I think about Spolsky's post on programmer productivity quite often [1]. I think the most interesting part of the post is when he says, "The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time." Obviously, I wonder if I am a programmer who can hit the high notes and, if not, what it will take to get there.
When I read a post like this, I try to apply it to making myself a better programmer in the "high note" sense. Trouble is - it just doesn't apply (and I am a huge fan of Dweck's work). This article is one for the masses - not people who are trying to create the next Google. Motivation, hard work and an ability to learn from mistakes are all necessary, but ultimately not sufficient for our craft.
If I had to guess what the missing ingredient is, I would say creativity.
Heck - we are programmers. We get immediate feedback on our mistakes all day long and anyone reading this post has most likely gotten really really good and learning from those mistakes. ...but, how many of us are hitting those high notes?
EDIT: So I got a coke and thought about this a bit. I like your point, but I feel like maybe the high-noters are high-noters precisely because they're ruthlessly self-critical and growth-minded. Ever see someone who was really good at something cringe after what you thought was an amazing performance, because they missed, e.g. the f6 in Mozart's Queen of the Night? They're better (honest?) at seeing their mistakes, and they're better at addressing them. Maybe that's the natural talent?
Aside from the tone, maybe, this article is not 'one for the masses.'
Jony Ive didn't just sit down and whip up the iPod, to use Spolsky's example. We don't see the blood/sweat/tears that goes into it. From Ive:
One of the hallmarks of our team is this sense of looking to be wrong ... It’s about being excited to be wrong because then you’ve discovered something new.
Obviously Ive has the creative ingredient. And some are going to be predisposed with talent. Michael Jordan may have had his famous "4am club" where he hit the court every morning to just drill, but so did Scotty Pippen, and he never hit the Jordan high note clutch performances that make my jaw drop watching 20-year-old replays. So I see your point, that talent matters. But the other way to look at it is that Jordan was just better at learning from his mistakes in those 4am practices.
So no, this is not some pedestrian piece of feel-good soup. Great work, in programming, design, anything, is about repeatedly pushing a boundary, recognizing where you messed up, fixing it, and repeating that all over again. The people who do this best are the people who believe that by iterating they can get better. This works even as you get all the way up into the stratosphere of a field.
What is this 4am club? I'm a big Jordan fan and I haven't heard about any of this and a quick Google search comes up nothing about Jordan practicing at 4am.
It could partially be natural talent, however much of it is nurture. Carol Dweck has proven that the growth-mindset can be taught. Parents, friends, communities, media and school systems alike can promote "fixed" mindset thinking through various means, thus limiting learning from mistakes. It's incredible how much harm someone can do by steering someone off the growth-mindset path.
It's very easy for us to forget about variance and standard deviation of programmer productivity when all other factors are equal. Let's imagine we have 1000 of the world's best programmers working for a year on creative projects. All of them will try something innovative. Only some of them, however, will succeed.
Who succeeds is a function of what projects they were working on. And that, is almost purely random and a result of circumstances. We like to think that Sergey and Larey were more brilliant than anyone else, for example, but the truth is they just stumbled into the right thing at the right time.
Don't discredit yourself as a programmer for not yet having a huge stroke of luck.
The problem here is that you're segregating the "world's best programmers" without explaining how you selected them. The more relevant question here is what makes someone the "best" at something.
You're also using a limited angle of success (Larry and Sergey's business success via google). Many of the other "best programmers" on your 1000 person list may have non-commercial success (their creative project leads to a highly cited paper for example).
If you just took the top 1000 programmers (again assuming you could) in 2003, it's unlikely that Mark Zuckerberg would have been one of them. Not that he wasn't a great hacker, but what metric could have demonstrated his creative/business abilities as an undergraduate?
Of course luck is involved in anything. Einstein was "lucky" that he happened to be obsessed with the relative speed of light to different parties at a time when we knew a bit about how light/gravity etc worked. Perhaps if he'd been born in Newton's time, his style of intellect would not have had the same impact. Nonetheless we can, in hindsight, only measure someone's achievement, not his/her luck.
