Then we gave students some hard new problems, which they didn’t do so well on. The ability kids now thought they were not smart after all. If success had meant they were intelligent, then less-than-success meant they were deficient. Guettel echoes this. “In my family, to be good is to fail. To be very good is to fail….The only thing not a failure is to be great.” The effort kids simply thought the difficulty meant “Apply more effort or try new strategies.” They didn’t see it as a failure, and they didn’t think it reflected on their intellect.
