211–220 of 424 posts
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Hard work in itself isn't necessarily valuable. Smart work is. It's vital to learn early on that you have to put in the work if you want to achieve anything at all. Merely being gifted or naturally good at something certainly is not enough. However, I'd say it's just as important to understand the purpose behind any kind of work and to be able to question how things are usually done. Achieving the same or better resu…
I challenge the distinction between hard work and smart work. You cannot be smart without hard work. Amassing knowledge and mental ability requires years of effort and work. It is easier for gifted/clever people, but not inherent. gifted =/= smart
You can keep churning out spaghetti code (hopefully the uncooked kind) or you can learn and apply better methods, for example.
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Your comment is grey and I don't think it should be. People care so much about being "a good person" while also acknowledging corporate psychopathy and other "bad guys win" scenarios that are so normal to the human existence. Meanwhile, if you ask an educator about their situation, I'm not sure they'd tick the box. The educators I know are fulfilled by their work, not their work environments.
Let's ask short order cooks if they are fulfilled by their work environments. They'll probably complain about coworkers, the hours, and say their feet hurt. That's not to say teachers don't have the feelings they might have, but it's a pretty privileged position to be in to expect your work to fulfill you in some deep way.
The education system provides fairly clear and predictable paths to affirmation, success, and a sort of grade based people ranking system. Life outside that system often very much does not. Everyone has to come to terms with it at some point. I can understand how for someone who school makes a strong impression on them it can be a real struggle without what was such a clear and predictable system.
I have a hypothesis that at least in the US smart people that want to continue with the same sort of “do the work you are assigned and be rewarded” become doctors. There are entrepreneurial paths in medicine but an excellent student that wants to can go from medical school to a residency, followship, and then a hospital position and earn enough to be in the 1% without ever needing to fight for it in the office politi…
"Become doctors" is just saying that they graduated medical school; even C students become doctors, but the politicking really starts once you try to join a specific practice, like cardiology, emergency medicine, pediatrics, etc. Every speciality has its gatekeepers who they need to schmooze if they want that seal of approval.
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One challenge is kids will figure out they are smart all on their own. As a parent you have to almost actively repress the notion in a kid’s head that they are “smart”.
Why? Being smart is good. Why wouldn't you let your kids know?
I realized that being selected for a gifted class wasn't so much about helping my peers as it was protecting the order of the classroom. If someone said today, "hey, these people are exceptional, let's isolate them from the people they seem to lead," I'd recognize it for what it was. When I look at former gifted kids, it's almost as though a generation of young leaders were sabotaged by appealing to their parents van…
Management and leadership involve plenty of problem solving! It's genuinely hard work, not just faffing around - that's just the stereotype that prevails among people who have never been in a management role in the first place. For one thing, if you're in management, there's probably a higher-level manager that you're accountable to! Funny how people seem to forget this.
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I think the point is that intelligence is a tool. By itself it doesn't get you terribly far (assuming you want to get somewhere). You need to apply it to something diligently. In other words, intelligence is necessary but not sufficient.
That's why it's fucked up to translate these studies into advice saying "don't compliment your kids intelligence".
Being "gifted" is sometimes badly misjudged. I have a friend who was the best in his school, then we was at the bottom of his class in high school. All his confidence disappeared when he found that "best in school X" can actually mean nothing because school X may be quite bad by comparison. The one eyed person that is the king in the land of the blind is the best comparison. Second, even having a high native intellig…
Might have solved sanitation for the entire world?
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Because it does more harm than good in the long term
I'd say having false belief (believing oneself not to be smart, when in fact, one is smart) is more harm than good in the long run.