Praise Effort and Grit, Not Talent
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
- Stephen King, Author
Carol Dweck led a fascinating study back in 1998 in which she and her colleagues worked with four hundred 5th graders and gave them a series of tests, mostly puzzles, and then praised them in two different ways with these six little words.
With half of the group they said, “You must be smart at this.”
With the other half of the group they said, “You must have tried really hard.”
The first word set awarded intelligence, and innate talent, similar to how many parents and coaches (myself included) get trapped into talking about, and to, our kids. We say how smart they are, or how naturally gifted they are. The second word set praised effort, determination, preparation, grit. What the researchers were interested in, was how the kids would view their abilities, as fixed and unchanging or as malleable and able to grow and change with work.
In the next round of puzzles, the kids were offered a choice. They could try harder problems or easier ones. You guessed right, the kids praised for effort choose to attempt the harder problems. The kids praised for talent selected the easier problems because when you praise for innate talent, you create a form of status. If someone believes they have special talent and they are expected to perform well, then the thought of failing expectations becomes a liability. So to protect yourself as a “gifted and talented” individual we will choose easier tasks to ensure we have high performance.
In the next part of the study both sets of kids were given harder problems to solve and both sets of kids performed more poorly. But here’s the interesting thing. When the researchers asked the kids how they did on the problems, the kids praised for talent lied 40% of the time, presumably to maintain their social status as “talented.” However, when the other kids praised for effort were asked to tell their peers how they did on this set of questions, only 10% of them exaggerated their performance. They felt no loss of self-esteem from doing poorly on difficult problems.
Here’s where it gets really interesting. In the next phase of the study, both sets of kids were given problems comparable to the original set of problems. In terms of difficulty, this next set was just as challenging as the first. The group praised for talent had just had an ego setback in the earlier round, and did 20% worse than they did the first time around. They were told they were smart, then they performed poorly, and now attacking the same level of difficulty with decreased confidence they do 20% worse.
But the second group did 30% better this time around. There’s the difference – 6 words. But keep in mind there are a lot of ways to say, “You must have tried really hard.”
Carol and her colleagues use these kinds of effort or “process” praise: which is praise for engagement, perseverance, strategies, improvement, etc.
– You really studied for your English test, and your improvement shows it. You read the material over several times, outlined it, and tested yourself on it. That really worked!
– I like the way you tried all kinds of strategies on that math problem until you finally got it.
It was a long, hard assignment, but you stuck to it and got it done. You stayed at your desk, kept up your concentration, and kept working. That’s great!
– I like that you took on that challenging project for your science class. It will take a lot of work—doing the research, designing the machine, buying the parts, and building it. You’re going to learn a lot of great things
Next time you see excellent, praise the effort, the grit, the patience and hard work it must have taken to get there. You’ll not only be rewarding excellence, but also building growth and confidence.
Read MoreWhen you Systematize, You Sterilize
“To systematize is to sterilize.”
- Shlomo Maital
Lionel Messi plays soccer with the joy of a child. His inventiveness and wizardry can leave you (his opponents too) gaping in awe. In an interview for the New York Times with Jere Longman, Messi stated that he would quit the game as soon as it stopped being fun.
I have three kids and I’m convinced that they will far exceed me in their capability in pretty much anything that they’re working on currently. The capacity and abilities of my daughter, for example, in ballet and building fairy houses is well…already beyond anything I’m capable of, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me. My boys, currently nine and eleven, are into skiing and soccer at the moment, and because of the understood 10,000 hour rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, I’m quite certain that they will far surpass me as well.
Last night I coached an indoor soccer game with my son Will’s team, and although individually each player is quite talented, we were playing a team that was a little bigger and little older than us. And while it was a close match at halftime, in the second half the opposite team outscored us probably 5-1. Later that evening I attended a party and I was chatting with Artie, one of the fathers of a player on our team who had grown up playing a game called futsal. Futsal is a game in which you play with a small ball on a small court, and the ball doesn’t bounce so well. The game rewards creative, inventive play, and since it’s played on small court, like indoor soccer, most goals come from either breakaways or crisp passing to find opportunities. The game does not reward a single individual attempting end to end efforts.
Artie was suggesting that we should play the game more like basketball in which once we lose the ball our team should retreat immediately back to a defensive position and wait for the opposing team to attack. Once we regain possession of the ball we should try for breakaways down the wings – down the sides and out of traffic on this small field. He pointed out that almost all of the goals scored in the game came from breakaways, we should employ the same tactic.
