Obviously, my teachers and parents were raising me the best they thought was possible, but I think they were mistaken with this strategy.
I read a blogpost that really spoke to me: NEVER tell a child that they are smart, or dumb. Frankly, it doesn't matter. If they are unable to do X, tell them "You are unable to do X", no if-and-or-buts about it. Tell them you expect them to be able to do X, but in a way that doesn't bring up "intelligence" or "general performance".
Its something I strive for with the next generation: my little cousins or nephews (no kids of my own yet) will be told what my expectations of them are, but I try to avoid the "intelligence trap" when talking with them.
We talked a lot about how literally no one on earth is capable of seeing an understanding your flaws as well as you, but also most humans on earth are infinitely less interested. The lens you view yourself with is totally unrelated to the lens with which the rest of the world sees you; you'll drive yourself insane if you think you and the world interpret you the same.
The point is, I think he did a phenomenal job at blasting my self deprecating brain into reality, but his initial spin of "Stop treating yourself like you're an idiot, because you're not and I can prove it" was just a slight misstep.
Obviously I'm just theorizing from my armchair and don't know more than you about this, or want to be agreed with, it's just that your post sparked my interest and I'd like to know more because my hunch is that removing excuses to not change oneself is generally a reasonable thing to do, even if it can hurt in the short term. In fact, it kind of worked for me to improve myself in the past (not regarding intelligence or academic/professional achievements, but other aspects of life). Maybe it depends on the particular person and situation?
It' might've helped things looking forward, but looking backward I think it wasn't great. As in, "I am so smart and yet thus far have accomplished nothing." So, maybe that's a debt to be paid, and once paid a person is able to move forward at a better trajectory than before? That might make sense to me.
What was the lesson you learned specifically from this?
You're aware of your flaws because they're a part of you, but that doesn't mean that anyone else notices them.
Thought this was just me...
I try never to reward results directly, only effort.
If the results are reward for effort then they are earns.
It too me a decade to undo the damage from always been told I was bright and never learning good habits for studying/persistence.
It’s just damn lucky that I enjoyed programming enough that I stuck with it and it became a career because otherwise I’d be earning a lot less.
Too much of that "focus on the effort" and you end up with a generation of bureaucrats - people that are good at miming processes and posturing but not capable of producing anything of actual value. Society doesn't care about the efforts, it cares about results. No matter how much neurosurgery you studied, if a patient dies at your table no family member will reward you for your "effort".
> It too me a decade to undo the damage from always been told I was bright and never learning good habits for studying/persistence.
The issue is not then about being result-vs-effort focus. The issue here is that unfortunately you didn't get people to push you for your best and to get out of your comfort zone.
The best things in life typically reward effort spent with incremental results, which come with their own dopamine rush. It's something I wish I had been made to understand at a much earlier age.
Here's a short list: - Cooking - Playing an instrument - Singing - Painting - Drawing - Writing - Learning (..a language, a new skill, etc) - Developing and maintaining valuable social and romantic relationships into adulthood - Any and all sports - Crafting - Raising children
The goal obviously isn't to maximize effort, it's simply to reinforce the link between effort and results and help the child understand that they can coast off their natural abilities (as we all have/do), but if they want to improve or excel in something that they enjoy then it will take real effort.
(Well, some bosses try to praise for effort but I’ve always found it to be really patronising or a barely-disguised attempt to get you to work overtime.)
To be honest I have been pretty successful despite that, but I don't feel like I'm as smart as people were always trying to convince me I was, or at least I have a different sort of intelligence from the sort of thing they were implying, and I definitely have a complex now where I don't like to expose myself to failure. I guess there was not much else to praise about me except for my apparent general intelligence, but I wish they'd come up with something. I was, I think, a friendly, creative, thoughtful kid? But that's not enough, is it?
I also have just a crippling fear of failure, so bad that I just never do anything that really tests my abilities. I failed an Amazon interview 10 years ago and I can't bring myself to give a fair shot to most tech companies.
It's also rough knowing as I type these words on this website that they may come back to haunt me, but I suppose in this moment I'm willing to commit to being honest.
Let me give you a kick in the ass. You failed an Amazon interview when you were 19? For me, the difference between 19 and 29 was the difference between being a kid with literally zero practical skills, in college but not studying anything with "computer" in the name, and being an adult with the ability to walk into FAANMG^[1] interviews, pass them, and survive mostly-happily in the caustic environments therein.