No doubt hyper-achievement (like Einsteins' or Zuckerbergs') is evidence that the achiever possesses a high degree of work ethic AND talent with at least a bit luck thrown in. No doubt that you would agree Hyper-achievers are a subset of "Potential Hyper-achievers" (those with talent & work ethic) and someone's level of achievement will roughly correspond to his/her personal characteristics.
In a particular poker game, it's mostly luck whether you come out ahead, but over time (as in life) those who practice harder and play smarter will (usually) come out on top.
People attribute almost everything to luck to feel better about their own lack of success. Luck plays a minor role. Intelligence and tenacity are much more important. If luck was the main factor nearly all successful programmers would come from China or India since they have the most entrants in the "lottery" for successful programmers.
You argue that intelligence and tenacity are more important than luck, but then it follows that since China and India have the most entrants, the only explanation for their lack of proportional success is lack of intellence and tenacity relative to Americans(I'm not saying you think this, I'm just noting it follows from your argument).
I would argue luck does play a big role, and that they weren't lucky enough to be born into a country with the standard of living, educational resources, and number of tech jobs that Americans have is the major differentiating factor.
I didn't mean to provide an exhaustive list successful characteristics.
Also it is a bit of a logical fallacy to say just because luck is not the main factor in success that being unsuccessful means you are lazy or dumb rather than unlucky.
You can take the luck argument too far though. You were lucky to be born as the you that you know because there were millions of other sperm competing to fertilize your mother's egg.
You can take it too far, but I think at a macro-level "luck", by which I mean random factors beyond your control, is by far the dominant factor. I do fairly well for myself, among the top 0.5% by world income, but I'm quite sure this is not because I am among the top 0.5% in world intelligence+tenacity. I like to think I'm fairly smart, especially when it comes to reading widely, in an interdisciplinary way, and making unexpected connections between different domains.
But honestly, I came pretty close to "winning" by the time I was 10 years old. I was born in one of the richest countries of the world, to well-off parents who were science/technology-minded, attending a good school district, etc. I also happen to have computer science as one of my strengths from a young age, partly due to foresighted parents who sent me to an after-school Logo program, and partly due to what feels like natural affinity. That pays well, while I could just as easily imagine being gifted in something less-lucrative, like music or history (I'm personally completely in awe of people who have perfect pitch and what seems like an innate sense of rhythm). I had to do relatively little on top of all that to succeed, at least compared to what other people would've had to do to succeed similarly. Basically had to not completely fuck it up. (And I assure you I am lazy as shit compared to a lot of people doing less well.)
Successful people attribute almost everything to their own intelligence, willpower or hard work to feel better about themselves. Luck is extremely important for any individual trial - once you get up to a large sample size, sure, your traits will win out - but many people will never reach such a sample size in their entire life.
When I see "fail fast", what I really think is: "increase your sample size".
This does not match my experience. While certainly some successful people like to take all the credit, most of the successful ones I know acknowledge either luck, fortune, or God's blessing played a huge roll in their success. Machievelli in particular talked about it at length in the Prince and other works.
But you can't directly control luck. You can directly influence the other factors, and while luck does play an important role, so do other factors. To borrow a quote, "The harder I work, the luckier I get."
Sounds like you're putting the cart before the horse. How are you identifying 'the very best' but by their successes? The argument is that you need both to 'succeed'. So, sure, if you only look at the ones that were both hard-working/relentless/growth-oriented AND lucky, then boy howdy does it look like luck isn't a factor.
The difference between lucky people and unlucky ones is that the lucky ones were able to recognize opportunity better. I've seen some research on this, but don't have a link handy.
I prefer the idea that the lucky ones "made their own luck" by increasing luck surface area.
In this view, the lucky may not have recognized opportunity better, just created better opportunities for themselves (through hard work). Even if this notion isn't completely correct, I like how it incentivises working rather than waiting.
Nassim Taleb talks about this, I think in Fooled by Randomness. He couched it in terms of increasing exposure to chance (serendipitous) occurrences via being more social, studying across disciplines, keeping friends whose views differ from yours, etc...
Edit: corrected my phone's overzealous auto-correct.
i've come to view luck as preparation + opportunity. You can't directly make yourself "lucky" but you do have control over how much you prepare (study, practice, exercise, think, train, drill, paying attention to surroundings, planning for future, etc) and you can expose yourself to more opportunities by meeting more people, being more ambient, being social as well as analytical, watching community and industry news, etc.
ps. huge fan of Empire! thank you sir for working on that game. i think Sid Meier cited it as a design influence for Civilization as well.
