Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation (1998) [pdf]

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I think I was one of the first of my peers to get a job at 15. It's not that my parents didn't pay for things for me, just that they had their ideas of what they wanted me to do, and my ideas of what I wanted to do were different.

I haven't been unemployed for a significant time since, I've been out of work 2 months now (I start my new job in a week) and it's driven me up the wall.

Most people I knew in high school never had a job, and I knew a few people at university who managed to go through their entire degree without a job as well. These people have never worked a day in their life, they're going to have massive issues when it comes to actually finding a career. I'd never hire someone who's 20-something with no job experience.

Upon saying that, along the way I've picked up an attitude of work harder, not smarter, which I've been struggling to reverse. I worked for half a decade in kitchens, where that was the prevailing attitude, nobody would spend 5 minutes to save them 20 minutes. Chefs aren't known for being intellectuals and good managers.

Of course it can.

What does an intelligent kid do? Find the easiest way to do a task or question whether the task is necessary at all. That's just humans conserving energy. Which is smart. This is not the hard part for them, they excel at this.

Effort is consciously fighting against the drive to stop working. THIS is the hard part. Above average children never have to learn this, because they get through school and life that easy. It's only when they are forced to leave their comfort zone, when problems show up.

Intelligent Children who aren't kept or lead out of this effort-avoidance (which is a kind of motivation as well: the motivation to avoid effort in order to conserve energy) also tend to get worse grades after they got good ones.

Because praising them signals them that they actually overachieved and can therefore put even less energy into accomplishing a task.

So the way to go is praising them for doing something that they didn't want to do or for repeating effort.

Not sure. The lesson for others that was being promoted by his behaviour was certainly bad: "That you do not need to work hard, you only need to be gifted and smart and you can go by." Now, it's not really his fault that he is not being challenged, so the school messed up, at least partly, here. They fixed the problem for the other students, but not for him. I think the point made in another comment, that he should have been made to attend classes, but given actual challenging work that matched his abilities, is correct.

At school I was probably similar, and thinking back basically an awful child, for much of the same reasons. But at least in some of my classes (maths, for example) they recognised that just following the standard course at the same pace as everyone else was a waste of my time, and allowed me to work on the course material for the next years classes, which was at least a little more interesting, and some kind of extra-curricular maths problems as part of an inter-school competition that were much more interesting.

OT - the maths problems didn't always hold my interest, and when I couldn't be bothered doing the actual work of proving something rigorously, I instead wrote a brute-force solver in PASCAL, that produced the correct solution. Then I had the challenging task of persuading people that this was actually an acceptable method of solving a problem. I can't remember if I succeeded, but I think I gave the example of the computer proof of the four-colour theorem that I had read about in New Scientist.

If you exaggerate the importance of practice, people will do more of it, and become better. But what is the opportunity cost?