Though it will be work, and you may encounter setbacks, you are ready for your next step. I completely relate to the feeling that despite knowing you are smart, creative, and able to solve complex problems, you're somehow still not good enough to get hired, but it's all in your head. You should not be worrying about whether you can get hired, but rather where you want to get hired, if getting hired is even the thing you really want to do.
> It's also rough knowing as I type these words on this website that they may come back to haunt me, but I suppose in this moment I'm willing to commit to being honest.
I've found that "being vulnerable" can be an effective tool for building rapport, as long as you don't get too weird. Anyway, I certainly wouldn't worry about anything you've said here.
^[1] Not to say I attach any particular value to these companies, but their interviews are generally accepted to be on the challenging side.
I did pretty well on standardized tests (e.g. great
scores on SAT and ACT with no prep) and people were
always saying I was smart. Usually it was something
like this: I was obviously capable of doing the work,
so why didn't I?
Two explanations come to mind. I think both of them are probably true to some degree for many people.
1. High intelligence does not always equate to high executive functioning. Lots of smart people have trouble focusing on things they don't want to do, and that focus is generally a requirement for people who become "high achievers" by society's traditional standards.
2a. Those standardized tests only cover certain sorts of intelligence. My brother did well on those tests, but I did quite a bit better. Yet I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is at least my equal if not my better when it comes to smarts. It's just that those tests tended to cover things that weren't his strengths. In my case I feel like perhaps those tests may have painted a too-rosy picture of my intelligence since they catered to some of my strengths.
I go back and forth on it, though, because (as I mentioned) I've been successful in "real life" without any kind of psych treatment and looking back on my childhood "bad" decisions that were held up as evidence of my badness and the necessity of medicating me, e.g. neglecting my summer homework in favor of playing outside every day, I have to say that a lot of them (including that one) were great decisions. The worst thing was that the world was unwilling to let me be a child, and the best thing was that I said fuck you to the world and was a child anyway. Big thanks to mom and dad for not normalizing me with psychotropic drugs—I truly believe a lot of people can benefit from them, and I also believe they would have stolen something from me that could never be repaid.
What if the world had simply accepted me for the person I was? There would have been no need, then, to engineer some misguided praise in the hope of turning me into something that I wasn't. I don't practically expect the world to be fair, nor to supply a weirdly-shaped hole for every weirdly-shaped peg, but I'm not sure it's best to reach for the DSM-5 whenever such a peg appears.
Big thanks to mom and dad for not normalizing
me with psychotropic drugs—I truly believe a lot
of people can benefit from them, and I also believe
they would have stolen something from me that could
never be repaid.
I had to come up with tons of strategies to work around ADHD and/or anxiety or whatever the hell it was. Because I literally didn't know what those things were, and I went through school before ADHD diagnoses started to really boom. Would I have used ADHD as a crutch? I honestly don't know. I can honestly say I'd have been tempted to.
I wish that childhood had been easier, and I had known that I wasn't "lazy or crazy."
Frankly I wish I could have just had therapy and a life coach for that stuff, rather than meds. Teach me to fish, don't hand me a fish.
At a young age my parents were told by someone I did not have AD(H)D. I believed them. But later when I was living on my own I felt his methodology lacked credibility. (He was a person who called his treatment "turbo-drive psychotherapy" and dismissed questions about its effectiveness, calling them "pooh-poohing the next generation of technology". Not really someone who would want to hold an intellectual dialogue).
Looking back on it in the present I realized that if my parents were going to tell me I was or wasn't X or Y at that age, I was going to believe them - for as long as they were physically around to assert it. It had always felt wrong to disagree. For various reasons I had internalized that argument was not a means to find truth but instead an unreasonable risk when you could be locked in a closet for it.
I'm not sure what being diagnosed today would do for me since it wouldn't change any of that. Though it could give some more clarity to my past.
Maybe I was fortunate that my parents are also smart. My dad once shared that he completely understood that we (his kids) struggled so much with finishing university and finishing the stuff we worked on. He had many of the same problems (though he did finish his PhD). He never managed to teach me that discipline to follow through and get stuff done, though. But at least I wasn't judged and made to feel dumb for it.
My oldest son again has the same traits of high intelligence and extreme laziness. I'm trying to teach him better ways to handle this. I try to emphasize the importance of doing the work, doing homework, finishing projects, focus, and sometimes just doing what is necessary whether you like it or not. I try to de-emphasize intelligence without making him feel dumb. He knows he's smart, and he knows it a little too well in my opinion, but I try to praise him for the things he does, rather than for how smart he is. I try to challenge his intelligence, but also try to steer him towards things that aren't about IQ, like art or sports. (He's not interested though; he mostly just wants to play Minecraft and build beautiful houses and complex machinery there. Close enough, I guess.)
