10 ms·

Why Do Some People Learn Faster?

390 points by mikeleeorg 15y ago

zanek 15y ago
I totally agree with the points in the article. I actually have actively pushed myself to learn from my own mistakes since I was around 22-23 yrs old. For me, it was a natural, logical way to learn. I looked at it like riding a bike. Almost noone says they cant ride a bike if they make a mistake and fall. They try to adjust their balance better or think about what caused them to fall. They key is that they get back on the bike. However, in other areas of life, people dont think that what they are doing is like riding a bike when it really is. With that approach I was able to teach myself programming, linguistics, etc. Its kind of awesome to read this article a decade or so afterwards.
wallflower 15y ago
"Most people say it's easier to pick up languages when you're younger," says David Green, of University College London, who specialises in bilingualism. "But people can learn languages at any point in their lives. Being immersed in a language is important. Personality is a contributing factor too - not being able to tolerate feeling foolish from making inevitable errors will make learning a new language a difficult process. "The cult of the hyperpolyglot" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17101370 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17101370
- hessenwolf 15y ago
  I'm experiencing this at the moment. I am picking up the local lingo at a relatively rapid rate compared to my peers, and I can see it is mostly down to having no sense of embarrassment. I went around saying 'Biscuit' to people for a month as a reply to 'Gruess Gott', thinking I was mimicking perfectly, and I'm okay with that.
- dirtyaura 15y ago
  Quite interesting. I feel that my spoken English has stuck to a certain level for an opposite reason: I don't care enough about mistakes and thus I don't actively try to improve my English. I just speak and either I get understood or try to explain my thought in another way.
- kenrikm 15y ago
  I was 22 when I learned my second language (Spanish) I was immersed because my (now) wife spoke very little english when I met her. My in-laws don't speak any english even though they know a lot of words because they are "scared to say it wrong" I just listened until I knew enough and then started to string together words even if the grammer was wrong, Now I'm fluent. Funny thing is if you get my mother-in-law drunk she magically starts speaking english!
- david927 15y ago
  David Green is wrong. It's easier to pick up languages when you're younger. Noam Chomsky discovered that the brain is specifically geared to learn languages around 3 to 6 years old. Kids at that age get the language in a way that you'll never get after. But people can learn languages at any point in their lives Of course. I learned German, from nothing to fluency, in my twenties; and the same with Czech in my thirties. But if you ask me, for example, how a German or Czech name sounds, my answer won't match with native speakers. You can get all the definitions, make no mistakes in the grammar, but you won't understand it at a deeper level. A language is way to express a culture, and the culture is gigantic and ineffible compared to the language.
  - acerimmer 15y ago
    Out of curiosity, why did you learn Czech?
    - david927 15y ago
      I visited Prague and it blew me away. I kept going back; eventually met a Czech girl. In other words: for the best reasons.
      - acerimmer 15y ago
        I'm glad you liked it here :)
  - paulhauggis 15y ago
    "Kids at that age get the language in a way that you'll never get after." This is just an excuse that will limit you. Yes, kids might learn at a faster rate, but they also don't do anything else but learn that language for years. Most people have busy lives which doesn't allow for this unless they completely immerse themselves. As an adult, you also have the advantage of understanding difficult concepts (because you've already learned them in your native language), which speeds up the learning process. " You can get all the definitions, make no mistakes in the grammar, but you won't understand it at a deeper level. A language is way to express a culture, and the culture is gigantic and ineffible compared to the language." Then you don't really know those languages as well as you think. Part of knowing the language is knowing the culture. This requires immersion, studying, and discipline. I've been studying Japanese for the past 5 years and I've started a couple of meetup groups in my area for studying. What I've found is that 99% of the people that try to learn a new language as an adult give up at some point. Mostly when they get to any point of difficulty. You also have to be disciplined enough to study it every single day. Something else I've learned is that the similarities between starting a business and learning a new language are actually very similar.
- Too 15y ago
  An interesting perspective is putting in the years of learning. Say a kid realistically starts learning a language at age 4. Add 5 years and you end up with a 9 year kid. 9 year olds are not thaaat good at language. Compare this with an adult that's been learning a completely new language for 5 years. As in seriously learning, dedicating at least one hour per day, 3-4 days per week. Plus living in the country, listening to radio, tv, etc. I think the adult will win. Even if you compare with an older kid up to maybe 13 years old, but then it's cheating because that kid has been learning the language for more than 5 years, even if you increase the "start learning definition" to age 7.
