Sarah Kanning

This just in from the business section of the New York Times:

“Society is obsessed with the idea of talent and genius and people who are ‘naturals’ with innate ability,” says Ms. Dweck, who is known for research that crosses the boundaries of personal, social and developmental psychology.

“People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.” (emphasis added)

The quote is from Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. The article focuses on success in business, but I’ve been reading The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin (and will be reviewing that here soon), and he says something similar about creative pursuits.

It seems to come down to the way people think about learning and developing skills. If they tend to think they are good at things because they are smart and talented, then when they inevitably screw up, it must be because they are stupid hacks. On the other hand, people who think they are good at things because they have worked hard and focused a lot of time, energy, and attention on developing those skills, when they inevitably screw up, they decide it’s because they need to do some more work, try harder, try a different angle, revise their approach, et cetera. (Those are my words; Waitzkin talks about brittleness versus resiliency in the two approaches to performance.)

The NYTimes article puts it this way:

People with a growth mind-set tend to demonstrate the kind of perseverance and resilience required to convert life’s setbacks into future successes. That ability to learn from experience was cited as the No. 1 ingredient for creative achievement in a poll of 143 creativity researchers cited in “Handbook of Creativity” in 1999.