Pushkin

In my job as a professor, I often face situations in which I need to introduce my students to challenging concepts.

One's that are kind of hard to learn.

They often struggle, at least at first.

But after wrestling a bit with the material, they usually arrive at that blissful aha moment

where everything makes sense.

You can practically see the light bulbs going off in their heads.

But sadly, sometimes I also observe the opposite.

Students never make it to that aha moment.

Because all of a sudden, they just seem to give up.

It's a moment that every teacher dreads.

I was a middle school teacher and my only skill was getting my kids fired up to learn.

Unfortunately, once they were fired up, I had mediocre pedagogical skills.

And so I went to graduate school wanting to learn, if I say this to my kids,

are they going to be more motivated than if I say that?

And you'd be amazed how little research actually tests anything like that.

This is David Yeager, a psychology professor at UT Austin.

He and his collaborator, the renowned Stanford professor, Carol Dweck.

Study how the things we believe about the world are so-called mindset can influence our behavior.

And they've found that the way we think about a challenge can make a huge difference

and how well we get through it.

Do I believe that things in the world can change?

...