully when they’re actually interested in, value, and want to accomplish or do something.

Intelligence is a blunt instrument and should be taught to be used with the same consideration and care as you would any other potentially dangerous tool or device.

I would argue it doesn't matter what you expend effort on as long as you're expending effort. IMO the only true rule in life is that you only value things you expend effort on. Beyond being able to afford the basic necessities it's all semantics. For example if efficiency interests you then working smarter could be your thing, but you'll still need to find more challenges to work on so that you're always expending effort. By all means, do this, but if your goal is to eliminate or reduce overall future effort you're fooling yourself if you think this will achieve some higher state of happiness.

The greater the effort the more rewarding it is, regardless of whether others would consider it rewarding or smart effort.

Once you internalize this it's basically the secret to life and you can throw out all of those self-improvement rags. Of course it's still a struggle in that you'll forget it constantly and have to correct course.

I resonate with the bristling too and the struggle to determine when to appreciate is a daily affair due to the kids' diverse activities. My six year old experimented with somersaulting on rings today, barely did anything to start with and then worked it to routine in just a day during a holiday break when he articulated a series of variations at the end. Hard work at play! I don't even know whether to say anything. Don't want to spoil it.

As for myself, I didn't consider myself gifted or intelligent though folks around me seemed to .. but mostly because they had no idea how much work I actually put in .. even just academically. So when I faced the same situation described in the article about facing peers also on top, I was rejoicing and enjoying it instead of despairing as seems to be a pattern. I attribute the main difference to an event that disconnected me from seeking external approval.

Can you find this article and post it please? I have to show it to someone

It sounds a lot like Carol Dweck's book Mindset, or one of the many articles about having a growth rather than fixed mindset.

I think this article is about the study about that topic which started it all:

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/14/science/praise-children-f...

Thanks for the link.

''Praising children's intelligence, far from boosting their self-esteem, encourages them to embrace self-defeating behaviors such as worrying about failure and avoiding risks,''

This is arguably good advice regarding 5th graders. For adult software engineers, however, go ahead and praise them for being smart, since worrying about software failure and avoiding software risks is great.

Try searching for the "Pygmalion Effect on children ", it covers the general principle. (I suggest ignoring the Wikipedia article as it is very narrowly focused.)

I read the Grit book and it talked about having high expectations. I had never heard of this Pygmalion effect before. Thank you for sharing. Here is the article I just found on it

https://www.wisdomtimes.com/blog/the-pygmalion-effect-at-hom...

If you can suggest a better one, I would be grateful.

Here are some articles from 2009 that mention Alfie Kohn, who wrote "Punished by Rewards."

https://www.leanblog.org/2009/01/leanblog-podcast-57-alfie-k...

http://www.blog.montessoriforeveryone.com/are-kids-punished-...

This article also looks like a likely candidate for the OP: https://www.parentingscience.com/praise-and-intelligence.htm...

Kohn goes a long way further. Don't praise your children just for "working" hard either -- that's just encouraging them to seek your external validation.

Instead, help nurture your children's own curiosity, interest, and experience in the things that they do.

Stop treating them like lab rats to be conditioned with praise, because we know exactly what happens when that praise inevitably ceases.

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