tintin 15y ago
Isn't this all about interest? When you are interested in a subject you are more likely to try again and learn from your mistakes. People with an almost unhealthy interest in a subject (people with Asperger for example; they think Newton had this) are the brilliant people on the subject.
- crusso 15y ago
  What does interest have to do with the article and the experiments performed? Seems to me that the performance of the test subject depended upon the type of praise given, not the interest of the subjects (which would have been consistently random across test groups)
tpatke 15y ago
I think about Spolsky's post on programmer productivity quite often [1]. I think the most interesting part of the post is when he says, "The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time." Obviously, I wonder if I am a programmer who can hit the high notes and, if not, what it will take to get there. When I read a post like this, I try to apply it to making myself a better programmer in the "high note" sense. Trouble is - it just doesn't apply (and I am a huge fan of Dweck's work). This article is one for the masses - not people who are trying to create the next Google. Motivation, hard work and an ability to learn from mistakes are all necessary, but ultimately not sufficient for our craft. If I had to guess what the missing ingredient is, I would say creativity. Heck - we are programmers. We get immediate feedback on our mistakes all day long and anyone reading this post has most likely gotten really really good and learning from those mistakes. ...but, how many of us are hitting those high notes? [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html
- mburney 15y ago
  I have seen programmers make the same avoidable mistakes over and over again without learning much from them. Sure, they learn from syntactical errors and perhaps how to avoid specific kinds of errors. But how many programmers will actually re-model their entire coding paradigm in order to improve?
  - mekoka 15y ago
    In order to learn from a "mistake" there needs to be some sort of feedback. Many programmers make the same mistake over and over because it hasn't yet come back to seriously bite them in the ass, or because the evidence of it isn't clear. Only then is the mistake corrected and the lesson learnt. For example, in this day and age of fast processors, abundant memory, large hard-drives, you can't expect a novice to put much emphasis on efficiency. He'll code and will run his program just to see the output appear almost instantly. A veteran will look at it and shake her head, but that's because she knows that back in her days, code this inefficient guaranteed that you'd spend the day in the lab just waiting to see the first letter of the output. Don't expect the newbie to learn that lesson any time soon, with his blazingly fast laptop, on which he's working comfortably from his bedroom. Now, hand him one of those snail computers at his next internship and watch the transformation operate.
tmh88j 15y ago
While I do agree that learning from your mistakes is a huge part of education, I think your interests are a close second. Generally, I'm intrigued by something that others deem to be difficult. I scored better grades in all of my engineering, math and science classes than my intro courses like psychology, economics and so on which I attribute to being more interested in science and thus being able to focus more. For example, I was always very intrigued by calculus because most people talk of how difficult it is. I wanted to know why it's so difficult, so the first opportunity I had I took a calculus course. The subject itself wasn't necessarily interesting, I wanted to know what the fuss was about.
crusso 15y ago
Really, this kind of research points to the folly of the "everyone gets a trophy", "sheltering ego is most important in learning" school of thought. The every-day evidence of that folly litters the corpse of the American public education system. Praise your kids when they do well. Point it out when they've made mistakes (in a graceful way). Teach them that doing better next time is always within their power if they apply themselves. Most of all, let them know that you make mistakes but that you learn from your own mistakes and are willing to work hard to do better. Be a good example of coping with life and its difficulties, including the difficulties of parenting.
- ajross 15y ago
  No, that's just a straw man arguing for the opposite extreme. It's even better established that consistent failure and lack of praise anticorrelates with educational achievement. The point is balance and sanity, not policy flamage.
  - crusso 15y ago
    Speaking of straw men... Did you read what I posted or make up something in your mind based upon your preconceptions? All I said was that praise should be deserved. When you disconnect someone's mental model from reality, it has consequences.
    - ajross 15y ago
      When you start your post with a phrase like "folly" that "litters the corpse of the American educational system", I think it's a little disingenuous to claim that "all" you said was that praise should be deserved. You have an axe to grind, and you picked up a stone from this article to do it. But the article isn't about broad education policy, it's about very narrow findings in psychology. So yes, your post looks to me like a poorly-informed, knee jerk flame. History, if you will, is littered with the corpses of people who thought they knew exactly how to fix the american educational system (or whatever: pick your policy obsession, it's all the same).
