- In Chia’s experiments, professional musicians learn about two pianists whose biographies are identical in terms of prior achievements. The subjects listen to a short clip of these individuals playing piano; unbeknownst to the listeners, a single pianist is, in fact, playing different parts of the same piece. What varies is that one pianist is described as a “natural” with early evidence of innate talent. The other is described as a “striver” with early evidence of high motivation and perseverance. In direct contradiction to their stated beliefs about the importance of effort versus talent, musicians judge the natural to be more likely to succeed and more hirable. As a follow-up study, Chia tested whether this same inconsistency would be evident in a very different domain where hard work and striving are celebrated: entrepreneurship. She recruited hundreds of adults with varying levels of experience in business and randomly divided them into two groups. Half of her research subjects read the profile of a “striver” entrepreneur, described as having achieved success through hard work, effort, and experience. The other half read the profile of a “natural” entrepreneur, described as having achieved success through innate ability. All participants listened to the same audio recording of a business proposal and were told the recording was made by the specific entrepreneur they’d read about. As in her study of musicians, Chia found that naturals were rated higher for likelihood of success and being hirable, and that their business proposals were judged superior in quality. In a related study, Chia found that when people were forced to choose between backing one of two entrepreneurs—one identified as a striver, the other a natural—they tended to favor the natural. In fact, the point of indifference between a striver and a natural was only reached when the striver had four more years of leadership experience and $40,000 more in start-up capital
- It turns out that run time in the Treadmill Test at age twenty was a surprisingly reliable predictor of psychological adjustment throughout adulthood. George and his team considered that staying on the treadmill was also a function of how physically fit these men were in their youth, and that this finding merely indicated that physical health predicted later psychological well-being. However, they found that adjusting for baseline physical fitness “had little effect on the correlation of running time with mental health.
- research shows that people are enormously more satisfied with their jobs when they do something that fits their personal interests. This is the conclusion of a meta-analysis that aggregated data from almost a hundred different studies that collectively included working adults in just about every conceivable profession. For instance, people who enjoy thinking about abstract ideas are not happy managing the minutiae of logistically complicated projects; they’d rather be solving math problems. And people who really enjoy interacting with people are not happy when their job is to work alone at a computer all day; they’re much better off in jobs like sales or teaching. What’s more, people whose jobs match their personal interests are, in general, happier with their lives as a whole
- people perform better at work when what they do interests them. This is the conclusion of another meta-analysis of sixty studies conducted over the past sixty years. Employees whose intrinsic personal interests fit with their occupations do their jobs better, are more helpful to their coworkers, and stay at their jobs longer. College students whose personal interests align with their major earn higher grades and are less likely to drop out
- What we found is that students can change the way they think about practice and achievement. For instance, asked what advice they’d give to another student on how to succeed in school, students who learned about deliberate practice were more likely to recommend “focus on your weaknesses” and “concentrate one hundred percent.” Given the choice between doing deliberate practice in math versus entertaining themselves with social media and gaming websites, they elected to do more deliberate practice. And, finally, in the case of those who’d been performing at a below-average level in class, learning about deliberate practice increased their report card grades
- Reflecting on purpose led students to double the amount of time they spent studying for an upcoming exam, work harder on tedious math problems when given the option to watch entertaining videos instead, and, in math and science classes, bring home better report card grades
- : Teachers who have an optimistic way of interpreting adversity have more grit than their more pessimistic counterparts, and grit, in turn, predicts better teaching. For instance, an optimistic teacher might keep looking for ways to help an uncooperative student, whereas a pessimist might assume there was nothing more to be done… optimistic teachers were grittier and happier, and grit and happiness in turn explained why optimistic teachers got their students to achieve more during the school year
- In a yearlong study of first- and second-grade classrooms, she found that teachers who gave special privileges to higher-performing students and emphasized how they compared to others inadvertently inculcated a fixed mindset among the young students. Over the year, students of teachers who acted this way grew to prefer games and problems that were easy, “so you can get a lot right.” By year’s end, they were more likely to agree that “a person is a certain amount smart, and stays pretty much the same.
- a few researchers have equipped kids with beepers so that, throughout the day, they can be prompted to report on what they’re doing and how they feel at that very moment. When kids are in class, they report feeling challenged—but especially unmotivated. Hanging out with friends, in contrast, is not very challenging but super fun. And what about extracurricular activities? When kids are playing sports or music or rehearsing for the school play, they’re both challenged and having fun. There’s no other experience in the lives of young people that reliably provides this combination of challenge and intrinsic motivation.
- kids who are more involved in extracurriculars fare better on just about every conceivable metric—they earn better grades, have higher self-esteem, are less likely to get in trouble and so forth… kids who spend more than a year in extracurriculars are significantly more likely to graduate from college and, as young adults, to volunteer in their communities. The hours per week kids devote to extracurriculars also predict having a job (as opposed to being unemployed as a young adult) and earning more money, but only for kids who participate in activities for two years rather than one
References
- Naturals and Strivers: Preferences and Beliefs About Sources of Achievement, Privileging Naturals Over Strivers: The Costs of the Naturalness Bias
- Some Physiologic Antecedents of Adult Mental Health
- A Meta-Analytic Investigation of Vocational Interest-Based Job Fit, and Its Relationship to Job Satisfaction, Performance, and Turnover, Interest Fit and Life Satisfaction: A Cross-Cultural Study in Ten Countries
- Vocational Interests and Performance: A Quantitative Summary of over 60 Years of Research
- Using Wise Interventions to Motivate Deliberate Practice,”
- Boring but Important: A Self-Transcendent Purpose for Learning Fosters Academic Self-Regulation
- True Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Longterm Goals Predicts Effectiveness and Retention Among Novice Teachers
- Young Children’s Motivational Frameworks and Math Achievement: Relation to Teacher-Reported Instructional Practices, but Not Teacher Theory of Intelligence
- Positive Development in a Disorderly World, Continuity, Stability, and Change in Daily Emotional Experience Across Adolescence, Student Engagement in High School Classrooms from the Perspective of Flow Theory, “Engagement in After-School Program Activities: Quality of Experience from the Perspective of Participants, The Quality of Experience of Asian American Adolescents in Academic Activities: An Exploration of Educational Achievement
- Toward a Psychology of Positive Youth Development, Extracurricular Participation Associated with Beneficial Outcomes? Concurrent and Longitudinal Relations,Adolescents’ Participation in Organized Activities and Developmental Success 2 and 8 Years After High School: Do Sponsorship, Duration, and Intensity Matter?”