Do you think working harder makes you better? According to author Peter Orszag in the article “The Effort is the Prize,” dedicated hours of practice may far exceed talent in helping us achieve success in many arenas. He states that “conventional wisdom significantly exaggerates the relative role of innate and immutable ability in complex tasks.”
In other words, spending tremendous time and effort working towards mastery not only leads to greater skill for most of us, most of the time, but also probably has a larger impact on the results achieved than the talent or skill we had at the outset.
Peter then looks at the interesting question of WHY some people are willing and able to sustain this intensity while others cannot or do not. He cites Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and attributes much of this ability to mindset. That is, that people tend to bring to a situation either “a fixed mindset, which occurs when someone believes that personal qualities like intelligence are immutable, or a growth mindset, which occurs when someone believes that skills and characteristics can be cultivated through effort.”
As you might guess, the argument follows that a growth mindset, which sees abilities as malleable and under one’s control, tends to lead to greater feelings of motivation and commitment to expend effort to improve. The fixed mindset, in contrast, leads one to give up or assume that what is must remain as such.
I have mixed feelings about Peter’s points. On the one hand, I have always been a big fan of talent! Why not play to your strengths? In fact, for a good portion of my career I took more pride in things coming easily to me and resisted things that were too difficult. More recently, however, I have come around much more to the Orszag/Zweck point of view. Several times in the last few years when speaking at important events or in front of significant groups, I have found myself writing things down and practicing much more than I ever did before. And I discovered something many of you may have learned far before me… which is that I really perform much better when I put in that dedicated thought and practice! Who knows what results I might have achieved had I been working that hard and practicing that much all these years?!?
What do you think about this idea of “growth” v. “fixed” mindsets? Do you recognize yourself exhibiting either or both of these orientations to certain kinds of activities and challenges? When you are faced with something difficult, do you get excited by the challenge and rally your resources to address it? Or prefer “playing to your strengths” and sticking with what comes more easily?
Share your thoughts on the role of practice in achieving mastery or great results!
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As I see it, the idea that you need either talent or hard work is an idea of what you call “fixed” mindset.You know you can choose what do you think. If you believe: it will come easily if I have the right talent/parents/education/genes/whatever or/and I need to work hard – then it will be so. But if you say: “I can easily achieve anything I want” – it will be so. The success and/or achievement could definitely come from talent or hard work, but there are plenty of other ways.
I believe that success is not about talent or hard work. It is about where you are emotionally. If practice and hard work brings you into good emotional place – that’s for you. But if you angry all the way – it is useless and you need to become open to other ways. Ones that make you feel good.
I hear what you are saying about the importance of beliefs and creating and respecting what works for me, or each of us, individually. At the same time though… Isn’t actual concrete success, as in results in the world such as winning races or being a more effective teacher, for example, do you think being in a good emotional place is always enough? Are there challenges you face where feeling good only gets you part of the way to your desired result?
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts!