New study yields instructive results on how mindset affects learning | Hacker News Reader

New study yields instructive results on how mindset affects learning

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11 pointsdean6 comments

> "One very common thing is that often very brilliant children stop working because they're praised so often that it's what they want to live as--brilliant--not as someone who ever makes mistakes," she said.

Exactly my experience. I've been trying to figure out how to motivate myself to actually do anything for my whole adult life (and a good bit before), because in my formative years I basically got As for showing up - not only did I never have to figure out how to work at something, when I did find something difficult I instantly decided I was a failure at it and stopped trying.

Any suggestions on how I can break out of that cycle would be very gratefully received... but I'm scared that at 33, it's too late for me to learn how to learn - or how to fail.

OK here's the suggestion.

Do one foolish thing every day.

I am serious. Start small if you have to. Work up to it.

Declare intentions publicly and be open about results.

I completely agree that having that mindset is more motivating and those with it will go further than if they did not.

I wonder however if its true, that the brain is like a muscle and can be significantly improved upon use.

Its easy to test and see that its difficult but possible to go from very overweight to great shape in a few short years. But how easy and common is it to go from really dumb to really smart?

To loose weight things you have to do are obvious: eat less, run, pump iron. And whats even better is you have a feed back loop where you can monitor clearly in simple terms ( a number ) that indicates your progress. But to become clever both the method to follow and the way to measure it is so vague. Which is what is at the root of the problem.

Infact setting up a feedback cycle is important in anything that you want to make progress. If you think startupishly, the early prototype-userfeedback-update cycle is not so different

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