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ericHosick 15y ago
I agree that learning from mistakes is really important. I also think that memorizing and rote learning are a detriment to being fast at learning. You can't "get it" if you are memorizing. If you have a firm grasp of something then you understand how to manipulate the concept in different contexts. Adding a new idea allows you to simply twist contexts to include the new knowledge and you've "learned" how to do that new thing. As things get more complex, so does the contexts and thus it gets harder to "learn" if you've been doing rote learning all along. Rote learning is memorizing a new idea in a specific context and there is no room for morphing that context. If you get good at morphing contexts to fit new ideas then you can also get good at taking two different contexts, merging them at getting new concepts out of it: this is the act of inventing.
trustfundbaby 15y ago
I wish I had happened on this article 10 years ago ... I was always very good at school, so I picked up what I thought were bad habits. Reading this now, it's clear that what I was doing was protecting myself from failure. When I'd do badly on a test in a class that I thought I should do well in, I'd stop taking the class seriously so that when I got a 'C' I could kid myself and say "I did that and wasn't even really trying" Oddly enough, I never made much of the fact that if I really wanted to do well in a class (because I was in love with the subject teacher for example ... :D) I could actually put the work in to get to the top of the class ... I just put it down to being smart. This had a lot of bad repercussions when I went to college. For the first time in my life I was not only competing with a shitton of people just as smart as me, but almost as many people who were WAAAAAY smarter. Trying really really hard to only make B's was a huge blow to my psyche and I was very demoralized and uninspired for a long time. It wasn't until I realized that not only did it take hard work, but for me, inspiration or passion was necessary to truly excel at something. That's when I realized that I just had to shun things I really wasn't interested in and devote myself to things that I really wanted to be good at. Even nowadays, I still look at people in this field who I consider quasi geniuses (DHH, Yehuda, Resig) and wonder if I can ever get to that level, and whenever I doubt myself, I go back and read this very deeply inspiring article from John Nunemaker http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/01/12/i-have-no-talent/ http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/01/12/i-have-no-tale...
- bgutierrez 15y ago
  All of the greatest under-achievers I've known were constantly told how smart they were by people with the best intentions, and they had experiences similar to yours.
- KingMob 15y ago
  This. I have the exact same problem. Praised for being smart from a young age (graduated high school at 16), left me with some bad habits about work and effort., and it's only been lately, that I've started to dismantle them. tl;dr Praising smart kids for their intelligence is a sure-fire way to screw them up for years.
joering2 15y ago
hope its not too much offtopic, but if I had children right now, i would definitely use my time differently to teach them things today than 20 years ago. in schools they still _mostly_ teach you to remember useless stuff (no, I am not talking about basics of history) instead of teaching you how to get necessary information, analyze it and get to conclusions. its not a miracle to anyone living in the age of internet that most information you need could be found on internet in less than 30 seconds (you dont need to pack it all inside your brain). ergo i would teach my children fast-reading (real fast) so they can analyze data quickly, and would teach them how to analyze facts and put them together to get to solid probative conclusions. also, how to do basic PI work :) to find data you looking for by assembling big puzzle from different places of small chunks over the net.
espeed 15y ago
This is a perfect example of what Alan Kay meant when he said, "A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points." I had this epiphany three years ago, and it has been my manifesto ever since (http://jamesthornton.com/manifesto http://jamesthornton.com/manifesto).
- gitah 15y ago
  Wow great read. I've been having similar thoughts lately and your manifesto puts my thoughts in words perfectly. My frustration is that I want to see things in another perspectives, but I simply can't a lot of the time..
horsehead 15y ago
This seems really related to the post from yesterday about how the one fellow learned from his daughter not to be afraid to fail (or maybe that was earlier today?).
jakesandlund 15y ago
I know it has been mentioned before about this same study, but I can't remember where: what do you do when your kids are finding the work too easy? Praise them for their effort? That seems like it could backfire if they think they can get by in life with hardly any struggle, while still being complimented for their labor. Obviously, you could give them something challenging to learn, but what about when they're in school with kids that have a wide spread of natural talent? They will probably get good grades and be praised by their teachers for their intelligence, meanwhile getting bored of the same material over and over again. This seems to suggest the need for more individualized teaching, either by the parent, or by a teacher of some "gifted" class.
