Category Archives: Public Service, Civics, Government, Activism

The secret of achievement is persistence – a ‘growth mindset’ over a ‘fixed mindset’

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Wow does this headline sounds like so much self-help crap! But read the stories linked with an open mind. The research is thought provoking and inspiring.

Stanford Psychology professor and author of “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”, Carol Dweck has spent decades researching the question “What makes a really capable child give up in the face of failure, where other children may be motivated by the failure?”.

Her research and a body inspired from it has implications for how we raise our children, how we manage employees, how we work to overcome difficulties, how we think of ourselves.

In April 2007 Stanford Magazine wrote up a profile of her titled, “The Effort Effect”.

Po Bronson referenced her work in a well-linked NY Magazine piece, “The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids”.

That Bronson’s piece came out in 2007 and it influenced what I’ve come to believe about instilling a belief in Emma that she or me isn’t ‘smart’ – but that it’s smart to try and try again to figure something out, to learn something by practice and experimentation.

Dweck believes that we tend to have one of two mindsets when it comes to seeing achievement in others and ourselves: a ‘fixed’ mindset that tells us when we see someone’s mastery over something it is from innate talent, or a ‘growth’ mindset that tells us that person must have worked hard to achieve it.

People who believe others are born with certain talents tend to do worst than those that believe we can grow and change.

In order to believe someone can grow and change, including ourselves, we need to believe that failures have lessons and that if we keep at something, we can improve.

Just keeping that as a core belief can make all the difference in our lives and in how we see others. It calls on us to give ourselves a chance, to give others a chance. To be empathetic, to empower. And to keep on keepin’ on. This may sound a bit too ‘new agey’. But its more a call to action. Because yes, the world isn’t fair, but if we try and try again, we might raise our lives to a better place, and better yet, the lives of those around us.

Related:

Recently Po Bronson has co-authored with Ashley Merryman a new book I’ve been meaning to read that incorporates some of these lessons in parenting.

Science Daily 12/10/2009: First Evidence of Brain Rewiring in Children: Reading Remediation Positively Alters Brain Tissue

NPR: 12/9/2009: Reading Practice Can Strengthen Brain ‘Highways’

Nurture Shock: Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman: 12/10/09: New Research: $13 Christmas gifts = 13 point gain in kids’ IQ

The Atlantic: David Dobbs: December 2009: The Science of Success

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” | MetaFilter

Can’t get it out of my head: A father’s yearlong quest to grasp the infant musical mind

TED.com: Video: “Martin Seligman on positive psychology”

New Yorker: Malcolm Gladwell: “GETTING OVER IT: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit put the war behind him. Why can’t we?”

Finally, quote from Calvin Coolidge I’ve kept in my wallet for over 10 years:

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan press on has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

It’s cold out – what you can do to help homeless in Philadelphia

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Write 1.215.232.1984 on a piece of paper and put it in your wallet or purse.

If you see a homeless person living on the streets in the cold please call that number.

Its Project H.O.M.E.’s Outreach Hotline.

If you happen to be homeless, in need of services, and have access to a phone, call 1.877.222.1984.

It’s that simple.

If you have more time or resources, think about volunteering or donating to Project H.O.M.E..

This post inspired by Garret Vreeland‘s recent link to CNN story “How to help the homeless in the cold”.

You could have been killed

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“People were told to read it, memorize it, and destroy it because if they were caught with it, they could be killed.” – Joe Wos on the dangers of possessing a copy of “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story”, a comic book, in the 1960s.

You can read the comic, originally published 1956 online. It still has a message that resonates.

You can read the background on the comic book from Tom Christopher.

Check out the Metafilter Thread and links from Bleeding Cool.

danah boyd On Facebook, Class, Privacy, and Public-ness

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danah boyd: “Facebook’s move ain’t about changes in privacy norms”

Public-ness has always been a privilege. For a long time, only a few chosen few got to be public figures. Now we’ve changed the equation and anyone can theoretically be public, can theoretically be seen by millions. So it mustn’t be a privilege anymore, eh? Not quite. There are still huge social costs to being public, social costs that geeks in Silicon Valley don’t have to account for. Not everyone gets to show up to work whenever they feel like it wearing whatever they’d like and expect a phatty paycheck. Not everyone has the opportunity to be whoever they want in public and demand that everyone else just cope. I know there are lots of folks out there who think that we should force everyone into the public so that we can create a culture where that IS the norm. Not only do I think that this is unreasonable, but I don’t think that this is truly what we want. The same Silicon Valley tycoons who want to push everyone into the public don’t want their kids to know that their teachers are sexual beings, even when their sexuality is as vanilla as it gets. Should we even begin to talk about the marginalized populations out there?

Recently, I gave a talk on the complications of visibility through social media. Power is critical in thinking through these issues. The privileged folks don’t have to worry so much about people who hold power over them observing them online. That’s the very definition of privilege. But most everyone else does. And forcing people into the public eye doesn’t dismantle the structures of privilege, the structures of power. What pisses me off is that it reinforces them. The privileged get more privileged, gaining from being exposed. And those struggling to keep their lives together are forced to create walls that are constantly torn down around them. The teacher, the abused woman, the poor kid living in the ghetto and trying to get out. How do we take them into consideration when we build systems that expose people?

Related:

Bruce Schneier: “The Eternal Value of Privacy”

Nicholas Carr: Other people’s privacy

NPR on the ‘Fierce Urgency Of Now’

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NPR.org: Remembering MLK And The ‘Fierce Urgency Of Now’:

King spoke of a debt before he spoke of the dream. This is important to remember because it shows his focus on economic conditions and problems in America. King was concerned not only with fighting segregation and discrimination, but also with fighting poverty. During his last year he was organizing a poor people’s campaign to come to Washington, D.C.

Think you have statistical chops? Help predict homicides in Philadelphia

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The Analytics X Prize is “to use statistical techniques and any data sets you can find to predict where crime, specifically homicides, will occur in the city”.

Drew Conway at Zero Intelligence Agents has posted some of his progress so far using spacial regression.