Dan Erwin

Six Resources for Creativity

Innovation and creativity, everyone says, is key to our nation’s success in the marketplace. While working through some new stuff on creativity and innovation, I stumbled, once more, across Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart’s analysis of the resources for creativity. It has the intriguing title, Buy Low and Sell High: An Investment Approach to Creativity.

The resources are a reminder of what it takes to get a leg up on creativity. More significantly and perhaps more useful, the resources are especially programmed for succeeding as a worker in today’s business world.

1.    Intelligence. This is not a reference to your IQ, but your processes for planning, monitoring and evaluating your thinking. As Jonah Lehrer writes in a superb blog, it’s more than a matter of gut feel, it’s reflecting on your decision process itself.

2.    Knowledge. Almost tongue-in-cheek, the writers say that “advancing knowledge beyond where it is requires knowing where it is.” I suspect that the biggest, hugest, most terrible weakness of Googling for information is that you don’t go through the painful work of digging it out by yourself in books, articles, conversations and reflection. Just the process of digging out knowledge makes it possible to find out where the knowledge is, something that Googling can never replace.

3.    Thinking styles. Styles are proclivities or tendencies in the way we think. Not abilities. Creative folk not only just plain like novelty, but they also like to see problems in new ways, undertake new challenges and just plain put together things in their own ways. As Carol Dweck would say, they take an incremental view of life and intelligence. They’re fluid and changeable and get satisfaction from learning, and seeing opportunities to get better.

4.    Personality. There are a huge number of studies about the personality attributes of creative folk. The attributes overlap, and the include a tolerance of ambiguity, willingness to overcome obstacles, willingness to grow, the willingness to take sensible (interesting adjective) risks, and belief in one’s ability to correct mistakes.

5.    Motivation. Again and again, researchers have found that people do their most creative work when their motivation is task-focused rather than goal-focused, and internally driven rather than externally driven.

6.    Environment. Without a supportive organizational environment, all these resources are liable to come to nothing. It's important to note that the organization can support creativity by helping spark creative ideas, by supporting these ideas, and by serving as a basis for assessing and correcting these ideas as they are developed.

You’ll notice that these resources overlap. And because there are so many resources, creativity is not as common as we would like. Still, when people in business recognize that creativity is revealed just as much in new business processes as in new products (think iPad), there’s a lot of creativity going on out there, and a lot more space for creators.

Just a "Taste of College" Can Boost US Success in the Talent Wars

The need for hard-to-find talent has some of America’s best companies getting involved in high school education. A former client, now senior executive at General Mills, nailed the problem. “If we don’t build relationships at high school level, another major firm (Target or Best Buy) will steal some of our best potential talent,” she said. Business support and pushing of talent development, even at the pre-college levels, will more and more become a key strategic necessity for American companies. Talent development in K – 12 will take many different forms. 

What top researchers in Minnesota have found is that just a “taste of college” can boost high school student success, providing more opportunity for building our talent base.   

The program, emphasizing dual credit in high school and college, has been pushed by Joe Nathan, one of America’s most respected educationists, who specializes in inner city education. Nathan, formerly of the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota, now runs research out of the Center for School Change at Macalester College.  Nathan believes that if we can develop a sense of “I belong here. I understand this world,” through dual credit classes for poor and minority students, we can keep kids who might otherwise leave school. The growth through advance placement classes, International Baccalaureate programs, or dual credit classes (taught by college profs in high school), has shown surprisingly significant results in developing potential talent. 

The report recommends that “dual credit” courses be available to younger and perhaps the less academically successful.  It also notes that a study of New York and Florida students revealed that dual credit programs demonstrated an “ability to raise the achievement of students not traditionally seen as successful in high school”—low income and low-achieving students. 

Participation increased from 17,581 in 2007-2008 to 21,184 in 2009-2010. That’s a huge change in a state will little over 60,000 public high school graduates per year.  

The program offers a number of significant advantages to both students and families.

• Students can earn a two-year associates degree while enrolled in high school.
• The programs, paid for by the various school districts, are free.
• It keeps some of the kids in school who might otherwise drop out.
• Students and parents can save as much as $40,000 on a four-year degree.
• Provides lower income and minority students a better understanding of school options.
• Provides students with a clearer understand of life goals.
• Makes for a far easier transition for students from high school to college.
• Makes it possible for those who do not see themselves at college to complete relevant certificate programs.
• Studies from several states show that students who take college courses in high school fare better in college. 