shawndumas 15y ago
Fixed mindset -- “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it.” Growth mindset -- “[W]e can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and energy.” A fixed mindset and a growth mindset are not mutually exclusive beliefs. As I see it there are three dependent factors in accomplishing a complex task: 1.) intelligence -- raw computational power (impacted minimally by sleep/diet/use) 2.) knowledge -- data stored regarding a given task (impacted immensely by attention/research/exposure) 3.) wisdom -- the application of 1 on 2 (impacted greatly by experience/composure/analysis) Knowledge, and to a lesser extent wisdom, can come as a result of investing time and energy. Wisdom is an amplifier of intelligence and knowledge; it can produce an order of magnitude increase in efficacy with very little change in either of the other two. Both can be true...
silentscope 15y ago
"Education is the wisdom wrung from failure." I really couldn't disagree with this more. No doubt, failure is important in learning. However, to be educated or have an education, at the end of the day, you need to get something right. Personally, I don't learn by failing fifty times and never succeeding. I don't learn how to lose weight if I try fifty diets and never lose a pound. I don't learn how to talk to a girl if I speak with a dozen of them and get shot down every time. I don't learn how to rockclimb by falling off the rock and never gaining elevation. That is negative re-enforcement. I have learned what not to do--the opposite of what I set out to accomplish. Education is progressive. I learn by failing until I succeed, if only a little bit. Then I go back and try to succeed even more. That's the hard part, not calling it quits. Finding inspiration and success in the smallest scraps of result. Just don't sell education or yourself short.
- wccrawford 15y ago
  On top of that, it's perfectly possible to learn without ever having made a mistake in the first place! I've learned plenty of things perfectly the first time, and didn't need a mistake to lock it in. So mistakes are only half the key to learning.
- ars 15y ago
  You so completely missed the point that I wonder if you actually read it. You have to learn FROM the mistake. Learn what you did wrong, and don't do that again. Simply repeating your mistakes does nothing. Can you really try 50 diets and not know what doesn't work in a diet? Don't repeat the same mistake in each diet - that's pointless.
  - silentscope 15y ago
    I suppose my point is: how do you know what's a mistake until something works AND doesn't work? Point counterpoint, right?
fuzzythinker 15y ago
Very similar to "The secret to Raising Smart Kids" from Scientifc America in 2007, bookmarked, but seems behind a pay wall now: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-...
dacilselig 15y ago
Having a Bsc in psychology, I can remember that this was one of those concepts that I picked up from my classrooms and have used for myself. I believe that you could expand on this and say something similar about your athletic abilities. Being from Canada, I've played a lot of hockey and would be told that I was quite good. Having that thought in my head stagnated my ability as a player. It would be mean that when I had a bad game, I would question put blame on other factors and not myself. After reading this article, it made me realize that my self-perception about being a good hockey player was not a good way of seeing myself. After having a bad game, I shouldn't feel bad but rather I focus on finding a way to improve my weaknesses.
orbitingpluto 15y ago
Why do I sometimes learn faster? 1.) When I've had a decent night's sleep. 2.) When I've made efforts taken to manage stress. 3.) Coffee!!!! (Dyn-a-mit-eh!) 4.) When I'm just in interested in why I made a mistake. 5.) Active presence of mind that I should be focusing on the task at hand. 6.) When I'm interested in the material. 7.) When I don't give a damn how about smart or dumb I might think I am. 8.) Removal of any negative influences at the moment. (PHB) And most importantly, 9.) When I've exercised that same day.
netmau5 15y ago
It's great to see a formalized study validate some of my long-held beliefs. For me, the biggest drawback of being self-critical has been "what if I draw the wrong conclusion from this mistake?" Some people call it tenacity: to try again and again after failure. But I think it's paranoia. The thought that I learned and will now stand-by something completely wrong due to a flaw in reasoning is a frightening path towards ignorance.
narrator 15y ago
Memory and learning is not just something that magically happens, there's a lot of electro-chemical machinery underlying all of it that is greatly influenced by gene variation and other factors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation
wtvanhest 15y ago
I'm going to apply this to my management style and make sure I praise people for working hard, trying hard, but not being smart, or naturally good at anything. They know they are good at stuff naturally, but for the team to be most effective, the smartest people need to work the hardest.
HappyH 15y ago
Because of their work focused
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390 points by mikeleeorg 15y ago