I've thought a lot about creativity by watching the people around me in art and science. I suspect that an important, perhaps defining characteristic of highly creative people is their ability to change their mind at will. (Similar to how a good scientist develops the ability to change his mind utterly when confronted with solid evidence, and change it back when that evidence is refuted.)
A factor in that is developing a strong associative memory. This means seeking out many many kinds of knowledge and experiences and constantly trying to connect them together. It's not banging "random" ideas together, because your associative memory filtera it down.
Article: > unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong — that surge of Pe activity a few hundred milliseconds after the error, directing our attention to the very thing we’d like to ignore — the mind will never revise its models
tpatke: > it just doesn't apply (and I am a huge fan on Dweck's work). This article is one for the masses - not people who are trying to create the next Google
aristus: > defining characteristic of highly creative people is their ability to change their mind at will. ... A factor in that is developing a strong associative memory ... seeking out many many kinds of knowledge and experiences and constantly trying to connect them together
Being wrong, persisting, and trying to learn from the mistake takes effort. It's difficult, and I suspect as difficult as (if not directly linked to) exerting self-control. Connecting thought is here: http://psr.sagepub.com/content/11/4/303.short
A good question for Moser/Dweck would be: is the physiological response of a child to a mistake a function of their blood glucose levels? I suspect that it is: anecdotally, people are a lot more optimistic and willing to explore an issue instead of yielding to to surface obstacles if they're on a sugar high.
The book 'Thinking: Fast & Slow' has a section on 'ego depletion' that may have some insight into your question. Basically when you think hard on a problem, make difficult choices, or work hard physically, you suffer from 'ego depletion' that makes further work even harder. This has a measurable impact on brain glucose levels. People given a glucose supplement don't suffer from the same drop-off in performance as those given a fake-sugar drink.
I hadn't thought about it in terms of Dweck's work on open-mindedness but it seems like accepting failures and persisting probably fall into the category of tasks that cause ego depletion. Very interesting.
| A good question for Moser/Dweck would be: is the physiological response of a child to a mistake a function of their blood glucose levels? I suspect that it is: | anecdotally, people are a lot more optimistic and willing to explore an issue instead of yielding to to surface obstacles if they're on a sugar high.
I wondered this as well. Even if it's not necessarily glucose-focused, there are a ton of angles. Depression? The two ends of manic/depressives? Sleep -> mood -> mistake response? Talking to an attractive member of the opposite sex and having it go well/not well?
Yet another question for Moser/Dweck: does the almost-immediate negative response to making mistakes diminish if the subject is in a state of flow?
From personal experience, a state of flow while performing an intellectually engaging activity diminishes any and all negative feelings I may have. Positive and calm feelings remain, but when I encounter an obstacle or an error, I simply adapt to it like water flowing down a mountain.
I suspect that Moser/Dweck would find that programmers in a state of flow encountering a compile/runtime exception would exhibit significantly lower amplitude signal associated with immediate negative response.
For error-related negativity (ERN), "negative" refers to the direction of voltage change, not the person's attitude.
Since ERN amplitude is associated with better learning, it might be the other way around, that people in flow are producing stronger ERN's and correcting their mistakes faster.
I think the point of this article is that it doesn't matter if you are top talent. It is detrimental to your growth think that you are. It is better to approach learning anything from a position of humility and interest rather thank thinking that you are hot shit.
Beware drawing conclusions about causes in the top decile based on averaged effects over the whole distribution. And adults based on studies of kids, etc.
I have seen programmers make the same avoidable mistakes over and over again without learning much from them. Sure, they learn from syntactical errors and perhaps how to avoid specific kinds of errors. But how many programmers will actually re-model their entire coding paradigm in order to improve?
In order to learn from a "mistake" there needs to be some sort of feedback. Many programmers make the same mistake over and over because it hasn't yet come back to seriously bite them in the ass, or because the evidence of it isn't clear. Only then is the mistake corrected and the lesson learnt.
