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).

Needed: priority shift

Are you failing to prepare your kids for the impending robot takeover? Sam Chaltain writes:

now, in the shadow of the technological singularity, there are a slew of movies about humankind’s desire to transcend the biological limits of body and brain.

Singularity is that moment when the whole game board changes, when artificial intelligence pulls even with, and then rapidly exceeds (or merges with), human intelligence.

Chaltain recommends that we should

Start focusing less on what we want kids to know and more on who we want them to become. And the good news is that lots of communities are already doing this — not by designing futuristic curricula or teaching kids how to build a better robot, but by recognizing that content is merely the means by which young people develop new skills and habits to carry them successfully through life and to equip them to solve problems we can’t even conceive of.

At the Mission Hill School in Boston, educators have decided four characteristics matter more than anything else: forethought, perseverance, production and reflection. At the MC2 School in New Hampshire, there are 18 habits to work toward, from critical thinking to self-direction. At the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia there are five — inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection; and at Indianapolis’s Spring Mill Elementary, it’s a set of 12, which includes traits such as empathy, integrity and cooperation. These qualities are timeless, as critical in an era of computerized knowledge as they are now. These schools demonstrate that our education system doesn’t need to aspire to a single, universal set of facts to impart. Instead, every school needs to decide for itself that, of all the characteristics the ideal graduates could embody, which ones must they hold to be successful in the world, no matter the decade?

The latest research about how people learn affirms the value of this priority shift. As Paul Tough writes in “How Children Succeed,” “What matters most in a child’s development is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.” California State University’s Arthur Costa makes a similar point in “Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind.” “We are interested in enhancing the ways students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce it,” he writes. “The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information, but also knowing how to act on it.”

Read more here.

If I only scrape a livin', at least it's a livin' worth scrapin'.

Rich Roll writes,

every genuine, sustainable success is birthed only from incredible persistence, interminable patience, invisible defeats, rabid dedication and unrelenting passion.

"If there's no future in it, at least it's a present worth remembering."


Rich Roll again:

we live in such a meme, hashtag and shortcut obsessed culture. And what is the trending topic of the day? The meme that is beyond reproach, enjoying platinum status and irresistible staying power in every corner of the Internet?

The hack.

Consistent with our shrinking attention span, demand for immediate gratification, intolerance for hard work, rebuttal of experiential value, and general (illusory) sense of entitlement to the good life, this hack ethos is emblematic of our obsessive modern imperative for immediacy — the drive to turbocharge, accelerate, optimize, scramble, quicken and hasten our way to maximum health, fitness, professional success and ultimately happiness. A hell-bent zeal to quick-fix ourselves to overnight six-pack abs, envious wealth, limitless free time, and in some ways I suppose, salvation. Finger-snap your way to nirvana. Don’t just keep up with The Joneses — blow them out of the water!

Of course, in many ways this is nothing new — old as time actually. The hack a mere modern vernacular reframing of practices and marketing techniques dating back to the snake oil salesmen and carnival barkers of yore, promising everything from miracle cures to deliverance with a sharp preacher’s tongue and unconscious reflexive response that suppresses question and finds us impulsively forking over our hard-earned coin to the prophet of the moment.

What is relevant is signing up for the journey. What is crucial is showing up at the starting line. What is essential is taking that first step, followed by a second, on what I can only hope will be a pilgrimage that will last the remainder of your days in this short life. Irrespective of success or failure (subjective terms anyway), you are guaranteed to experience what it is like to be fully invested in something, anything. This is what it is to be completely alive. And that is the gift.

Read more of Mr. Roll's inspiring writing here.