zanek 15y ago

I totally agree with the points in the article. I actually have actively pushed myself to learn from my own mistakes since I was around 22-23 yrs old. For me, it was a natural, logical way to learn. I looked at it like riding a bike. Almost noone says they cant ride a bike if they make a mistake and fall. They try to adjust their balance better or think about what caused them to fall. They key is that they get back on the bike. However, in other areas of life, people dont think that what they are doing is like riding a bike when it really is. With that approach I was able to teach myself programming, linguistics, etc. Its kind of awesome to read this article a decade or so afterwards.

wallflower 15y ago

"Most people say it's easier to pick up languages when you're younger," says David Green, of University College London, who specialises in bilingualism. "But people can learn languages at any point in their lives. Being immersed in a language is important. Personality is a contributing factor too - not being able to tolerate feeling foolish from making inevitable errors will make learning a new language a difficult process. "The cult of the hyperpolyglot" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17101370 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17101370

hessenwolf 15y ago
I'm experiencing this at the moment. I am picking up the local lingo at a relatively rapid rate compared to my peers, and I can see it is mostly down to having no sense of embarrassment. I went around saying 'Biscuit' to people for a month as a reply to 'Gruess Gott', thinking I was mimicking perfectly, and I'm okay with that.
dirtyaura 15y ago
Quite interesting. I feel that my spoken English has stuck to a certain level for an opposite reason: I don't care enough about mistakes and thus I don't actively try to improve my English. I just speak and either I get understood or try to explain my thought in another way.
kenrikm 15y ago
I was 22 when I learned my second language (Spanish) I was immersed because my (now) wife spoke very little english when I met her. My in-laws don't speak any english even though they know a lot of words because they are "scared to say it wrong" I just listened until I knew enough and then started to string together words even if the grammer was wrong, Now I'm fluent. Funny thing is if you get my mother-in-law drunk she magically starts speaking english!
david927 15y ago
David Green is wrong. It's easier to pick up languages when you're younger. Noam Chomsky discovered that the brain is specifically geared to learn languages around 3 to 6 years old. Kids at that age get the language in a way that you'll never get after. But people can learn languages at any point in their lives Of course. I learned German, from nothing to fluency, in my twenties; and the same with Czech in my thirties. But if you ask me, for example, how a German or Czech name sounds, my answer won't match with native speakers. You can get all the definitions, make no mistakes in the grammar, but you won't understand it at a deeper level. A language is way to express a culture, and the culture is gigantic and ineffible compared to the language.
- acerimmer 15y ago
  Out of curiosity, why did you learn Czech?
  - david927 15y ago
    I visited Prague and it blew me away. I kept going back; eventually met a Czech girl. In other words: for the best reasons.
    - acerimmer 15y ago
      I'm glad you liked it here :)
- paulhauggis 15y ago
  "Kids at that age get the language in a way that you'll never get after." This is just an excuse that will limit you. Yes, kids might learn at a faster rate, but they also don't do anything else but learn that language for years. Most people have busy lives which doesn't allow for this unless they completely immerse themselves. As an adult, you also have the advantage of understanding difficult concepts (because you've already learned them in your native language), which speeds up the learning process. " You can get all the definitions, make no mistakes in the grammar, but you won't understand it at a deeper level. A language is way to express a culture, and the culture is gigantic and ineffible compared to the language." Then you don't really know those languages as well as you think. Part of knowing the language is knowing the culture. This requires immersion, studying, and discipline. I've been studying Japanese for the past 5 years and I've started a couple of meetup groups in my area for studying. What I've found is that 99% of the people that try to learn a new language as an adult give up at some point. Mostly when they get to any point of difficulty. You also have to be disciplined enough to study it every single day. Something else I've learned is that the similarities between starting a business and learning a new language are actually very similar.
Too 15y ago
An interesting perspective is putting in the years of learning. Say a kid realistically starts learning a language at age 4. Add 5 years and you end up with a 9 year kid. 9 year olds are not thaaat good at language. Compare this with an adult that's been learning a completely new language for 5 years. As in seriously learning, dedicating at least one hour per day, 3-4 days per week. Plus living in the country, listening to radio, tv, etc. I think the adult will win. Even if you compare with an older kid up to maybe 13 years old, but then it's cheating because that kid has been learning the language for more than 5 years, even if you increase the "start learning definition" to age 7.