Children don't understand that. Children internalize everything. They blame themselves and you blamed yourself.
"You're so smart, why are you unable to do X ??".
Which only made me feel as if I was dumb.
You can be superintelligent in general, and bad at lots of specific things. Or even bad at most things! It's not a contradiction in the slightest.
I think that IQ has become less and less emphasized over the years, and that's a good thing. It has some utility, IMO, but a lot of care needs to be taken when it comes to applying it to... well, anything.
See : Modern society
But to make poor decisions on a scale that affects many others, you generally need the intelligence to rise to some level of power.
(There are of course exceptions, like starting a brushfire, etc)
People get really defensive around intelligence though. Everyone wants to be at least average if not above average. If they can't claim it in one area, they'll try to redefine intelligence to include themselves. And we do have the habit of mistaking institutional knowledge for intelligence.
Height is an objective and one-dimensional measure. It measures your ability to do a single thing: reach objects that are farther off of the ground.
I think we really do humanity a disservice if we define intelligence that way. The brain is capable of so many other things.
Surely you have known people who were bright (or brilliant) in some areas and lacking in others.
But for people who I would consider as intelligent, it's not a result of just knowledge. Or just skills.
I would trust their ability to "get" concepts they've been previously ignorant of relatively quickly. The wheels just spin faster.
And a lot like height, there's diminishing returns and what not. I can get a step ladder, then being tall is just a fact. Being intelligent can help you get a concept quicker, but once we both understand it, there's no effective difference.
But no one gets defensive about height. Or strength. Or anything with visible qualifiers. Which is funny, because intelligent people are better at thinking in the abstract and intelligence and the results of it are abstract.
I found that a lot of concepts of child-rearing overlaps with management, but with different labels. My grad-level Nursing Ethics class discussed qualities of a nursing leader, that employees need to made to feel personal worth. I made the link with ideas expressed by Mr. Rogers and on Sesame Street.
If anyone is into Yoga, or Yogachara, the way they put it is that internal formations (imagination or historic image/sound data/logging ala Parakalpita) represents one type of thinking (which everyone does not necessarily do) and analytical or "thinking mind" represents another type of thinking which everyone does, but may not be their primary mode.
From a few of my interviews about this topic:
- Old business acquaintance can visualize 2D seismic data in augmented reality 3D. He can literally see underground in his mind in front of him in his office.
- Musically inclined acquaintance (singer) can hear all the accompaniment music for performances in her mind.
- Guy who designed my kitchen can see my kitchen in his head.
"Mindset" by Dr Carol Dweck is probably the most important book (research) on this topic. A must-read for anyone pretending to educate kids, actually to anyone period.
invariably when a topic about intelligence gets posted we need someone to come around with an IQ around the 140 mark (I have no reason to doubt they are being honest fwiw) to tell us how because they personally failed, genetic intelligence is really unimportant (smarter rebuttals acknowledge that genetics plays a major role in intelligence, but that IQ is a really poor proxy of this, which is debatable).
this ultimately culminates in Almost Everyone Can Be Good At Almost Everything If They Try Hard With A Good Minset, The Growth Mindset. the science is weak. it's baffling how her book can be a "must-read".
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-grow...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/07/growth-mindset-4-growt...
https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/what-is-your-mindset
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism
edit: this article only addresses MENSA members, so i think this submission is bad. most well-adjusted intelligent people want nothing to do with MENSA. so even the claims of the submission are questionable.
The thing here is that many people are convinced that "I just cant learn X at all", so they wont even try. And when they do actualy try, they can become at minimum alright, probably decent and maybe good at X. You see that on both kids and adults.
That is where growth mindset comes from.
Will everybody be next Beethoven, Michelangelo, Knuth or win the olympic? No. Can healthy person learn to play piano, draw a portrait, write a python script or learn to swim? Absolutely yes.
I trust you've done your research so this isn't a rebuttal — merely a surprised observation. You probably have too much of it in the US (and indeed too much of even a good thing can hurt) whereas we have way too little of it in the EU (at least the "Latin" world).
100% agreed on Mensa (we don't have that here but even I know it's almost a scam).
The whole education system is built around the idea that everyone is the same and could success if they work hard enough, which has seriously bad consequences such as universities filled with people who don’t belong there (this is becoming worth and worth as the bar is lowered constantly in lower education). There is shaming about trade schools in most of the country, despite it being a way to succeed and filling jobs needed by society. There is specialized schools and sections for low IQ people but not for higher ones. You better be average to fit and "succeed" at school.
