learning

After a humiliating evening last night of getting my butt whooped many times by my friend Jon and some other chess jockeys at Fat Cat, I found an article that puts things into perspective. It suggests that the sort of highly challenging experiences of sweating through the really difficult stuff when learning are what actually produce real breakthroughs.

So take that chess masters! I feel WAY better now knowing that I am the one who was truly learning something last night while you guys were just pitifully going through the motions. That makes me feel really, really a lot better. Totally a lot better. Seriously.

Does that make sense? I was having trouble wording the headline. Basically, Carol Dweck's research suggests that how you conceive your talents has an effect on how well you are able to achieve goals which utilize those talents. If you can understand your talents as being mutable rather than fixed, it seems to be the case that you can achieve more:

Beliefs about intelligence affect mental performance.

This rings true for me. I've always believed that I could learn anything I set my mind to, and I've achieved a lot with that mindset. I also make it clear in the classes I teach at Parsons that your level of comprehension has nothing to do with whether you are "good at code" or not, or whether you've done well at math or science in the past, or any other excuse you can think up: it's about working hard and finding the right way to understand the concepts. Not everyone understands things in the same way, and this isn't just a feel-good cliché, it is absolutely true. This is critically important to understand if you want to get past your barriers to learning.