tintin 15y ago

Isn't this all about interest? When you are interested in a subject you are more likely to try again and learn from your mistakes. People with an almost unhealthy interest in a subject (people with Asperger for example; they think Newton had this) are the brilliant people on the subject.

crusso 15y ago
What does interest have to do with the article and the experiments performed? Seems to me that the performance of the test subject depended upon the type of praise given, not the interest of the subjects (which would have been consistently random across test groups)

tpatke 15y ago

I think about Spolsky's post on programmer productivity quite often [1]. I think the most interesting part of the post is when he says, "The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time." Obviously, I wonder if I am a programmer who can hit the high notes and, if not, what it will take to get there. When I read a post like this, I try to apply it to making myself a better programmer in the "high note" sense. Trouble is - it just doesn't apply (and I am a huge fan of Dweck's work). This article is one for the masses - not people who are trying to create the next Google. Motivation, hard work and an ability to learn from mistakes are all necessary, but ultimately not sufficient for our craft. If I had to guess what the missing ingredient is, I would say creativity. Heck - we are programmers. We get immediate feedback on our mistakes all day long and anyone reading this post has most likely gotten really really good and learning from those mistakes. ...but, how many of us are hitting those high notes? [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html

mburney 15y ago
I have seen programmers make the same avoidable mistakes over and over again without learning much from them. Sure, they learn from syntactical errors and perhaps how to avoid specific kinds of errors. But how many programmers will actually re-model their entire coding paradigm in order to improve?
- mekoka 15y ago
  In order to learn from a "mistake" there needs to be some sort of feedback. Many programmers make the same mistake over and over because it hasn't yet come back to seriously bite them in the ass, or because the evidence of it isn't clear. Only then is the mistake corrected and the lesson learnt. For example, in this day and age of fast processors, abundant memory, large hard-drives, you can't expect a novice to put much emphasis on efficiency. He'll code and will run his program just to see the output appear almost instantly. A veteran will look at it and shake her head, but that's because she knows that back in her days, code this inefficient guaranteed that you'd spend the day in the lab just waiting to see the first letter of the output. Don't expect the newbie to learn that lesson any time soon, with his blazingly fast laptop, on which he's working comfortably from his bedroom. Now, hand him one of those snail computers at his next internship and watch the transformation operate.

tmh88j 15y ago

While I do agree that learning from your mistakes is a huge part of education, I think your interests are a close second. Generally, I'm intrigued by something that others deem to be difficult. I scored better grades in all of my engineering, math and science classes than my intro courses like psychology, economics and so on which I attribute to being more interested in science and thus being able to focus more. For example, I was always very intrigued by calculus because most people talk of how difficult it is. I wanted to know why it's so difficult, so the first opportunity I had I took a calculus course. The subject itself wasn't necessarily interesting, I wanted to know what the fuss was about.

crusso 15y ago

Really, this kind of research points to the folly of the "everyone gets a trophy", "sheltering ego is most important in learning" school of thought. The every-day evidence of that folly litters the corpse of the American public education system. Praise your kids when they do well. Point it out when they've made mistakes (in a graceful way). Teach them that doing better next time is always within their power if they apply themselves. Most of all, let them know that you make mistakes but that you learn from your own mistakes and are willing to work hard to do better. Be a good example of coping with life and its difficulties, including the difficulties of parenting.

ajross 15y ago
No, that's just a straw man arguing for the opposite extreme. It's even better established that consistent failure and lack of praise anticorrelates with educational achievement. The point is balance and sanity, not policy flamage.
- crusso 15y ago
  Speaking of straw men... Did you read what I posted or make up something in your mind based upon your preconceptions? All I said was that praise should be deserved. When you disconnect someone's mental model from reality, it has consequences.
  - ajross 15y ago
    When you start your post with a phrase like "folly" that "litters the corpse of the American educational system", I think it's a little disingenuous to claim that "all" you said was that praise should be deserved. You have an axe to grind, and you picked up a stone from this article to do it. But the article isn't about broad education policy, it's about very narrow findings in psychology. So yes, your post looks to me like a poorly-informed, knee jerk flame. History, if you will, is littered with the corpses of people who thought they knew exactly how to fix the american educational system (or whatever: pick your policy obsession, it's all the same).