At first glance, “dual credit” programs may sound like just another flaky educational idea, but, as the statistics above demonstrate, longitudinal research strongly supports Nathan’s ideas. If you’ve been around inner city kids, you know that it’s their attitudes that get in the way of motivation and prevent them from achieving. And what Nathan’s program does is to focus on those attitudes, and provide constructive opportunities to impact the students’ learning context. 

Extensive research by Carol Dweck and her associates at Stanford has consistently shown that students with a growth mindset—a fundamental attitude--do better in school. Moreover, the research demonstrates that the growth mindset raises motivation and achievement, especially in difficult courses or across difficult school transitions. Though faculty may not label or talk about the dual credit experience as a “growth mindset,” that’s exactly what the experience can provide for students. 

Though I grew up in a family with college background, I have never forgotten how important my trips to the University of Michigan with our high school choir were. Years later, I can still see myself on that magnificent campus, talking to recent grads from my own high school. I recognize that those experiences were a piece of my drive for higher education. They impacted my attitudes and served to motivate me as strongly as anything anyone could say.    

Sure, I know that what works in Minnesota, Massachusetts or Michigan in the 1940s, may not work--because of resources--in Nevada, New Mexico or Alabama today. If you’ve lived and worked in several different parts of the country, you know that state cultures and state resources differ profoundly. That’s why smart thinkers in the US Department of Education are encouraging individual states to figure out what works locally, experiment with it, create a pilot program, tweak it, and when successful, celebrate and publicize the stuff. The “dual credit” program is one such successful strategy for developing talent. It’s actually quite amazing that just a “taste of college” can boost student success.

Carol Dweck and Greg Walton on Willpower

Is willpower about your biology or your brain? Are we constrained by the narrow limits of our biology?

After nearly a two-week hiatus from blogging--and Thanksgiving week in glorious Boston with my kids, spending some of that time going over my grandson’s list of potential colleges, I’m back home again. So I chuckled to see Carol Dweck and her associate, Greg Walton, reporting still more of their ground-breaking practical research in Sunday’s NYTimes. 

The Stanford profs have studied another important issue of human capital: willpower. And they’ve found that we can actually manage our willpower. 

The authors begin by posing two important illustrations of the problem, both depicting the popular belief that willpower is about biology not mindset. In one, they quote a recent nutrition book, arguing that because of how the brain’s hypothalamus works, it is a “myth” that anyone can will himself to lose weight. A second illustration from a just published book concludes that willpower is “limited and depends on a continuous supply” of glucose. Dweck and Walton’s assessment is spot on: these theories attribute our failures of willpower to our fixed biology—and wrong. 

The theories, as Dweck and Walton point out, have an obvious appeal: attributing failures of willpower to our fixed biological limits justifies our procrastination as well as our growing waistlines. Not only that, we also get to consume more sugar. 

In stark contrast, their research has found that what’s limiting our willpower is our mindset. And when people believe that willpower is self-renewing and work hard, they’re energized to work more. 

Recognizing that many people are skeptical about renewing willpower, their research found the following: 

When the initial task was easy and willpower wasn’t required, people did well on the tricky cognitive task, making few mistakes. But when the initial task was hard and involved self-control, people who believed that willpower was limited made almost twice as many mistakes on the tricky cognitive task as did the group that performed the initial easy task. This finding replicates many studies by Dr. Baumeister and others that have been interpreted as evidence that willpower is limited and easily depleted. But, strikingly, we found that people who believed that willpower was not limited continued to perform well on the second task, making few mistakes, even after facing the difficult initial task. They were not “depleted” and kept on doing well.

This study and others put the lie to our common notions about the limitations of willpower. They also reinforce the well-known research that shows that the more we learn, the better and the faster that we can learn.