As a french, I would argue that there is "public" backlash - e.g. in newspapers, etc. - but in private life most people would agree with OP. France is by far not a socialist country - here are the last (2015) regional election results : blue is right-wing, black far-right, pink and red, left-wing :
The Japan example is true (although they do have serious social issues), but the fact is that European countries utterly dominate most list of the best places to live. See for example
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/best-countries-to...
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/quality-of-life-r...
https://ceoworld.biz/2019/04/11/best-quality-of-life-2019/
where most of the countries in the top ten are European, with special predominance of particularly leftist countries like the Nordic countries. And at least the first two are American sources (not sure about the location of the third one).
"It’s also possible that people who join Mensa differ from other people in ways other than just IQ."
ironic because you'd think that if buzzfeed was as bad as its reputation, being a left-leaning outlet, it would be reasonable to assume they'd be in favor of growth mindset.
In one world an individuals actions and decisions would largely determine their outcome. In the other world things completely outside of an individual's control would be the primary determining factors in their outcome.
One of these worlds would imply the need for systems directly subsidizing those who fail to achieve. In the other world, poor outcomes would be attributable in large part to poor decisions. The latter scenario doesn't necessarily preclude a subsidization of those who fail to succeed, but it makes it a much more tenuous proposition.
I reccommend checking the sources given in the blog post.
But you know, we do this too with other natural gifts. My exceptionally tall friends were constantly encouraged to enter sports like basketball. Tall people are built up emotionally through compliments that they receive on a daily basis from people. I would say it's not necessarily bad to compliment smart people for being smart.
I was a short scrawny kid growing up and I was bullied but I definitely took solace in the fact that I had a higher IQ than most people.
That is to say, I fucking hate having to say "no" every time (and it happens at least once every couple weeks) I am asked if or where I played basketball.
I'm also somewhere around 3 std dev above average IQ (mid 130s if I look at SAT equivalents, ~150 if GRE) and experienced the "but you're so good at school, why don't you like it" stuff.
In both cases, physical and... mental feels wrong, but it's the best word I've got, I feel as though I have wasted huge gifts. I don't take solace in any of it.
And since I'm full of anecdotes tonight, your bullying comment made me remember another. I had a target on my back for bullying due to my size I believe, everyone wanted to take a shot. I once got gang tackled by about 5/6 football players when I was 16 - the resultant slamming of my right knee into the tile floor means it will be my "trick" knee for the rest of my life. So, the size didn't give me a pass - if anything it made me stand out more. YMMV and all that.
A lot of people will just stream their consciousness in the case that they observe a trait that they wish they had. It's a projection, but it's also a tell.
Is it the anxiety that makes you feel wrong for receiving compliments?
Why? Why to do you think this? Could you provide your sources. Here's a source for the opposite: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/06/the-s-...
If you excel in any other trait, people will acknowledge it and praise you for it, especially visual traits. Beauty, height, strength, speed, endurance, etc. Intelligence, by contrast, is rarely acknowledged. It's not as easily discerned. Confidence is an important part of achieving your best potential. Learning to accept compliments with grace is an important skill for life. Giving yourself such compliments is even more important.
Obviously smart people need to understand that their intelligence does not protect them from being wrong or delusional or failure. That's an important part of growing up and maturing for any human though.
In practice and in the work place, the only thing that matters is if you get your work done or not. You can spend a lot of effort on things and get almost nothing done... I know programmers who spent 2+ years on custom unit-testing solutions (and I guess management never noticed this guy was spinning his wheels on something that has been solved in multiple github projects or something...)
Just because he put a lot of work in doesn't mean that other engineers respected his work or even he got anything done. All it means is that he wasted 2-years on the project.
That's real life.
Human civilization is advanced by working smarter, not harder.
I began to feel guilty for wasting my intelligence. I knew my older brother was at least as smart as me, and fell into an addiction cycle early on, so I was determined to not follow in his footsteps.
Granted, I still went on to slack off and spend 7 years as an undergrad, but it payed off in the end.
Sounds like you're smart enough to always find an argument for hating yourself :)
In order for this not to be a useless post, FWIW: most mathematicians that I know and that are highly regarded would not do well in IQ tests, I would think. The clever ones solve problems and move on; the pioneers are less clever, more committed and more random, idiosyncratic.
I'm glad I know, because it feels good to know I guess. But I don't think that making me take that test really moved the needle for me in terms of self worth or success or anything like that. I had to figure my shit out via other methods (while working with that therapist). I suppose the point of this message is only to say that I empathize with your situation.