For example, in this day and age of fast processors, abundant memory, large hard-drives, you can't expect a novice to put much emphasis on efficiency. He'll code and will run his program just to see the output appear almost instantly. A veteran will look at it and shake her head, but that's because she knows that back in her days, code this inefficient guaranteed that you'd spend the day in the lab just waiting to see the first letter of the output. Don't expect the newbie to learn that lesson any time soon, with his blazingly fast laptop, on which he's working comfortably from his bedroom. Now, hand him one of those snail computers at his next internship and watch the transformation operate.
Taking your question literally and in isolation, no.
But the manifestation more relevant to the real world is not having the experience base to realize it's biting you in the ass. Specifically, even though X is working, it could be working better, for less effort. Or another common case is X is not working and you misidentify why ("lazy developers not willing to do the work" instead of "used the wrong paradigm for the job", for instance).
True enough, needless optimization is often unnecessary.
The difference is that an expert will be able to make a good decision about that trade-off. A novice is restricted to the tools and practices they are familiar with - they might come to the same conclusion, but not for the same reasons.
First as a disclaimer. I have ADD and will never be a great C programmer (I can hack, but my ADD makes it extremely difficult to get the consistency in results that C demands when doing bulk coding, but that's a topic for another time). I have done some C programming and I will do some more. However there are hard limits for me that a lot of other people don't have.
Now this being said, in the environments where I work, I have met a lot of top-notch programmers and a much larger number of mediocre programmers who crank out huge quantities of unmaintainable code. And of course unmaintainable code is contagious: if you work with it, the quality of your own code suffers.
And so I have come to a contrarian perspective on a lot of this.
The difference I think is that the top notch programmers tend to be interested in improving. There is nothing worse than reading through the SQL-Ledger codebase and realizing that despite some modest improvements in security over the years (though not enough IMO) the coding style has never improved (\%$form? Really? Still? And no 'use strict?' what will it take?). Instead they make up for a lack of self-improvement with extra brute force effort in things like testing and debugging.
So this leads me to conclude there are two fundamental types of programmers out there: brute force programmers (the majority), and those programmers who substitute quality of effort for quantity of effort.
The majority of programmers are mediocre and never hit high notes because they believe that what matters is how much time and effort they put into programming. The other programmers spend less time and effort coding, and more time and effort thinking about coding. They recognize that this is where the key investment lies, and that time spent here saves a lot of effort elsewhere.
One problem with programming is that you rarely get immediate feedback on the mistakes that matter---areas like style, clarity, maintainability, and elegance of design. It's only if you go back and question your ability in these areas can you improve. But time spent thinking about these things, going over past efforts and critiquing them, is time that is not spent programming.
I sometimes think programming should be learned first through an apprenticeship, then through journeyman programs where an individual learns from many accomplished programmers, and finally certified to take on students.
I'm not a zealot for it, but test driven development does shorten the feedback loop in significant ways. You get specific feedback for problems and avoid making the same mistakes twice.
When I'm working with code that doesn't have it, runtime errors significantly lengthen the time between insights, as I hunt for the root cause of some bug.
The general point is that you do better work in small increments and revisions than you do, like Coleridge, getting high and watching masterpieces spill out of you, like Kubla Khan. You will be less sensitive to small things destroying your work, like Coleridge's visitor. Truish story.
Another thing to consider with Spolsky's student example is that there are a wide variety of experience levels in a programming class IME. I just finished 5 years of CS school (3 years undergrad, 2 grad), and I would attribute the variety in time it takes to complete a project mainly due to experience with the language/project type/etc.
There could be kids in the class with 2 years internship experience with the exact language on similar projects and those that have never programmed before.
Comparing professionals would be much more useful.
High notes, low notes who cares? The test of the acceptable programmer is in the works he/she creates. And to judge that requires answering the following:
1. Does the software do what it's supposed to do?
2. Does it do what it does efficiently?
That's it.
Forget wanting to belong to the legions of hallowed programmers who use the latest/best programming languages or frameworks.
