I often wonder how many more scientists we’d have if we congratulated kids for working hard rather than praising them for being smart. We need to get rid of the myth that science is only accessible to an intellectual elite.
Yes yes yes!
Malcolm Gladwell and Matthew Syed have both written books about this and it’s well known phenomenon in psychology. If you tell people they did well because they’re smart they actually under-perform in future, whereas if you tell them they do well because they worked hard they just get better and better. The myth of talent is really harmful and frustratingly persistent.
I can vouch for the damaging after-effects of inculcating children with this mindset. I’ve been praised for being “smart” for the majority of my life, and never learned how to emotionally deal with struggling and working hard at something. It didn’t help that the usual refrain I heard at home consisted of “well, you’re smart, why don’t you understand X already?” and internalizing my inability to instantly understand something as an unforgivable defect since “being smart” was so inherent to my identity. I was not allowed to admit that I didn’t know or understand something and needed help. Nowhere in this experience was my work or effort at something ever valued. When I was younger, my mother even took to re-doing my assignments and not letting me turn my own work in.
That mindset stuck even after I left home for undergrad, where I majestically imploded into a vomiting fetal ball of anxiety and academic failure. I could no longer “coast” on my slightly-above-average ability to comprehend complex concepts quickly and evidence of my failure to live up to this “smart” identity piled high right and left. I had no idea how to even start learning how to learn at such a late age (at least then I felt it was late) and fell apart at the earliest indication of things not panning out despite me actually putting in some effort for once in my life. But this “smart identity” was so central to my personality that I couldn’t turn to any of my friends to admit this and eventually ended up isolating myself socially since I became so preoccupied with just containing my emotional response to all of this failure. I spent days lying in bed, sleeping and crying my life away, doing absolutely nothing. I actively wished I’d get hit by a car or a bus every time I crossed the street to drag my zombie carcass to class. The big “S” word loomed large in the back of my mind, but I thought of how my mother would really be angry that she’d already paid for the semester and I’ve wasted her money by selfishly offing myself (in retrospect, my mother would not really be this heartless, but it demonstrates the darkness of my thoughts at the time). I made half-hearted attempts to see counseling at school but I felt so much shame at my situation I couldn’t be honest with the therapist. I would’t have this problem in the first place if I was actually “smart” like everyone keeps thinking that I am. I had nothing to be proud of and nothing to show for the four years I wasted there. My only thoughts at graduation were “I’m glad this is over and I can move on from this place.”
I’ve never actually discussed this in such great detail to anyone before, so forgive me if quite the ramble. I don’t like talking about undergrad at all and it fills me with fear whenever someone asks me “Oh, so you went to Uni of X! How did you like it?” The opportunity to attend that institution was completely squandered on me as the only valuable thing I can say I learned was how to fail and move on.
Research was the one bright side to my undergraduate experience and that is the sole reason I am still pursuing that now, even though looking back at it my participation and appreciation of it at the time was rather shallow as I didn’t really move past being the grad student/post-doc little helper. The act of scientific pursuit is so littered with disappointment and failure that it has actually helped me in my ongoing attempt to rid myself of this noxious mindset of needing to have inherent talent or brilliance to produce something of value or merit. Yes, there are many brilliant scientific minds out there and they should certainly be celebrated, and I’ve met many people throughout the years who I can say are inherently brilliant in one way or another, but nowadays I don’t find myself aspiring to be them. The backbone of science lies in drudgery, repetition, and hard work, and I’m just happy to be part of this process in my own small way. I am happy to be a tool and a means to an end, as defeatist as that may sound to some, and this has helped me not take my idiocy regarding many topics so personally since ultimately, this pursuit is not about me but the work.
Anyone who knew me from high school would definitely say I’m “under-performing” and am not living up to whatever potential one could extrapolate from my academic performance at the time. I feel like I’m just belatedly learning and experiencing the satisfaction of finally understanding difficult concepts after wrestling with them for days, the emotional stability that comes with being able to fail at something and evaluate what should be done next without being paralyzed by negativity for months on end … you know, normal people things. I’m trying to push myself to do harder things, different things, things that are new and foreign and out of my depth that I’m bound to mess up the first, fourth, tenth time around. I feel like these are experiences I should’ve had already if I didn’t have such a noxious attachment to this idea of “smart”.
I’m creeping towards the latter end of my twenties and I haven’t accomplished what I should’ve by now. Sure, I’m bitter and wish I could’ve been raised differently and maybe that would’ve changed some things. But there’s nothing I can do about that now but deal with it and move on.
tl;dr Smart can only get you so far if you don’t know how to work hard. We should at least learn to value the latter as much as the former, if not more.
