reading notes for code fellows
Deliberate practice is an important part of getting better at something. Just doing whatever you’re doing (for example, coding) isn’t always going to help you get better if you aren’t pushing yourself to do things you aren’t already good at. It is entirely possibly to stagnate and stop getting better at something if you stop pushing yourself to improve. As a general rule, deliberate practice pushes you out of your comfort zone, is repeated often, has readily available feedback, is highly mentally demanding, difficult, and requires good goals. The best way to go through deliberate practice is to challenge yourself, as you are the most knowledgeable about how you learn best, your current skill set, and your limits.
The current system we employ in schools mostly teaches children to work only for the ‘now’, and if they can’t achieve things exactly when they’re supposed to that they aren’t good enough. Studies though have shown that teaching kids about growth mindset and using language like ‘not yet’ can actually improve their performance and lead to more equality between struggling students/areas that produce less high quality work and the top schools. Letting children understand that a difficult problem isn’t the end of the road and that even attempting it will make them better in the long run produces far better results in terms of future grades and effort than leaving them with a fixed mindset.
Having perserverence is a strong indicator of who will succeed and how far they will go in life. The more grit someone has, the more likely they are to do well in school, in jobs, and in their general life. We aren’t sure yet exactly how to raise the level of grit in children, but the prevailing theory is that a good way to go about it is to raise them with a growth mindset. Giving them the belief that failing at something is an important step to getting better at it means that they are more likely to put forth more effort and gain more perserverence.
In this day and age, we often measure success against people like Bill Gates because we are told that anyone can be successful if they work hard enough and make the right decisions, but in reality you are incredibly unlikely to end up in that position. Our world today pits you against someone of a much higher stature and says ‘here, look, you’re in similar circumstances, you could get there,’ but really you need to stop focusing on unattainable goals. Don’t use the version of success set out and pushed upon you by others, sit down and think, what do I believe constitutes success? Another hard thing in today’s society is that the previously mentioned notion that anyone can be successful places us as a meritocracy, where the most talented and deserving people get the position in life that they deserve, but the least talented people end up at the bottom of society through their own doing. This implies that if you have a bad lot in life, it is no one’s fault but your own. Obviously, this isn’t true, but it has a massive impact on the self worth of people in today’s society and the more a civilization thinks of itself as a meritocracy, the more likely people are to have mental health issues and commit suicide. To avoid this, we need to each decide for ourselves what constitutes success, and at what point we will be happy, as well as acknowledging that we can’t hold ourselves up to the people at the top, because as much as they like to tell us so, that is not what success will mean to the average person, or even the above average person, and holding yourself to impossible standards means you will never reach a point where you can feel successful.
The emotional intelligence and bias exams are both currently broken, I will return to this later when they’re working again.