No programmer hits a low note ... unless they want to. Those are not programmers but itenerant workers just filling in for the time-being. (Which could last 30 years. :) )
I wish I had happened on this article 10 years ago ... I was always very good at school, so I picked up what I thought were bad habits. Reading this now, it's clear that what I was doing was protecting myself from failure. When I'd do badly on a test in a class that I thought I should do well in, I'd stop taking the class seriously so that when I got a 'C' I could kid myself and say "I did that and wasn't even really trying"
Oddly enough, I never made much of the fact that if I really wanted to do well in a class (because I was in love with the subject teacher for example ... :D) I could actually put the work in to get to the top of the class ... I just put it down to being smart.
This had a lot of bad repercussions when I went to college. For the first time in my life I was not only competing with a shitton of people just as smart as me, but almost as many people who were WAAAAAY smarter. Trying really really hard to only make B's was a huge blow to my psyche and I was very demoralized and uninspired for a long time. It wasn't until I realized that not only did it take hard work, but for me, inspiration or passion was necessary to truly excel at something. That's when I realized that I just had to shun things I really wasn't interested in and devote myself to things that I really wanted to be good at.
Even nowadays, I still look at people in this field who I consider quasi geniuses (DHH, Yehuda, Resig) and wonder if I can ever get to that level, and whenever I doubt myself, I go back and read this very deeply inspiring article from John Nunemaker http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/01/12/i-have-no-tale...
All of the greatest under-achievers I've known were constantly told how smart they were by people with the best intentions, and they had experiences similar to yours.
This. I have the exact same problem. Praised for being smart from a young age (graduated high school at 16), left me with some bad habits about work and effort., and it's only been lately, that I've started to dismantle them.
tl;dr Praising smart kids for their intelligence is a sure-fire way to screw them up for years.
"Most people say it's easier to pick up languages when you're younger," says David Green, of University College London, who specialises in bilingualism.
"But people can learn languages at any point in their lives. Being immersed in a language is important. Personality is a contributing factor too - not being able to tolerate feeling foolish from making inevitable errors will make learning a new language a difficult process.
David Green is wrong. It's easier to pick up languages when you're younger. Noam Chomsky discovered that the brain is specifically geared to learn languages around 3 to 6 years old. Kids at that age get the language in a way that you'll never get after.
But people can learn languages at any point in their lives
Of course. I learned German, from nothing to fluency, in my twenties; and the same with Czech in my thirties. But if you ask me, for example, how a German or Czech name sounds, my answer won't match with native speakers. You can get all the definitions, make no mistakes in the grammar, but you won't understand it at a deeper level. A language is way to express a culture, and the culture is gigantic and ineffible compared to the language.
"Kids at that age get the language in a way that you'll never get after."
This is just an excuse that will limit you. Yes, kids might learn at a faster rate, but they also don't do anything else but learn that language for years. Most people have busy lives which doesn't allow for this unless they completely immerse themselves. As an adult, you also have the advantage of understanding difficult concepts (because you've already learned them in your native language), which speeds up the learning process.
" You can get all the definitions, make no mistakes in the grammar, but you won't understand it at a deeper level. A language is way to express a culture, and the culture is gigantic and ineffible compared to the language."
Then you don't really know those languages as well as you think. Part of knowing the language is knowing the culture. This requires immersion, studying, and discipline.
I've been studying Japanese for the past 5 years and I've started a couple of meetup groups in my area for studying. What I've found is that 99% of the people that try to learn a new language as an adult give up at some point. Mostly when they get to any point of difficulty. You also have to be disciplined enough to study it every single day.
Something else I've learned is that the similarities between starting a business and learning a new language are actually very similar.
Apoligies if I am making a strawman or unfairly characterizing you, but lately I've been seeing a lot of "Get Motivated" stuff here and on reddit that is completely false.
Sorry, but children do have the "language acquisition" device. I'm bilingual and learned both my languages during those golden years. My memory as a child is amazing, and I can name scene for scene the movies I watched once as a child, yet I can barely tell you the plot of the movie I saw last month. Childhood learning and the malleable brain really isn't something in dispute. Immersion isn't remotely comparable.
My wife lived for 5 years in Russia and studied the language all through college. She's no where near my childhood learned Greek which I speak maybe 5 or 6 times a year. Her Russian fades quickly too. If she's not using it, she's losing it. Oh, she speaks 4 laugnages at a proper adult level too. She needs to keep using all 4 or she will also lose them. She's no stranger to language learning or immersion. My Greek is permanent, btw, no need to practice or anything. Its forever mine.