You may contend that these results show only that some people just happen to have more willpower — and know that they do. But on the contrary, we found that anyone can be prompted to think that willpower is not so limited. When we had people read statements that reminded them of the power of willpower like, “Sometimes, working on a strenuous mental task can make you feel energized for further challenging activities,” they kept on working and performing well with no sign of depletion. They made half as many mistakes on a difficult cognitive task as people who read statements about limited willpower. In another study, they scored 15 percent better on I.Q. problems.

When faced with skepticism about this kind of research I remember that old dogma dies hard. Once concepts are deeply embedded, a superstructure of assumptions and ideas grows around it. Rejecting a dogma means that many ideas are now questionable, and . . . as a result a close read of a book or thoughtful analysis of a new and complex idea is impossible. As an acquaintance of mine said about these ideas: "I don't believe it. I can't believe it. Everything I've ever learned about intelligence and achievement would go out the window." He tuned out. It was a losing battle I chose not to fight.

This research reminds parents of some very important truths for their children—and themselves as adults, businesspersons and professionals.

At stake in this debate is not just a question about the nature of willpower. It’s also a question of what kind of people we want to be. Do we want to be a people who dismiss our weaknesses as unchangeable? When a student struggles in math, should we tell that student, “Don’t worry, you’re just not a math person”? Do we want him to give up in the name of biology? Or do we want him to work harder in the spirit of what he wants to become?

Time is Running Out

 The way to love anything is to realize it might be lost.—G.K. Chesterton 

I couldn’t help but laugh when I read this morning’s Minneapolis Star Tribune. Emblazoned at the top of the page was the blaring headline, Time is running out, says NFL. Act now before another city does. The reliance on what we in the persuasion field call the scarcity factor is frequent, widespread and systematic. In this example, the National Football League is attempting to persuade legislators on the need to act quickly to save the Vikings Football team for the Twin Cities.

The scarcity factor is a common persuasive strategy. In recruiting it surfaces as “if we don’t get this guy, our competition will go after him. And then. . . .” Fill in the blanks. But it also surfaces in our search for jobs: “If I don’t land this job, then. . . .” Fill in the blanks. We engage in self-persuasion also.

Don’t jump too quickly.  This is a strategy regularly employed in business, politics, religion, antiques and, well . . . you name the field. The most obvious place to see it is in the listing of autos for sale. On some weekends, the approach may be seen in up to one-quarter of dealer sales. 

Scarcity is a major weapon in the arsenal of the persuasion engineers. Robert Cialdini says the scarcity factor trades on our weakness for shortcuts. Underlying the strategy is the belief that the things difficult to possess are better than those easier to obtain. Of course, as opportunities become less available, we lose freedoms. And, if you’re like me, you hate to lose your freedoms. I watched the Twins baseball team get a multi-million dollar stadium almost solely on this basic strategy. The Vikings’ are using the same strategy for getting the taxpayer to partially fund a new stadium, costing close one billion dollars.

As Robert Cialdini says, the scarcity model works this way: when increasing scarcity—or anything else—interferes with our prior access to some item, we will react against the interference by wanting more. Simple. But it really works very well for the uneducated populace. That includes a lot of professionals. 

Becoming an educated business person and consumer requires a knowledge of this strategy. Indeed, as a student of persuasion I take the view that it is as much our responsibility to engage in self-protection as it is the business person’s to use the strategies available. 

The starting place for self-protecting is what we call “downplay.” In other words, when a persuader intensifies a proposal, downplay it. The flip side should also take precedence in your strategy: when the persuader downplays, then you intensify. So when you recognize a propaganda blitz, it’s to your advantage to be cool, detached, and skeptically alert. Not only to the inflated puffery with its dreams and promises, but also to intensified phenomena. Scarcity is one strategy for intensifying phenomena that you'll meet again and again. 

One way to deal with this is to create a scorecard. After you’ve done it methodically on paper, you begin to do it in your head as soon as the persuasive messages start coming. One way to do this systematically is to divide a sheet of paper into quarters, and then enter the kinds of downplaying and intensifying being practiced. Simply by seeing these, you can become more alert to what kind of manipulation is going on. 

The scorecard will look something like this: 

Intensify your product’s good     Intensify the other product's bad 

Downplay your product’s bad      Downplay the other product's good 

You can list what you hear and observe under each category and get a much better sense of what’s going on. Furthermore, it’s important to remember that persuasion is going on constantly, not only through the media, but just as much in our conversations. I have no problem with that. I do it too. But I also keep a data set of strategies so I become a responsible persuadee. It really is a matter of consumer beware.