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ericHosick 15y ago

I agree that learning from mistakes is really important. I also think that memorizing and rote learning are a detriment to being fast at learning. You can't "get it" if you are memorizing. If you have a firm grasp of something then you understand how to manipulate the concept in different contexts. Adding a new idea allows you to simply twist contexts to include the new knowledge and you've "learned" how to do that new thing. As things get more complex, so does the contexts and thus it gets harder to "learn" if you've been doing rote learning all along. Rote learning is memorizing a new idea in a specific context and there is no room for morphing that context. If you get good at morphing contexts to fit new ideas then you can also get good at taking two different contexts, merging them at getting new concepts out of it: this is the act of inventing.

trustfundbaby 15y ago

I wish I had happened on this article 10 years ago ... I was always very good at school, so I picked up what I thought were bad habits. Reading this now, it's clear that what I was doing was protecting myself from failure. When I'd do badly on a test in a class that I thought I should do well in, I'd stop taking the class seriously so that when I got a 'C' I could kid myself and say "I did that and wasn't even really trying" Oddly enough, I never made much of the fact that if I really wanted to do well in a class (because I was in love with the subject teacher for example ... :D) I could actually put the work in to get to the top of the class ... I just put it down to being smart. This had a lot of bad repercussions when I went to college. For the first time in my life I was not only competing with a shitton of people just as smart as me, but almost as many people who were WAAAAAY smarter. Trying really really hard to only make B's was a huge blow to my psyche and I was very demoralized and uninspired for a long time. It wasn't until I realized that not only did it take hard work, but for me, inspiration or passion was necessary to truly excel at something. That's when I realized that I just had to shun things I really wasn't interested in and devote myself to things that I really wanted to be good at. Even nowadays, I still look at people in this field who I consider quasi geniuses (DHH, Yehuda, Resig) and wonder if I can ever get to that level, and whenever I doubt myself, I go back and read this very deeply inspiring article from John Nunemaker http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/01/12/i-have-no-talent/ http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/01/12/i-have-no-tale...

bgutierrez 15y ago
All of the greatest under-achievers I've known were constantly told how smart they were by people with the best intentions, and they had experiences similar to yours.
KingMob 15y ago
This. I have the exact same problem. Praised for being smart from a young age (graduated high school at 16), left me with some bad habits about work and effort., and it's only been lately, that I've started to dismantle them. tl;dr Praising smart kids for their intelligence is a sure-fire way to screw them up for years.

joering2 15y ago

hope its not too much offtopic, but if I had children right now, i would definitely use my time differently to teach them things today than 20 years ago. in schools they still _mostly_ teach you to remember useless stuff (no, I am not talking about basics of history) instead of teaching you how to get necessary information, analyze it and get to conclusions. its not a miracle to anyone living in the age of internet that most information you need could be found on internet in less than 30 seconds (you dont need to pack it all inside your brain). ergo i would teach my children fast-reading (real fast) so they can analyze data quickly, and would teach them how to analyze facts and put them together to get to solid probative conclusions. also, how to do basic PI work :) to find data you looking for by assembling big puzzle from different places of small chunks over the net.

espeed 15y ago

This is a perfect example of what Alan Kay meant when he said, "A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points." I had this epiphany three years ago, and it has been my manifesto ever since (http://jamesthornton.com/manifesto http://jamesthornton.com/manifesto).

gitah 15y ago
Wow great read. I've been having similar thoughts lately and your manifesto puts my thoughts in words perfectly. My frustration is that I want to see things in another perspectives, but I simply can't a lot of the time..

horsehead 15y ago

This seems really related to the post from yesterday about how the one fellow learned from his daughter not to be afraid to fail (or maybe that was earlier today?).

jakesandlund 15y ago

I know it has been mentioned before about this same study, but I can't remember where: what do you do when your kids are finding the work too easy? Praise them for their effort? That seems like it could backfire if they think they can get by in life with hardly any struggle, while still being complimented for their labor. Obviously, you could give them something challenging to learn, but what about when they're in school with kids that have a wide spread of natural talent? They will probably get good grades and be praised by their teachers for their intelligence, meanwhile getting bored of the same material over and over again. This seems to suggest the need for more individualized teaching, either by the parent, or by a teacher of some "gifted" class.

