Is it Better to be Smart, or Get Good Grades?

Funny, earlier on HN was a headline that said to praise your children for their effort and NOT their intelligence.

Grades are a sign of effort. Effort wins most of the time.

What really surprises me about the wildly successful people I meet is that most of them aren't brilliant. But all of them work their asses off. Non-stop. I haven't met one who was brilliant and had a good work/life balance. Unsurprisingly, these habits often (but not always!) start early... Most of these successful people went to great schools and got great grades.

A not too smart "go getter" will always be able to do well at something. There's always a place for such people, and it's easy for management to understand how someone like that can bring value.

OTOH, a personal story:

In school, I got excellent grades up until lots of effort was required. At that point my grades went down drastically. This is what comes from being praised as smart, separate from results.

It took me a good while after I was out of school to really come to grips with things, and it's still a bit of a struggle. However, I have managed to make a career of programming. I try to play to my strengths, solving tricky problems that don't yield easily to hard work alone. This makes me fairly valuable, though I have to work hard to find employment where management realizes that there are roles for people like me. Currently I develop software in support of the science team on an active NASA space mission. If I can pat myself on the back a bit, that's not bad for someone who took an extra semester to graduate high school and never went to college.

So someone smart can learn to work harder and be results oriented, but without help from parents and school I think it's a lot harder and brings delays. What could I have done if I'd been praised for results rather than "being smart?" I don't obsess about that, but it comes to mind these days as I raise my child.

I'm sure people will say it in various ways, but one's path in life is (far) smoother if they have a track record - something people can see and relate to. It might be serial startups, it might be open-source success, it might be commercial success. Starting out, it's a transcript.

There's gobs of people out there. Differentiate yourself, so that people actually care when you talk to them.

It's time for the author to brush up on his argumentation and rhetoric. It makes no sense. But it is provocative.

Sadly college still does not provide enough of the "real world" to make much a difference. The college I went to, at least, seemed to be more interested in grooming me to be a researcher which is why I found most of the CS classes to be extremely boring.