When the Going Gets Tough, Will the Tough Really Get Going?

You know the old proverb about toughness. And if you went to Sunday School, it took the form of "tribulation is good for you," and you will not "suffer more than you are able to handle." This powerful, religious and cultural strain of our Western belief system holds that high performance requires tribulation. It argues that "dissatisfaction, discomfort and distress" actually galvanize performance. And indeed, some research, such as that of George and Jhou from 2007, demonstrates that negative moods signal a problem to be solved, driving the person onward into performance.

But an equally strong thread of conventional wisdom stresses that success comes from enjoying the work. As recently as 2008, Michael Riketta of Aston University in the U.K. found that higher job satisfaction, the enjoyment of your work, predicts better performance.

So how do you make sense of these two conflicting threads? Is either true? or both? Leave it to Teresa Amabile and her husband Steven Kramer, the real experts in the fields of performance and creativity, to answer this question. Harvard's Amabile has researched in this field for years, reporting regularly in the Harvard Business Review, and now in the fine new book, The Progress Principle. What they found is that there's a bit of truth in both threads, but that there's a far better way to go at work and life than either of the two principles actually offers.  

In a fabulous piece of comprehensive research, Amabile and Kramer collected diaries from a broad sampling of workers and managers over ten years. Their conclusions were built on the diaries of 238 professionals from 26 project teams over the duration of their projects. Nearly 12,000 entries later, they discovered the dynamics of the "inner work life" of professionals and especially its impact on their performance and the entire organization. They've found that performance is driven by a constant interplay between how a worker sees things happening, his/her emotions and the resulting motivation.

Take, for example, my architectural clients, who find themselves two weeks behind on a major elementary school project. The senior associates have added staff to the project, the members are working side by side, seven days a week, some as much as a 12 to 14 hours straight, all understanding the importance of their success to their own reputation, their jobs and the firm. The boss walks in and to their delight calls a halt for a lunch break. Outside there are stacks of pizza, the grills are going with brats and burgers. Beer and pop are available, and the warmth and support for all the team is on display. A seemingly trivial event causes the project members to perceive their work and themselves as important and valued, adding to their stash of very positive emotions. At the end of the day the team is happy and excited about the project, having leaped to the task and put great effort behind it. It is, as one of the members said, one of the "best days of the month." What got done on that good day? As Amabile and Kramer point out, people perform best when their workday experiences include more positive emotions, passion for their work and the supportive, favorable messages of their leaders. Put simply, employees are "working under the influence" of their inner work lives.

So how can you have a lot more of those great performance experiences? 

The key is simple: progress through "small wins." More than two years ago, I wrote about the personal satisfaction, delight and success of small wins in my blog on motivation and small wins. I learned years ago that small wins works because success breeds success. To have success, it's important to make it possible for yourself and your team. Small wins is a calculated, smart effort to break down, to chunk your work and your projects into pieces small enough to achieve on a regular, sometimes even on a daily basis. Chunking makes for a win and motivation, all at the same time. It's serendipity!

When you dig deeper into the process of small wins, what you find is that when people's best days are compared to their worst, the most important difference is being able to make progress in their work. Managers can learn an awful lot from that well-researched principle. Although many of you are fortunate in your managers, that's not always the case. Let's be honest. There are a lot of demeaning creeps out there. Men and women who aren't interested in the work life of their employees. One Gen-Yer said to me that he walked into a session with his boss in a good mood, but always left depressed. She made him hate his job. So rather than go into a funk, he learned the power of small wins for himself, his job, and even his relationship with that asshole boss. The strategy enhanced his feelings of control, made things a little better, and actually chipped away at the power of that dysfunctional culture. He looked out for small but sweet victories that he could win--a tactic that gave him staying power until he was able to successfully transfer out of that sicko group.

Amabile and Kramer have also found that small wins is the secret sauce of high performance. It doesn't make work easier or eliminate frustrations and struggles because most work today is not trivial. But the more small wins, the better able we are to hurdle those really difficult projects.

