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A Redditor's insightful message for discouraged students
51–60 of 110 posts
Re: A Redditor's insightful message for discouraged students
#52I wonder how this relates to the "entrepreneurial selection process". According to PG [1]: - hard work is necessary but insufficient - entrepreneurs either have a very high probability of success or "epsilon". - it is easy to know (or find out) what group you are in. PG makes a strong argument...but then, so does this guy from MIT. Maybe they are talking about different things? Is intelligence more important for a st…
The exact "work you need to do" is pretty much given to you when you do a degree. If you work hard on it and complete it all then it is hard not to succeed. When doing a start-up or in the "real world" you can easily fill up time with work which is not actually directing you towards your ultimate goal(s).
When you're in school, it often doesn't seem like the work is given to you. I remember knowing this, and I remember when it switched over for me in different subjects or different contexts. I'm not sure that start up world or "real world" is any different, there are just new (more difficult) contexts which can start out seeming mysterious but can become routine (often in retrospect).
Re: A Redditor's insightful message for discouraged students
#53There's research behind this too. The book NurtureShock has a chapter on telling kids "you're smart" vs. "you worked hard." There was even some HN discussion on it. Basically, when you attribute your kids accomplishments to their being smart, they kind of freeze up when they get a problem they can't handle. But when you attribute it to hard work, they work harder to figure it out. There are a series of fascinating ex…
Do you have a link/paper ont his? Legitimately curious.
Re: A Redditor's insightful message for discouraged students
#54I wonder how this relates to the "entrepreneurial selection process". According to PG [1]: - hard work is necessary but insufficient - entrepreneurs either have a very high probability of success or "epsilon". - it is easy to know (or find out) what group you are in. PG makes a strong argument...but then, so does this guy from MIT. Maybe they are talking about different things? Is intelligence more important for a st…
I don't feel like there's any gap there.
The Redditor is talking about a specific trap that some people who've been told from a young age that they're smart fall in to, at different ages. The trap involves - mostly - having not been challenged previously, and not knowing how to work through things that don't come easily.
When I was a kid, I spent 6 years at a school in Barbados, and some time at a school in Thailand, where I was unambiguously the smartest kid in the class, with the top grades, always. Then at 10 I went to the UK's largest prep school. I was behind in Latin, French, and a bunch of other subjects - especially those which required any rote learning (which I hadn't come across up to that point).
The transition to a school with /much/ better teaching saw me become a distinctly mediocre student almost straight away - faced with challenges, and faced with not being able to simply smart my way to the top of the class, I started rejecting work wholesale - something that stayed with me throughout the rest of my formal education, and led to me getting some truly shitty A-Level grades, to the disgust of teachers who saw much greater potential there.
Hard work and talent are both important, and so is the ability to encounter and handle challenge. If you grew up in an environment where you were coasting at the top, the first time you encounter serious challenge you might well fall apart.
I've recently started an MSc at what Americans would call an Ivy-League university (having talked my way without an undegrad degree), and the first module I'm working with is "Software Engineering Mathematics". Working through the chapters of the book I have consistently had real trouble getting to grips with the material. I want it to just fit in straight away - and I just want to understand it - and it doesn't, and that's a constant challenge.
Being a little older, and a little more mature, I'm throwing everything I have against it now, and seeing real dividends for perseverance. But every day is a struggle of fighting against the part of me that doesn't know how to deal with challenge, and I put that down to the sudden transition from coasting to the top to sudden massive challenge, and having not dealt well with it at the time - which it sounds like the very very original poster was also struggling with.
Re: A Redditor's insightful message for discouraged students
#55There's research behind this too. The book NurtureShock has a chapter on telling kids "you're smart" vs. "you worked hard." There was even some HN discussion on it. Basically, when you attribute your kids accomplishments to their being smart, they kind of freeze up when they get a problem they can't handle. But when you attribute it to hard work, they work harder to figure it out. There are a series of fascinating ex…
Do you have a link/paper ont his? Legitimately curious.
here's the HN thread : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3284169
Re: A Redditor's insightful message for discouraged students
#56There's research behind this too. The book NurtureShock has a chapter on telling kids "you're smart" vs. "you worked hard." There was even some HN discussion on it. Basically, when you attribute your kids accomplishments to their being smart, they kind of freeze up when they get a problem they can't handle. But when you attribute it to hard work, they work harder to figure it out. There are a series of fascinating ex…
Do you have a link/paper ont his? Legitimately curious.
Apparently, the chapter of the book also appeared in New York magazine, although I can't find the reference so I don't know which issue.
You can always read some excerpts on Google Books or Amazon, it's chapter 1 of NurtureShock.
Re: A Redditor's insightful message for discouraged students
#57What are some takeaways that us people in the industry can have from this? Should we be working harder? Should we be working smarter?
Work as hard as you can, learn your own strengths and limitations, learn to enjoy your successes without getting lazy, and struggle to understand something just enough so you can ask questions about does and doesn't work.
Re: A Redditor's insightful message for discouraged students
#58Perhaps I should rather have linked directly to the post: http://www.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/nxdzz/im_not_as_... Anyway, I want to emphasize that while his response was specifically to some guy in MIT feeling down, his words are applicable for any of us.
Indeed, I really liked this post. Everyone hears how hard MIT is, but then everyone sees how 97% pass, so you think these must be some geniuses that get in who transcend "normal" folk like us. They're just normal people who might not have been the smartest at school, but know when they're not motivated and how to look for help and get motivated. It's a good message for any student.
This. My brother goes to MIT and he is precisely life-sized. He just works very hard. Let me also comment that the difference on starting salary at MIT is not so different from that of top five schools. Coming from one of those schools and knowing the students there, I believe that your degree of success is more strongly linked to your work effort and the experiences you seek, compared to the school you went to.
Re: A Redditor's insightful message for discouraged students
#59There's research behind this too. The book NurtureShock has a chapter on telling kids "you're smart" vs. "you worked hard." There was even some HN discussion on it. Basically, when you attribute your kids accomplishments to their being smart, they kind of freeze up when they get a problem they can't handle. But when you attribute it to hard work, they work harder to figure it out. There are a series of fascinating ex…
Do you have a link/paper ont his? Legitimately curious.
Goto source is Carol Dweck; read Mindset for the general ideas and pick up Self-Theories for a in-depth look.
Re: A Redditor's insightful message for discouraged students
#60That advice was great, not only for younger students, but for those who have completed university (read: older) as well. Hands down, my favorite part of the piece was:
"smart" is really just a way of saying "has invested so much time and sweat that you make it look effortless."
All of the people that I truly admire (who subsequently I consider to be "smart") fall directly under this guise. They took the time and effort to learn how to be who they are. It's a simple idea, sure, but when it's really taken to heart it can change your entire outlook on things.