The Psychology of Success
Through deliberate practice, we can improve all areas of our lives.
Did you know that the IQ test was designed in the early twentieth century to identify children who were not benefitting from the public schools in Paris?
The IQ test was created by Alfred Binet (1859 -1911), a French psychologist, to help identify students who were not performing at their age level to help them get back on track by designing programs to help them.
I learned about this in the book Mindset by Stanford Psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck. In her book, she synthesizes her research around having a fixed or a growth mindset. A fixed mindset believes our intelligence and creative abilities are static and cannot be changed. A growth mindset sees challenges and failures as a necessary step in increasing our capabilities.
In the book, Carol Dweck shares a quote by Alfred Binet that gets to the heart of the idea:
“A few-modern philosophers ... assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism...With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.”
Through deliberate practice, we can improve all areas of our lives.
Our current or past abilities do not define us!
We can become the person we want to be!
We can accomplish our goals!
We can learn anything!
Remember, we can change the way we think, and it is up to us to fulfill our potential.
We can do it!
Have you read the book Mindset? Let me know if you would like to discuss this topic, we can do a video chat or share your thoughts in the comments below. You can buy the book here.
May you have a wonderful day full of wonder and creativity.