The Progress Principle spells out the issues in superb fashion for us all.

See my: Motivation and small wins.  Why small changes work and big changes don't.

See also: Amabile and Kramer: Harvard Business Review, Inner Work Life and The Power of Small Wins.

Think Twice Before You Follow Your Passion

In a critical rejection of the widely accepted notion to follow your passion, Dorie Clark argues in a Harvard Business blog that the strategy can be wrongheaded. As Clark points out, doing what you love can inspire great dedication and a sense of meaning, but it can also blind you to real problems.

She suggests four straight-forward reasons why the strategy can be a serious blunder.

1. You may not have a knack for your objective. Remember, it's always hard to judge yourself, to know what your strengths and weaknesses might be. Indeed, I've learned as an executive coach that though many have a sense of their weaknesses, few have a real sense of their strengths. It's often the case that personal passion may not play to one's strengths.
2. You hate the work surrounding your passion. Though your passion might truly reflect your strengths, it's also true that some really can drop the ball when it comes to the work surrounding their passion, putting them in serious risk. I've known numerous would-be consultants who love the work, but find that the sales processes involved drive them nuts. As a result, their passion goes by the wayside. 
3. You're too emotionally attached. I see this regularly in many well-trained professionals. Writers hate feedback. CPA's despise someone suggesting their financial strategy is limited. Physicians hate being challenged in their diagnoses. And business people have difficulty objectifying their expertise enough to accept criticism. When you care too deeply about a project, it's very difficult to make a rational decision about whether it should live or die.
4. No one will pay for it. You can turn your passion, your hobby into a job--only if someone's willing to pay for it. I've had two careers for which I was passionate, but learned that that both placed serious limitations on my financial future. Neither were financially viable. With three daughters off to college, I needed a more lucrative profession. Thankfully, I was able to leverage my experiences. But if I'd stayed in them, I would have been up the financial creek and our children would have suffered for it. In short, what was once a viable career may go out of existence tomorrow. 

Although Dorie Clark's recommendations are very practical and make a lot of immediate sense, there are two more profound reason's why following your passion can be a clear dead-end.

First, you may not be aware either of your future interests or strengths. It usually takes a significant amount of experience and feedback to draw relevant conclusions about one's own career. What's interesting and inspiring today may be exceedingly dull and boring tomorrow. So rather than being concerned about your dreams and your passion, I'd work on the skills of adaptability and take the opportunities that come across your path. Indeed, the combination of globalized competition and technological development have made rapid change and adaptation an absolute necessity for career survival and success.

But the most important reason not to follow your passion is to understand that the entire midset of "following your passion," the theory, is built upon false premises about us as humans. It's built upon the notion that you and I have one true self and that our task in life is to identify that true self. But you and I do not have one true self or one single identity. Instead we are a lot of selves with a lot of identities. In a previous blog I wrote about the disbelief and suprise of a high school classmate when she finally figured out who I was at a fifty year reunion. For a good laugh, check out my blog, How to change your personality. My career passion never entered into the matter. It was ultimately about family need and the demand for financial survival and success.

The notion of a true self, though exceedingly popular, has been thoroughly dispelled by research. To appreciate this dynamic—that each of us is not one true self but many selves, a whole cast of characters that we might become, think we should become or even fear becoming in the future—consider a study by Stanford’s Hazel Markus. In this study 210 college students were asked to “tell us about what is possible for you.”  With that information, Markus and Paula Nurius created a questionnaire of 150 possibilities.  Broken out into six categories, the questionnaire included general descriptors such as creative and intelligent; life-style possibilities such as being health conscious or alcohol dependent; and occupational alternatives such as business executive, supreme court justice, taxi-driver or police officer.  The categories were then broken down into how they thought about themselves currently and whether they considered an alternative for themselves in the future.  

The study showed that when the context is changed, the possibilities a person faces spur them to find role models they’d like to become.  So think twice before you follow your passion. You're liable to find a lot more out there than you suspect.

 Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius.  Possible Selves. American Psychologist 41(9) (1986), 954-969. 

What Really Motivates Mark Zuckerberg?

Good managers, we are told, know how to motivate their people.  The result of this ideology, of course, is that most managers spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do just this.  And inevitably, conference planners schedule conferences with so-called great motivational coaches and managers from business and sports.  All these speakers emphasize the manager's role in motivating people.  

