What sets apart highly successful students

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One of the major differences we found between highly successful students and mediocre ones: average students think they can tell right away if they are going to be good at something. If they don't get it immediately, they throw up their hands and say, "I can't do it." Their more accomplished classmates have a completely different attitude-and it is largely a matter of attitude rather than ability. They stick with assignments much longer and are always reluctant to give it up. "I haven't learned it yet," they might say, while others would cry, "I'm not good at history, music, math, writing, or whatever." Traditional schooling rewards quick answers-the person with the hand up first. But an innovative work of the mind, something that lasts and changes the world, demands slow and steady progress. It requires time and devotion. You can't tell what you can do until you struggle with something over and over again.

Ken Bain, What the Best College Students Do

Focusing on the Bright Spots

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Suppose that you go to bed tonight and sleep well. Sometime, in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens and all the troubles that brought you here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think, “Well, something must have happened – the problem is gone!”

The miracle question doesn't ask you to describe the miracle itself; it asks you to identify the tangible signs that the miracle happened. Once (someone has identified) specific and vivid signs of progress... a second question is perhaps even more important. It's the Exception Question: "When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even for just a short time?"

There are exceptions to every problem and that those exceptions, once identified, can be carefully analyzed, like the game film of a sporting event. Let's replay that scene, where things were working for you. What was happening? How did you behave? That analysis can point directly toward a solution that is, by definition, workable. After all, it worked before.

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

People think they know something.. because others know it

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People are individually rather limited thinkers and store little information in their own heads. Much knowledge is instead spread through the community—whose members do not often realise that this is the case.

(Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach) call this the illusion of understanding, and they demonstrate it with a simple experiment. Subjects are asked to rate their understanding of something, then to write a detailed account of it, and finally to rate their understanding again. The self-assessments almost invariably drop. The authors see this effect everywhere, from toilets and bicycles to complex policy issues. The illusion exists, they argue, because humans evolved as part of a hive mind, and are so intuitively adept at co-operation that the lines between minds become blurred. Economists and psychologists talk about the “curse of knowledge”: people who know something have a hard time imagining someone else who does not. The illusion of knowledge works the other way round: people think they know something because others know it.

From a review in the Economist of “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach

What I would say to my 22-year-old self

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I worked hard. I was focused, determined, and disciplined. But I did not necessarily allow myself the space and time for creativity and self-expression. I would encourage my 22-year-old self to take a moment to nurture my friendships--in person. Call them, make a plan, do something together--share experience. Laugh out loud every day. -Naomi Simson

What Growth Requires

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Growth requires hard work. The world is a complex place. We all become creatures of habit in the ways we think and act. To learn is to strip away those deeply ingrained habits of the mind. To do so requires that we push ourselves, that we keep building and rebuilding, questioning, struggling, and seeking.

Ken Bain, What the Best College Students Do

Style is not Ability

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People and institutions tend to value other people and institutions like themselves. The result is that we tend to see as higher in ability those who are like us. As a result, many children as well as adults are never appreciated for what they are, but rather for how they fit into the stylistic pattern of the evaluator.

There are those who look for and appreciate only others like themselves, and there are those who look for quality, whether or not it is the same kind of quality they have to offer. We will better utilize other people’s talents, and better help them develop, if we recognize people for their own stylistic strengths, rather than for what we might ideally like them to be.

Robert Sternberg, Thinking Styles