I’ve only been coaching soccer and lacrosse for a few years now – mostly to my young boys – but Artie has clued me into a couple things that Daniel Coyle has known from studying the worlds best coaches and players around the world, in disciplines ranging from skiing, to soccer to violin playing. The best coaches he finds, talk less yet say more, and let the kids define the play to accelerate the learning.
If you’re a parent watching sports, you have observed it is quite common to see coaches and parents from the sidelines yelling directions or ideas. But as the kids will remind me, and I’ve already observed, they really don’t hear very much as people yell from the sidelines. They hear you in the small moments when you speak to them personally and directly. The second key idea is to set up structured drills, but then allow the exercise to evolve as the kids choose the way the drill is created in real time.
The first idea is intuitive. It makes sense that if you pull a child aside and speak to them personally and customize each tip and bit of advice to them individually and let them understand you know them, your small bit of advice will resonate more strongly.
And the second idea – the one in which you allow the kids, the players, let the drill emerge as they see it happening, allows them find play and individual expression and joy in creating each moment, because the play comes from their own personal expression of skill and ability.
These ideas are aptly applied to our work. Daniel Coyle has spent the last few years studying just such coaches and players on a world class level and found numerous examples of how the best players and coaches mine and build brilliance from seemly “average” players, workers, contributors in almost any discipline. Join us December 7 for a live, interactive event in which Dan Coyle discusses these findings and provides clear, actionable tips on how to crack the talent code.
Read MoreBecome an Alchemist – Expect the Unexpected
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It’s an astonishing thing to observe people who encounter obstacle after hurtle after challenge, and yet seem to only gain strength and confidence and power after each, seemingly insurmountable, roadblock is set before them. There’s a great scene in KungFu Panda II in which the bad guy – an evil peacock – laments, “How many times do I have to kill the same panda?!” because the Panda, of course keeps getting stronger throughout the movie, until the end (spoiler!) in which he’s catching blazing cannonballs and throwing them back. All because he’s found inner peace.
Terry Fox was like that. He developed cancer in 1980, and while still in the hospital, decided to run across Canada to raise money and awareness for cancer research. We lost Terry to cancer but only after he had run several thousand miles across Canada. His mother Betty Fox kept Terry’s legacy and spirit alive for the last thirty years. Betty died last week and the world is a better place for their energy and passion.
In the book Born to Run, we learn Scott Jurek had such an alchemy moment at the 2005 Badwater Ultramarathon. It’s a 135 mile ultramarathon. Run in Death Valley at temperatures typically approaching the mid-120s. After Scott collapsed after (only!) 55 miles in a ditch in 125 degree heat in a catatonic stupor, he searched his mind for ten minutes, and then stood to run the next 80 miles in record time to win the race.
I’ve watched my mom, Bev Hunter, conjure resilience and calm in the storm of cancer these last six months. Harnessing the cumulative strengths of her community, her faith, her research-driven analytical mind, family, and joie de vivre, she has transmuted obstacle into power, challenge into growth, fatigue into enlightenment. And Erik Weihenmayer has been a great source of support and inspiration to her.
Erik Weihenmayer uses that term Alchemist to describe just such people who turn adversity into strength, a challenge into innovation, a smack-down into power.
I certainly agree we have the ability to surprise ourselves. If you watch kids, they do it all the time while testing the boundaries of their own possibilities. But the key is to take the leap, sign up for that daunting project, or impossible race, or mythic challenge you might think is beyond you. Build those capacities, strengths and creative resources now, because you never know when the world is going to sign you up for something beyond your control.
We’re wishing Erik a successful journey coming up as he and his teammates embark on Expedition Impossible. May he and his team find the alchemy needed to win.
Read MoreShared beats Borrowed Brilliance
Have you ever worked with a group of carpenters? Then asked to borrow a tool? In my experience it depends on the person, and the tool you ask for, but many are hesitant. Because as your experience grows, so do the selection, quality and personal connection to each tool. They want to know how you intend to use it, how long it’s going to be gone and when they’re going to get it back. More often the response might be, “Well, what are you trying to do?” or “Let me take a look and give you a hand.” Both because they want to help, and because tools are a personal kind of thing.
But what if you work in the creative, conceptual economy? And sharing ideas doesn’t mean surrendering something that can’t be recovered? Once you understand that sharing powerful ideas means creating value, and that hoarding only serves to allow good ideas to die with you, it becomes at once easy and fulfilling to give freely of the ideas you have. Often those enriching opportunities to give remain remote because we’re just too wrapped up in what we’re doing, and because often people just don’t know what to ask for. But recognition of good ideas to adopt is significantly easier than knowing what to ask. We just ‘know it when we see it.’