I'm very skeptical of much of what goes under this rubric of coaches and managers "motivating people." As a result I was absolutely delighted to see what the omnipresent Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook had to say about motivation.  

Zuckerberg takes issue with the way he's portrayed in The Social Network, especially that he built Facebook to build a pot of gold.  What he said to a Stanford audience about the movie portrayal and his own motivation is especially illuminating.  They frame it (the movie) as if the whole reason I invented Facebook was that I wanted to get girls or to get into some kind of social institution.  They just can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.

In what amounts to an expose of The Social Network, Viginia Heffernan writes in a New York Times article, Network Error, contrasting the movie Zuckerberg with the real guy's motivation.  As Heffernan commented, Zuckerberg doesn't mean that he is free from ambition.  It's just that his struggles and goals are not about notoriety, status or romance.  Quoting Virgil Griffith, she reminds her readers that hackerdom rewards spontaneity, curiosity and ingenuity.  Scientific questions like the creativity inherent in Facebook are deeper and the answers so uplifting and transcendently beautiful that contact with them is a genuine spiritual experience. 

In other words, Zuckerberg and his compatriots in the work world are all self-motivated.  My experience has been very similar throughout all my client base.  The managers that really do well and achieve legendary productivity are superb at identifying and hiring self-motivated people.  They don't spend their time motivating people.

Five Keys to Brilliance: The Fuel for Genius.

I’m excited to learn that more than 3,000 visitors  have read my post, How to be brilliant, since last Sunday.  That post grew out of David Shenk’s new book, The Genius in All of Us.  It was largely focused on the research of Anders Ericsson, the well-known father of “deliberate practice.” 

But we know that deliberate practice is hard.  It’s so hard that no one can do it without the benefit of motivation, a lot of motivation.  What can we do to develop that motivation?  Why is it so many of us seem to fall apart when we face the challenges of deliberate practice?  The answer is surprising.  Carol Dweck, the leading expert in motivation and personality theory, has discovered that the key to growth and perseverance is our mindset.  In more than 20 years of research, she’s discovered that our mindset is not a minor personality quirk. 

The motivational mindset unfolds and drives every aspect of our lives.  Long-term motivation grows out of a very basic mindset, the growth mindset.  This is not about taking more risks or believing in yourself.  Instead, as Dweck says, the belief (mindset) that your qualities can be grown leads to a “host of different thoughts and actions, taking you down an entirely different road.”  What can you do to develop a growth or mastery-oriented mindset—so that you will face up to your challenges rather than be overwhelmed by them?  Dweck has found that a focus on effort, thinking about what you could do to stay on track, and the information you can gather is the key to genius.

Here, then, are Dweck’s five keys to brilliance, the fuel for genius.  Notice that all five keys are connected, and that the mindset changes what we strive for and what we see as success. 

1.  The belief that effort is a positive, constructive force.  Success is not mistake-free or always about winning.  Those are the wrong issues.  Success is about preparation and and effort. 

2.  Development and progress are important—not just the product or the outcome.  Undue emphasis on testing can be harmful if it conveys to students that the whole point of school is to do well on these tests, and if it conveys to them that how well they do sums up their intelligence.  Jack Welch, Lou Gerstner and Anne Mulcahy are fascinating because they transformed their companies by putting a culture of growth and teamwork in its place.  These people talk journey, an inclusive, learning-filled journey, rather than about their own royalty.

3.  Substantial change, stretch and growth are the business of life, and that’s a lot of fun.  In today’s volatile business world, stretch and growth are the key ingredients for success.  My paper, “Bluff your way into a new job,” is all about stretch growth.  Research shows that stretch growth provides some of the very best work opportunities.

4.  Brains can become bigger.  Challenge is good.  Daniel Coyle’s fascinating book, The Talent Code, nails the issue:  Greatness isn’t born.  It’s Grown.

5.  Being on a learning edge is the smart thing to do.  Gains from occasional training or developmental experiences are useful.  But the really smart approach to your career is staying in the learning mode all the time.  The research shows that the more we learn, the easier and faster we can learn.  Success in the talent age requires constant learning.