There's just something really sad about how the motivation crowd has been co-opted by the meathead sports metaphor crowd "GIVE 110%!!!!". There's science and reality at work here. Yelling and overly positive platitudes aren't helping. If anything its a disservice to the people who really are looking for answers while trying to get motivated or trying to learn a second language. Motivation and learning and hacking them is a lot more complex than just willing yourself to make it happen. There's a fair bit of complexity here, especially when people have unrealistic expectations and do not love the process of learning and trying. Loving the process, being humble, asking for advice, accepting the pain, accepting looking like an idiot, etc are far more valuable to me than the whole "TRY HARDER!!!!" sports cliche.
Due to past research it has become accepted fact that children learn languages faster. However there has been a lot of research lately that has shown this to be false. So sorry I don't believe this is simply a motivational tool (however even so, belief that you innately don't have a particular ability often leads to self-limiting behavior).
I agree though that a language learned at childhood more easily sticks with you than one learned later in life. This makes sense for a number of reasons. However this is a completely different topic than one's ability learn a language.
Just curious -- how many years did you spend immersed in Greek? In addition, speaking Greek 5-6 times a year is great. If you changed that to 0 times a year, I can assure you that your ability to speak it would dissipate.
That research hasn't yet made the grade. You'll constantly find articles that state "some linguists" are doubting the Critical Period Hypothesis [1], just as you'll find doubts for many hypothesis, but it's quite well accepted within the linguistic field. And if you talk to people that have been deeply exposed to language acquisition, like "drzaiusapelord" above (and ignore the spirited Redditors who went to Japanese class a couple times), you'll find that it holds. Language is fascinating and with immersion and other techniques can get to 99%. But if you didn't hear it and speak it at 6, you'll never get it like a native speaker.
Here's a great example: I worked in Berlin for a Jewish woman who moved to America when she was 5. She didn't speak any English, only German, at the time. When she came back to Germany at 15, she had to learn German from scratch (completely from scratch). She was 50 when I worked for her and her German was flawless, but my German friends said that she occasionally made the tiniest of mistakes which made it clear she wasn't a mother-tongue speaker. She didn't make such mistakes in English.
I had the most interesting demonstration of the reality of this language acquisition period in high school. I was friends with a family of Vietnamese immigrants. Their oldest was past puberty when they moved to Canada, their younger ones were pre puberty. The oldest and the parents learned English, but never lost their accents. You could not tell that their younger children were not born in Canada.
That said, perfect language acquisition is not impossible for all adults. My brother started learning Chinese at 20. He learned it so well that people he first talked to over the phone are sometimes confused when they meet him - they can't believe that he's not native Chinese. (But he's been having to work to lose his Taiwanese accent.)
I was 22 when I learned my second language (Spanish) I was immersed because my (now) wife spoke very little english when I met her. My in-laws don't speak any english even though they know a lot of words because they are "scared to say it wrong" I just listened until I knew enough and then started to string together words even if the grammer was wrong, Now I'm fluent. Funny thing is if you get my mother-in-law drunk she magically starts speaking english!
I'm experiencing this at the moment. I am picking up the local lingo at a relatively rapid rate compared to my peers, and I can see it is mostly down to having no sense of embarrassment. I went around saying 'Biscuit' to people for a month as a reply to 'Gruess Gott', thinking I was mimicking perfectly, and I'm okay with that.
Quite interesting. I feel that my spoken English has stuck to a certain level for an opposite reason: I don't care enough about mistakes and thus I don't actively try to improve my English. I just speak and either I get understood or try to explain my thought in another way.
An interesting perspective is putting in the years of learning.
Say a kid realistically starts learning a language at age 4. Add 5 years and you end up with a 9 year kid. 9 year olds are not thaaat good at language.
Compare this with an adult that's been learning a completely new language for 5 years. As in seriously learning, dedicating at least one hour per day, 3-4 days per week. Plus living in the country, listening to radio, tv, etc.
I think the adult will win. Even if you compare with an older kid up to maybe 13 years old, but then it's cheating because that kid has been learning the language for more than 5 years, even if you increase the "start learning definition" to age 7.