shawndumas 15y ago

Fixed mindset -- “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it.” Growth mindset -- “[W]e can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and energy.” A fixed mindset and a growth mindset are not mutually exclusive beliefs. As I see it there are three dependent factors in accomplishing a complex task: 1.) intelligence -- raw computational power (impacted minimally by sleep/diet/use) 2.) knowledge -- data stored regarding a given task (impacted immensely by attention/research/exposure) 3.) wisdom -- the application of 1 on 2 (impacted greatly by experience/composure/analysis) Knowledge, and to a lesser extent wisdom, can come as a result of investing time and energy. Wisdom is an amplifier of intelligence and knowledge; it can produce an order of magnitude increase in efficacy with very little change in either of the other two. Both can be true...

silentscope 15y ago

"Education is the wisdom wrung from failure." I really couldn't disagree with this more. No doubt, failure is important in learning. However, to be educated or have an education, at the end of the day, you need to get something right. Personally, I don't learn by failing fifty times and never succeeding. I don't learn how to lose weight if I try fifty diets and never lose a pound. I don't learn how to talk to a girl if I speak with a dozen of them and get shot down every time. I don't learn how to rockclimb by falling off the rock and never gaining elevation. That is negative re-enforcement. I have learned what not to do--the opposite of what I set out to accomplish. Education is progressive. I learn by failing until I succeed, if only a little bit. Then I go back and try to succeed even more. That's the hard part, not calling it quits. Finding inspiration and success in the smallest scraps of result. Just don't sell education or yourself short.

wccrawford 15y ago
On top of that, it's perfectly possible to learn without ever having made a mistake in the first place! I've learned plenty of things perfectly the first time, and didn't need a mistake to lock it in. So mistakes are only half the key to learning.
ars 15y ago
You so completely missed the point that I wonder if you actually read it. You have to learn FROM the mistake. Learn what you did wrong, and don't do that again. Simply repeating your mistakes does nothing. Can you really try 50 diets and not know what doesn't work in a diet? Don't repeat the same mistake in each diet - that's pointless.
- silentscope 15y ago
  I suppose my point is: how do you know what's a mistake until something works AND doesn't work? Point counterpoint, right?

fuzzythinker 15y ago

Very similar to "The secret to Raising Smart Kids" from Scientifc America in 2007, bookmarked, but seems behind a pay wall now: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-...

dacilselig 15y ago

Having a Bsc in psychology, I can remember that this was one of those concepts that I picked up from my classrooms and have used for myself. I believe that you could expand on this and say something similar about your athletic abilities. Being from Canada, I've played a lot of hockey and would be told that I was quite good. Having that thought in my head stagnated my ability as a player. It would be mean that when I had a bad game, I would question put blame on other factors and not myself. After reading this article, it made me realize that my self-perception about being a good hockey player was not a good way of seeing myself. After having a bad game, I shouldn't feel bad but rather I focus on finding a way to improve my weaknesses.

orbitingpluto 15y ago

Why do I sometimes learn faster? 1.) When I've had a decent night's sleep. 2.) When I've made efforts taken to manage stress. 3.) Coffee!!!! (Dyn-a-mit-eh!) 4.) When I'm just in interested in why I made a mistake. 5.) Active presence of mind that I should be focusing on the task at hand. 6.) When I'm interested in the material. 7.) When I don't give a damn how about smart or dumb I might think I am. 8.) Removal of any negative influences at the moment. (PHB) And most importantly, 9.) When I've exercised that same day.

netmau5 15y ago

It's great to see a formalized study validate some of my long-held beliefs. For me, the biggest drawback of being self-critical has been "what if I draw the wrong conclusion from this mistake?" Some people call it tenacity: to try again and again after failure. But I think it's paranoia. The thought that I learned and will now stand-by something completely wrong due to a flaw in reasoning is a frightening path towards ignorance.

narrator 15y ago

Memory and learning is not just something that magically happens, there's a lot of electro-chemical machinery underlying all of it that is greatly influenced by gene variation and other factors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation

wtvanhest 15y ago

I'm going to apply this to my management style and make sure I praise people for working hard, trying hard, but not being smart, or naturally good at anything. They know they are good at stuff naturally, but for the team to be most effective, the smartest people need to work the hardest.

HappyH 15y ago

Because of their work focused

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