Changing how you feel about yourself and your future liberates you to focus on effort.  It makes motivation a part of daily living. 

In an interview, Carol Dweck summarizes the most important findings of her research.  This is what she has to say:

What has intrigued me most in my 30 years of research is the power of motivation.  Motivation is often more important than your initial ability in determining whether you succeed in the long run.  In fact, many creative geniuses were not born that way.  They were often fairly ordinary people who became extraordinarily motivated. 

By motivation, I mean not only the desire to achieve, but also the love of learning, the love of challenge, and the ability to thrive on obstacles.  These are the greatest gifts. . . .

How to Build Your Kid's Intelligence (and Your Own)

In a previous blog, I posted a quote from Richard Nisbett, distinguished psychology professor at Michigan and Malcolm Gladwell’s guru on human intelligence, who indicated that intelligence is under our control.  So how do you get our intelligence under control? 

Although there are a lot of answers to that question, including basics like nutrition and exercise, the best response is tied to the research of Carol Dweck, the world renown expert on human motivation.  I have written previously about her work here, here and here.  Dweck’s early research focused on why some school children persist in the face of failure while others quit as soon as the going gets rough.  Over the years her research has shown that it is crucial for parents to teach children that their intelligence is under their control. Indeed, she found that when children are praised for their intelligence, they resist accepting a challenge and doing things from which they can learn a lot.

Here is Richard Nisbett’s summary of that fascinating research:

In a clever experiment . . .developmental psychologists Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck told children that they had done very well on problems from the Raven Progressive Matrices test and praised them either for being bright or for working hard.  They then offered the children the opportunity to work on another set of problems—either easy ones (“so I’ll do well”) or hard problems that would challenge them (“so I’ll learn a lot from them, even if I won’t look so smart”).  Sixty-six percent of the children who were praised for their intelligence chose to work on easy problems that would show that they were smart; over 90percent of children praised for hard work chose problems that they would learn a lot from.  If the children did well because they worked hard, they wanted problems that would test their limits and teach them how to do even better.

But in order to further test their conclusions, the researchers added some important “difficulties.”

Before the children actually got a chance to work on a problem set of their choice, Mueller and Dweck required them to work on a second set of problems that were much more difficult than the first set.  The children were then asked to explain why they had performed poorly on the second set of problems.  The children praised for intelligence based on performance on the first set of problems were more likely to think that their failure on the second set of problems reflected lack of ability; children praised for hard work initially were more likely to think that their failure on the second set of problems was due to lack of effort.  Children praised for ability were less likely to want to continue to work on the problems and reported enjoying working on the second set of tasks less than did those praised for hard work.  As icing on the cake, Mueller and Dweck then had the children work on a third set of problems.  Children who had initially been praised for intelligence solved fewer problems than those initially praised for hard work. 

The conclusions are obvious:  If you want to build your kid’s intelligence (and your own), emphasize and praise for effort and hard work, not for intelligence or IQ.  Not only does that process reject the conventional and highly limiting views of innate intelligence, but more significantly, it puts performance under the control of the person.  You may not think you’ve got the ability, but you sure as hell can put more effort into something you want to learn.  And, that’s especially true when you’ve got an effective teacher and coach.

Later studies by Carol Dweck and Anders Ericsson on “deliberate practice” research successes in numerous fields based on the results of this seminal research.  That includes research on sports such as golf, ice-skating, and tennis, as well as games like chess, and academic subjects like math, business, the arts and an ever-enlarging set of disciplines.

How to Raise Kids to Achieve

The holidays are book times in our home.  I've promised to review two new books, Alexandra Levit's intriguing book, New Job, New You, and a different take on change by Jean Latting and Jean Ramsey, entitled Reframing Change.  I also picked up Atul Gwande's just published, Checklist Manifest: How to Get Things Right, an exploration of the nature of complexity in our lives.

My eldest sent me Ted Kennedy's autobiography, True Compass, a revelation of the Kennedy family.  I've  read 75 of the 500 pages thus far, but what's most fascinating is a major subtext: how the parents, Joseph and Rose, set out and succeeded in raising kids to achieve.

