> I have to snark a little about a giftie not investigating this for themselves. (snark snark snark) :-) Hah. well, you are the one talking about effort being

> I have to snark a little about a giftie not investigating this for themselves. (snark snark snark) :-) Hah. well, you are the one talking about effort being more important than intelligence. I, on the other hand, have always been lazy. I was in the program through ability alone.[1] I mean, clearly effort matters. But ability matters, too. Otherwise I'd be working at the 7-11 like my parents said I would if I didn't go to college.[2] Of course, if you can't do anything about innate ability and you can do something about effort, "praise effort not ability" makes sense, as you should try to improve the thing that can be improved, right? On the other hand, I think effort has limitations, too. As a kid, I was pulled out of the "gifted" class one hour a day to work in the "special ed" room. Handwriting. My stepmother made me spend probably five hours a week practicing my handwriting at home on top of that. To this day I can't write a legible sentence. I think key is to put effort in to areas where that effort makes a difference. Consume all the low hanging fruit before you start scaling a sequoia looking for pine nuts. [1] the ability to do well on standardized tests, that is. I've never had to learn to work a cash register, so it's gotta correlate to something useful, but I'm first to say that I'm really not all that bright. [2] Actually, considering my schedule variance, I wonder if I could hold down a job where the primary performance metric was "did the guy show up on time?"