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| Ignite your future. |
Here is part of David Hayes’s response to the “Let’s improve our weaknesses!” post.
I actually just finished Carol Dweck's Mindset, which is probably more relevant to the topic than either of the things I mentioned in my first comment. In a sentence, the point of the whole book is that the old Henry Ford saw "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right" is right. Though she never uses that phrase, she makes the point repeatedly that people's abilities are often constrained by what they believe they're capable of.
Praise a kid for things he knows and he'll start to fear failing. Praise a kid for how hard he worked on a project and he'll start to welcome work and failure as necessary steps on the road to success. She uses the terms fixed and growth mindset to delineate between the effects they observe in experiments between kids told that brains can change and kids who believe their abilities are fixed forever. Practically her whole career she's been doing studies showing that this basic divide is both real and powerful. (Here's a video is her explaining it herself.)
Who’s ready for another inspirational message from JW? Okay, here goes:
I agree that believing that something is possible means you’re more likely to achieve it. But I don’t think we can conclude from that, “Believe!” Two reasons:
(1) The logic can easily be taken too far to imply that you can accomplish anything you set your mind to. We’re only talking about probabilities, about improvements at the margin. Believing in oneself is not magical, even with regard to that which we have a decent amount of control over. Say that Shaq managed to convince himself that a FT% of 100% was possible. Would he have achieved it? Err, I hope I don’t need to answer that. That added self-confidence might’ve bought him a few extra percentage points, but we’re not talking extraordinary gains here.
In many areas, especially in those where we want to believe we have more control than we actually do (e.g., physical health), I’d argue that too much belief in belief – too much emphasis on positive thinking – is more likely than not to be harmful. Evidence.
(2) Believing in yourself is not fully up to you—like with the research on kids, it’s about who praises them and how. It’s about context. Unless we're a cat with extraordinary mental powers, we can’t just stand in front of a mirror and convince ourselves that we’re capable of anything. We can convince ourselves that we believe we’re capable of anything, but that’s different from actually believing it.
Point being that even if self-belief is magical, it’s not something we have much control over, so it’s not terribly meaningful advice.
A positive thinking groupie might counter, “But the only reason you don’t have control is because you don’t believe you do!” To which I’d say, shut up.