Really, this kind of research points to the folly of the "everyone gets a trophy", "sheltering ego is most important in learning" school of thought. The every-day evidence of that folly litters the corpse of the American public education system.
Praise your kids when they do well. Point it out when they've made mistakes (in a graceful way). Teach them that doing better next time is always within their power if they apply themselves.
Most of all, let them know that you make mistakes but that you learn from your own mistakes and are willing to work hard to do better. Be a good example of coping with life and its difficulties, including the difficulties of parenting.
No, that's just a straw man arguing for the opposite extreme. It's even better established that consistent failure and lack of praise anticorrelates with educational achievement. The point is balance and sanity, not policy flamage.
When you start your post with a phrase like "folly" that "litters the corpse of the American educational system", I think it's a little disingenuous to claim that "all" you said was that praise should be deserved. You have an axe to grind, and you picked up a stone from this article to do it. But the article isn't about broad education policy, it's about very narrow findings in psychology. So yes, your post looks to me like a poorly-informed, knee jerk flame.
History, if you will, is littered with the corpses of people who thought they knew exactly how to fix the american educational system (or whatever: pick your policy obsession, it's all the same).
I totally agree with the points in the article. I actually have actively pushed myself to learn from my own mistakes since I was around 22-23 yrs old. For me, it was a natural, logical way to learn.
I looked at it like riding a bike. Almost noone says they cant ride a bike if they make a mistake and fall. They try to adjust their balance better or think about what caused them to fall. They key is that they get back on the bike. However, in other areas of life, people dont think that what they are doing is like riding a bike when it really is.
With that approach I was able to teach myself programming, linguistics, etc. Its kind of awesome to read this article a decade or so afterwards.
I agree that learning from mistakes is really important. I also think that memorizing and rote learning are a detriment to being fast at learning. You can't "get it" if you are memorizing.
If you have a firm grasp of something then you understand how to manipulate the concept in different contexts. Adding a new idea allows you to simply twist contexts to include the new knowledge and you've "learned" how to do that new thing.
As things get more complex, so does the contexts and thus it gets harder to "learn" if you've been doing rote learning all along. Rote learning is memorizing a new idea in a specific context and there is no room for morphing that context.
If you get good at morphing contexts to fit new ideas then you can also get good at taking two different contexts, merging them at getting new concepts out of it: this is the act of inventing.
While I do agree that learning from your mistakes is a huge part of education, I think your interests are a close second. Generally, I'm intrigued by something that others deem to be difficult. I scored better grades in all of my engineering, math and science classes than my intro courses like psychology, economics and so on which I attribute to being more interested in science and thus being able to focus more.
For example, I was always very intrigued by calculus because most people talk of how difficult it is. I wanted to know why it's so difficult, so the first opportunity I had I took a calculus course. The subject itself wasn't necessarily interesting, I wanted to know what the fuss was about.
I really couldn't disagree with this more. No doubt, failure is important in learning. However, to be educated or have an education, at the end of the day, you need to get something right.
Personally, I don't learn by failing fifty times and never succeeding. I don't learn how to lose weight if I try fifty diets and never lose a pound. I don't learn how to talk to a girl if I speak with a dozen of them and get shot down every time. I don't learn how to rockclimb by falling off the rock and never gaining elevation.
That is negative re-enforcement. I have learned what not to do--the opposite of what I set out to accomplish. Education is progressive. I learn by failing until I succeed, if only a little bit. Then I go back and try to succeed even more. That's the hard part, not calling it quits. Finding inspiration and success in the smallest scraps of result.
On top of that, it's perfectly possible to learn without ever having made a mistake in the first place! I've learned plenty of things perfectly the first time, and didn't need a mistake to lock it in.
I know it has been mentioned before about this same study, but I can't remember where: what do you do when your kids are finding the work too easy? Praise them for their effort? That seems like it could backfire if they think they can get by in life with hardly any struggle, while still being complimented for their labor. Obviously, you could give them something challenging to learn, but what about when they're in school with kids that have a wide spread of natural talent? They will probably get good grades and be praised by their teachers for their intelligence, meanwhile getting bored of the same material over and over again. This seems to suggest the need for more individualized teaching, either by the parent, or by a teacher of some "gifted" class.
