More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
January 8, 2024
although talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is not. He could see potential where others had missed it.
If they were singled out by their coaches, it was not for unusual aptitude but unusual motivation. That motivation wasn’t innate; it tended to begin with a coach or teacher who made learning fun. “What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn,” the lead psychologist concluded, “if provided with appropriate . . . conditions of learning.”
high achievers vary dramatically in their initial aptitudes. If we judge people only by what they can do on day one, their potential remains hidden.
Potential is not a matter of where you start, but of how far you travel. We need to focus less on starting points and more on distance traveled.
People who make major strides are rarely freaks of nature. They’re usually freaks of nurture.
Stretching beyond our strengths is how we reach our potential and perform at our peak. But progress is not merely a means to the end of excellence. Getting better is a worthy accomplishment in and of itself. I want to explain how we can improve at improving.
ambition is the outcome you want to attain. Aspiration is the person you hope to become. The question is not how much money you earn, how many fancy titles you land, or how many awards you accumulate. Those status symbols are poor proxies for progress. What counts is not how hard you work but how much you grow. And growth requires much more than a mindset—it begins with a set of skills that we normally overlook.
By age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers.
The capacities to be proactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined stayed with students longer—and ultimately proved more powerful—than early math and reading skills. When Chetty and his colleagues predicted adult income from fourth-grade scores, the ratings on these behaviors mattered 2.4 times as much as math and reading performance on standardized tests.
Character is more than just having principles. It’s a learned capacity to live by your principles.
In chess—like in kindergarten—the early advantages of cognitive skills dissipate over time.
Character skills do more than help you perform at your peak—they propel you to higher peaks. As the Nobel laureate economist James Heckman concluded in a review of the research, character skills “predict and produce success in life.” But they don’t grow in a vacuum. You need the opportunity and motivation to nurture them.
What we overlook is that when people can’t see a path, they stop dreaming of the destination. To ignite their will, we need to show them the way. That’s what scaffolding can do.
They weren’t worried about being the smartest player in the room—they were aiming to make the room smarter.
The Raging Rooks weren’t just single roses growing from cracks in the concrete. They tilled the soil for many more roses to bloom.
When we admire great thinkers, doers, and leaders, we often focus narrowly on their performance. That leads us to elevate the people who have accomplished the most and overlook the ones who have achieved the most with the least. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.
Character skills training had a dramatic impact. After founders had spent merely five days working on these skills, their firms’ profits grew by an average of 30 percent over the next two years. That was nearly triple the benefit of training in cognitive skills.
Character is often confused with personality, but they’re not the same. Personality is your predisposition—your basic instincts for how to think, feel, and act. Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts.
Knowing your principles doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to practice them, particularly under stress or pressure. It’s easy to be proactive and determined when things are going well. The true test of character is whether you manage to stand by those values when the deck is stacked against you. If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day. Personality is not your destiny—it’s your tendency. Character skills enable you to transcend that tendency to be true to your principles. It’s not about the traits you have—it’s what you decide to do with
...more
If our cognitive skills are what separate us from animals, our character skills are what elevate us above machines.
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
they got comfortable being uncomfortable.
Becoming a creature of discomfort can unlock hidden potential in many different types of learning. Summoning the nerve to face discomfort is a character skill—an especially important form of determination. It takes three kinds of courage: to abandon your tried-and-true methods, to put yourself in the ring before you feel ready, and to make more mistakes than others make attempts. The best way to accelerate growth is to embrace, seek, and amplify discomfort.
The way you like to learn is what makes you comfortable, but it isn’t necessarily how you learn best. Sometimes you even learn better in the mode that makes you the most uncomfortable, because you have to work harder at it. This is the first form of courage: being brave enough to embrace discomfort and throw your learning style out the window.
Watching, listening, and doing weren’t enough to drive his growth. The one approach to comedy that Steve had written off was writing—it wasn’t his style. He hated writing, because it didn’t come naturally to him: “It was hard, so hard.”
Procrastination is a common problem whenever you’re pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone.
As blogger Tim Urban describes it, your brain gets hijacked by an instant gratification monkey, who picks what’s easy and fun over the hard work that needs to be done. All you have to show for your time is a profound sense of inadequacy and idleness. You’ve burned your self-esteem to ashes of shame.
Many people associate procrastination with laziness. But psychologists find that procrastination is not a time management problem—it’s an emotion management problem. When you procrastinate, you’re not avoiding effort. You’re avoiding the unpleasant feelings that the activity stirs up. Sooner or lat...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
I’ve seen many people shy away from writing because it doesn’t come naturally to them. What they overlook is that writing is more than a vehicle for communicating—it’s a tool for learning. Writing exposes gaps in your knowledge and logic. It pushes you to articulate assumptions and consider counterarguments. Unclear writing is a sign of unclear thinking.
It’s that if we avoid the discomfort of learning techniques that don’t come easily to us, we limit our own growth.
But learning is not always about finding the right method for you. It’s often about finding the right method for the task.
Comfort in learning is a paradox. You can’t become truly comfortable with a skill until you’ve practiced it enough to master it. But practicing it before you master it is uncomfortable, so you often avoid it. Accelerating learning requires a second form of courage: being brave enough to use your knowledge as you acquire it.
Once people saw discomfort as a mark of growth, they were motivated to stretch beyond their comfort zones.
When discomfort is a signal of progress, you don’t want to run away from it. You want to keep stumbling toward it to continue growing.
You don’t have to wait until you’ve acquired an entire library of knowledge to start to communicate. Your mental library expands as you communicate.
That took a third form of courage—not just embracing and seeking discomfort, but amplifying it by being brave enough to make more mistakes.
Shyness is the fear of negative evaluation in social situations,
Exposure therapy reduces discomfort by amplifying it.
You can’t be ready for anything if you haven’t trained for everything. Pilots learn to cope with discomfort by intensifying it, and they build their skills as they navigate it.
Learning is often understood as the process of recognizing, correcting, and preventing mistakes.
rather than aiming to reduce your mistakes, you should strive to increase them.
When we’re encouraged to make mistakes, we end up making fewer of them. Early mistakes help us remember the correct answer—and motivate us to keep learning.
“The more mistakes you make, the faster you will improve and the less they will bother you,” he observes. “The best cure to feeling uncomfortable about making mistakes is to make more mistakes.”
When you get praised for making an effort, the feeling of effort itself starts to take on secondary reward properties. Instead of having to push yourself to keep trying, you feel pulled toward it.
You don’t need to get comfortable before you can practice your skills. Your comfort grows as you practice your skills.
If we wait until we feel ready to take on a new challenge, we might never pursue it all. There may not come a day when we wake up and suddenly feel prepared. We become prepared by taking the leap anyway.
Improving depends not on the quantity of information you seek out, but the quality of the information you take in. Growth is less about how hard you work than how well you learn.
the distance we travel is due less to how much labor we do than the fruit it bears.
Prosperity rises as people become more capable of absorbing new ideas and filtering out old ones.
Cognitive skills that amplify our ability to take in and understand information lay the groundwork for becoming a sponge. As we become more spongelike, we become better equipped to achieve greater things.