Whatever your perspective on the Kennedy family, and they have plenty of detractors, there are a few timeless lessons for all of us.  Boston, these Irish Catholics decided, with its old Yankee stock would never completely accept the Kennedys.   The family move to Hyannis Port was an attempt to circumvent some of those prejudices.  Geographical change can become a necessity. 

But it's the family values that Ted Kennedy surfaces that drive the kids' achievement.  Since there's no question that we've identified with some of the same values, I want to do a personal sidebar of disclosure on our own values first.  On a few occasions I've commented that I was a Christian minister for elven years in the college towns of Boulder, Colorado (a glorious experience), and Flagstaff, Arizona (not nearly as interesting).  After those experiences, and with graduate degrees in tow, I taught in a theological seminary of the Scandinavian piety, here in Minnesota.  Many of you know that parts of the Twin Cities are heavily Lutheran and that St. Paul area has been heavily infused with the Catholic piety.  There isn't a Scandinavian bone in my body.  So that culture with its strong piety was,initially, a strange bird to us.  We love the emphasis on education, the arts, cleanliness and order.  But, the central place of conflict between the Scandinavian piety and myself is the hierarchy of values that determine a person's spiritual worth. 

Growing up in a family from the Mid-South, with English and Scotch-Irish in background, the Scandinavian emphasis on humility was utterly foreign to us.  We imbibed truth-telling from our ethnicity, and humility was far down the ladder.  In all my years of Detroit schooling and regular church attendance, I remember absolutely nothing about humility.  When we first moved here, it took me just a few months to learn that an open mouth is not to be rewarded.  Better to be quiet, put on no intellectual airs, and be humble.  People who speak up will not be rewarded.  A few weeks ago, I had a brief conversation with a former colleague who told me that in old age he had a developed a strong sense of humility about life.  I could see that he was visibly shaken by my response:  "That's a category that never crosses my mind." 

Of course, my cultural response to all the piety of humility was, "nonsense."  There is such a thing as genuine humility, but personal humility in my mind doesn't look like you Scandinavians want it to look.  Crassly, our style is much more like that of Penelope Trunk, the well known blogger.  She, of course, would have been tarred and feathered and run out of the church and society in this culture. 

So, as you can imagine, I ran up against plenty of barriers, especially with certain faculty and church-goers, in the early years of our Twin Cities experience.  But after awhile, I was able to look on the good side, celebrate the education and the arts, and go on about my business.  I've learned how to navigate the humble shibboleths, enjoy myself, build a good business and raise our three daughters.  I've also developed a few Scandinavian friends who can laugh with me about their piety and about mine as well.

From the birth of our first daughter, my wife and I both strategized about their lives.  We intended for them to achieve in school and in a profession, have a few significant friends, tell the truth most of the time, and develop a quality of street smarts that will enable them to achieve and have a meaningful existence in most any geographical setting.  Thus, in spite of the fact that I was a nationally known Christian minister, raising good kids who were "religious" was simply not an agenda of significance.  I believe that the Judeo-Christian ethos is the best support system for achievement in the modern world.  But in my ministry, I found that too many "good kids" were really boring nonachievers.

Now comes Ted Kennedy and his reminiscences about his father.  Kennedy writes that his father was never abusive, never wounding toward any of his children, but he let them know his expectations.  When he was 13 or 14, his father brought him in for a chat although the behavior that precipated the conversation was not recalled.  Here's what Joe Kennedy said: You can have a serious life or a nonserious life, Teddy.  I'll still love you whichever choice you make.  But if you decide to have a nonserious life, I won't have much time for you.  You make up your mind.  There are too many children here who are doing things that are interesting for me to do much with you.   

Obviously, it took Ted little time to make up his mind.

Two other values from Joe Kennedy take the form of simple proverbs:  There is to be no crying in this house.   It's very similar to a comment that one of my Scotch-Irish colleagues, Bill Bellinger, used to make occasionally to students who were complaining or dithering:  Just get on with it.  The "it" could be a paper, a project, or most anything else that needed completion.    

The other value is one that I made religiously acceptable by labeling it, "sanctified nonchalance."  Joe Kennedy would say, After you have done your best, then the hell with it. 

These few values go a long way toward raising achieving kids.  As the father of three successful professional daughters, I'm all for them.