Having a Bsc in psychology, I can remember that this was one of those concepts that I picked up from my classrooms and have used for myself. I believe that you could expand on this and say something similar about your athletic abilities. Being from Canada, I've played a lot of hockey and would be told that I was quite good. Having that thought in my head stagnated my ability as a player. It would be mean that when I had a bad game, I would question put blame on other factors and not myself. After reading this article, it made me realize that my self-perception about being a good hockey player was not a good way of seeing myself. After having a bad game, I shouldn't feel bad but rather I focus on finding a way to improve my weaknesses.
1.) When I've had a decent night's sleep.
2.) When I've made efforts taken to manage stress.
3.) Coffee!!!! (Dyn-a-mit-eh!)
4.) When I'm just in interested in why I made a mistake.
5.) Active presence of mind that I should be focusing on the task at hand.
6.) When I'm interested in the material.
7.) When I don't give a damn how about smart or dumb I might think I am.
8.) Removal of any negative influences at the moment. (PHB)
Memory and learning is not just something that magically happens, there's a lot of electro-chemical machinery underlying all of it that is greatly influenced by gene variation and other factors:
Fixed mindset -- “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it.”
Growth mindset -- “[W]e can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and energy.”
A fixed mindset and a growth mindset are not mutually exclusive beliefs.
As I see it there are three dependent factors in accomplishing a complex task:
1.) intelligence -- raw computational power (impacted minimally by sleep/diet/use)
2.) knowledge -- data stored regarding a given task (impacted immensely by attention/research/exposure)
3.) wisdom -- the application of 1 on 2 (impacted greatly by experience/composure/analysis)
Knowledge, and to a lesser extent wisdom, can come as a result of investing time and energy. Wisdom is an amplifier of intelligence and knowledge; it can produce an order of magnitude increase in efficacy with very little change in either of the other two.
I'm going to apply this to my management style and make sure I praise people for working hard, trying hard, but not being smart, or naturally good at anything. They know they are good at stuff naturally, but for the team to be most effective, the smartest people need to work the hardest.
Isn't this all about interest? When you are interested in a subject you are more likely to try again and learn from your mistakes. People with an almost unhealthy interest in a subject (people with Asperger for example; they think Newton had this) are the brilliant people on the subject.
What does interest have to do with the article and the experiments performed?
Seems to me that the performance of the test subject depended upon the type of praise given, not the interest of the subjects (which would have been consistently random across test groups)
It's great to see a formalized study validate some of my long-held beliefs. For me, the biggest drawback of being self-critical has been "what if I draw the wrong conclusion from this mistake?" Some people call it tenacity: to try again and again after failure. But I think it's paranoia. The thought that I learned and will now stand-by something completely wrong due to a flaw in reasoning is a frightening path towards ignorance.
hope its not too much offtopic, but if I had children right now, i would definitely use my time differently to teach them things today than 20 years ago. in schools they still _mostly_ teach you to remember useless stuff (no, I am not talking about basics of history) instead of teaching you how to get necessary information, analyze it and get to conclusions. its not a miracle to anyone living in the age of internet that most information you need could be found on internet in less than 30 seconds (you dont need to pack it all inside your brain). ergo i would teach my children fast-reading (real fast) so they can analyze data quickly, and would teach them how to analyze facts and put them together to get to solid probative conclusions. also, how to do basic PI work :) to find data you looking for by assembling big puzzle from different places of small chunks over the net.
This seems really related to the post from yesterday about how the one fellow learned from his daughter not to be afraid to fail (or maybe that was earlier today?).
When I read a post like this, I try to apply it to making myself a better programmer in the "high note" sense. Trouble is - it just doesn't apply (and I am a huge fan of Dweck's work). This article is one for the masses - not people who are trying to create the next Google. Motivation, hard work and an ability to learn from mistakes are all necessary, but ultimately not sufficient for our craft.
If I had to guess what the missing ingredient is, I would say creativity.
Heck - we are programmers. We get immediate feedback on our mistakes all day long and anyone reading this post has most likely gotten really really good and learning from those mistakes. ...but, how many of us are hitting those high notes?
[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html