The other day we learned a fabulous solution when talking to a senior IT leader at a Fortune 500 financial services company. His group of engineers had a steady +/- efficiency rate of about 46%, and the needle hadn’t moved substantially in a few years. Yet he knew that from a competitive standpoint he had some of the best and brightest coders in his group. Here’s what he did: He first went around to some of the more inventive programmers in his group and asked if he could gather up and group some of their unique and valuable hacks and macros they had created in their work. He then grouped them by application and posted them internally on a wiki where other coders could go in, browse and borrow interesting and useful hacks and shortcuts to solve coding problems.
Pretty soon people in the group were adding and swapping their signature solutions and hacks in a shared environment – both benefiting from the collective wisdom of the other programmers and creating a fun environment to brand their work publicly. Efficiencies shot up to over 65% – both through the sharing and iterating on signature solutions, as well as the camaraderie and co-petitive environment created.
In the conceptual economy ideas are still tools, but we are able to share these ideas and still maintain the integrity and personality of thought, and benefit from an idea tool that comes back sharpened by another. And even if it doesn’t come back, we still get the joy and knowledge of having shared and knowing your unique ideation will live on through the work and voice of others.
Read MoreThe Human Factor Turnaround
I was honored to interview Paul Hiltz last week in Cincinnati. Several years ago as the new CEO of Mercy Hospital, after a string of leaders before him had come and gone, one of the often side questions he would get was, “So how long do you intend to stay?” Paul never had any intention of leaving the hospital, even as it was losing almost 10% annually as a business. He started not only by providing a grand vision of excellence and profitability, but also by focusing on the people part.
Let me explain. You would expect the grand vision board meetings, and senior leadership meetings that happened. What you wouldn’t expect is that he spent much of his days not couped up behind closed doors, but out in the hospital learning the names of everyone who worked there, and what they cared about in their work environment. Paul first argued to the financial team that they should be investing in simple cosmetic and aesthetic improvements – paint, carpet, repairing or replacing damaged and old equipment. With these gestures of recognizing and knowing everyone in the hospital, and investing in the infrastructure and cosmetics, it gave everyone an uplifting sense of being a part of a rejuvinated place to work.
That was just one small part of the equation. Paul wasn’t done yet. The next thing he did was to hire healthcare financial advisors who conducted workshops to teach the caregivers and staff how the hospital financial model worked. People who had worked in healthcare for over a decade were surprised to find that some of the standard practices they had been engaging in to create value and positive revenue for the hospital, in fact had the inverse effect. Many of the ways in which they were working with patients had a negative financial effect, and they never knew until Paul brought in experts to help them understand how the business worked.
Throughout the last few years of Paul’s tenure, there has been very little of the headcount and project slash typically expected in turnaround efforts. True, Paul has helped to optimize some aspects of the hospital operations, but throughout the organization people will consistently say that what has been the most powerful and effective part of Paul’s efforts has been his ability to be present, persistent, genuine, honest, all despite immense financial pressures to perform.
In the face of adversity, think like Paul. Focus on the human aspect, because in the end it’s the people that make the difference.
Read MoreFinding Global Talent
During the .com boom 52% of technology and IT start-ups – silicon valley style – were created by foreign-born nationals. 26% of ALL start-ups in the U.S. are created by foreign-born nationals. People from China, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and well…everywhere, have been coming to the U.S. for the promise of an excellent education and the freedom of entrepreneurship.
Yet the U.S. has adopted a policy of sharply curtailing the issuance of H1-b Visas to stay and work in the U.S. Over the past decade the U.S. has reduced the H1-b quota from 195,000 to 65,000, a quota that was exhausted in 2010 before the year even began. By the end of 2009 more people had applied for Visa applications than were available for the entirety of 2010.
President Sebastián Piñera of Chile is offering $40,000 to people who are willing to come to Chile and start a business. Singapore is offering up to 4:1 in matching funds for entrepreneurs who come and create businesses. Meanwhile the U.S. is making it increasingly difficult and onerous to come to the U.S., stay in the U.S., and create new businesses. And so brilliant people are flocking to these inviting countries, as well as simply taking their excellent U.S. educations back to their home countries instead of staying in the U.S. to build jobs, innovation, and economic wealth.
Start Up Visa is trying to help change that.
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