The view you adopt for yourself 

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For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value. How does this happen? How can a simple belief have the power to transform your psychology and, as a result, your life? 

Believing that your qualities are carved in stone — the fixed mindset — creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character — well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.

I’ve seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves — in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships. Every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character. Every situation is evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser? . . .

There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.

Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

How to cover up your fatal flaw

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When did it become acceptable to embrace the characteristics that others have identified as detrimental to our mutual professional success? 

I suspect many of the people who trot out their fatal flaws are attempting to create a defense shield to protect themselves from further criticism:

"You will not speak of my fatal flaws because I have mentioned them first and am therefore immune to your potential condemnation."

It’s a classic offense-as-defense strategy.  That approach may work for a while but eventually it prompts some pointed questions: 

"If you know you talk too much, why do you continue to take up all the air time?"

"If you know you are considered dismissive, why do you believe it is in your best interest to denounce the perspectives of anyone who thinks differently than you do?"

"If you know you overpromise and underdeliver, what makes you think people will continue to take you seriously?"

"Why do you assume steamrolling over others is a sustainable strategy?"

It is good to be self-aware. But demonstrating self-awareness, while at the same time showing a lack of discipline to fix issues of concern, is worse than being clueless about our shortcomings. When people close to us offer consistent and considerable feedback about a behavior that is not serving us well, we need to listen up.  Dismissing feedback that does not comport with the way we see ourselves is understandable, but it is not strategic.

The most effective people I know sometimes whimper for a bit after receiving constructive criticism, but they quickly put a plan in place to modify the annoying or offending behaviors. By doing so, they demonstrate respect and appreciation for those brave enough to share difficult truths that are offered with the very best intentions. We need our colleagues to help us be better, but they can’t help if we’re not listening. 

Allison Vaillancourt writing in the Chronicle of Higher Ed   

Child rearing is an art

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Child rearing is an art, and what makes art art is that it is doing several things at once. The trick is accepting limits while insisting on standards. Character may not be malleable, but behavior is. The same parents can raise a dreamy, reflective girl and a driven, competitive one—the job is not to nurse her nature but to help elicit the essential opposite: to help the dreamy one to be a little more driven, the competitive one to be a little more reflective.

Adam Gopnik writing in The New Yorker

 

 

life beyond the screen

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Kevin Kelly writes, “Even the tiniest disposable item with a bar code shares a thin sliver of our collective mind.” Sharing in the increasing webness of things surrounding us is essential part of functioning in our digital society. If you have hung out on the cusp of technological adoption, waiting for the latest and most advanced devices to drop, you know how technology can monopolize our time and question any non-technological solution as inferior or important. The Internet is our exotic travel destination, a portal to bossy technologies.

Here’s the choice you have: You can grab the bullhorn of digital culture and plug into the belly of the machine or we can keep the cornucopia of technology at arm’s length to more easily remember who we are apart from it.

Somewhere there’s a balance between chasing the latest fad (simply because it is new) and becoming irrelevant to the conversation (because we choose to ignore transitions, remaining in our comfort zone). These extremes are the simplistic ditches we can fall into, when we would rather not have to regularly think hard and deal with uncertainty…and they will remain the temptations of anyone involved in the process of journalism.

As you decide where to place yourself in the technological embrace, remember there’s life beyond the screen.

Stephen Goforth

When your appliances work as police informants

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Suppose police suspect a man of organizing a political protest that turned violent, muses the ACLU’s Nathan Wessler, who argued the Carpenter case (on digital privacy) for the ACLU before the Supreme Court. The suspect’s smart meter and thermostat confirm that a handful of people showed up at his home and stayed there the two nights before the demonstration; the suspect’s smart refrigerator ordered a bunch of soda and snack food on those days, which was all consumed; after someone asked Alexa to play some music in his living room, a voice in the background said, “Tomorrow, we’re going to really show them”; and that night, the suspect’s smart mattress recorded him sleeping fitfully and his heart beating faster than normal. The police arrest the man on conspiracy and other charges. He eventually proves he’s innocent – some old friends visited from out of town, and planned a day of sightseeing—but not before a legal nightmare turns his life upside down.

 "There’s not a person among us who doesn’t have private aspects of their life that could create difficulty for them if they were exposed,” Wessler says. “And misinterpreted.”

David Henry writing in 1843