Hard work and persistence

Seth Godin writes,

The story we tell ourselves and the stories we tell our children matter far more than we imagine.

There's a huge difference between, "You got an A because you're smart," and "You got an A because you studied hard."

Or

"I succeeded in getting what I wanted because I'm pretty," and "I succeeded in getting what I wanted because I worked hard to be in sync with the people I'm working with (charisma)."

(And don't forget the way we process luck, good and bad, as well as bias and persistence.)

Smart and pretty and lucky are relatively fixed states, mostly out of our control, and they let us off the hook, no longer responsible for our successes and certainly out of control of our failures. (And, as an aside, pretty sends us down the rabbit hole of surface enhancements and even surgery).

On the other hand, hard work and persistence are ideas we can expand and invest in productively. (HT to Carol Dweck and John Medina).