There was an article in some magazine not too long ago that most people here have probably read, about how if you tell kids that they did good work because they are smart, they will not try as hard next time, whereas if you tell kids that they did good work because they worked hard, they will try harder and do better. This matches my own experience very well, because for a long time, I had this “smart person” approach to things, where I would try just hard enough to make a little headway, then either dismiss the problem as easy or give up. I see a lot of people falling into this trap, and they almost always are the ones who think they are smart, and who are referred to by others as smart.
I think that maybe it’s not about choosing problems, even. I think that it’s about walking any given path for long enough that you get to a place where nobody else has been, and that’s when you achieve some kind of status in other people’s eyes.
There was an article in some magazine not too long ago that most people here have probably read, about how if you tell kids that they did good work because they are smart, they will not try as hard next time, whereas if you tell kids that they did good work because they worked hard, they will try harder and do better. This matches my own experience very well, because for a long time, I had this “smart person” approach to things, where I would try just hard enough to make a little headway, then either dismiss the problem as easy or give up. I see a lot of people falling into this trap, and they almost always are the ones who think they are smart, and who are referred to by others as smart.
I think that maybe it’s not about choosing problems, even. I think that it’s about walking any given path for long enough that you get to a place where nobody else has been, and that’s when you achieve some kind of status in other people’s eyes.