Grit > IQ
Photo by London Academy of IT

Grit > IQ

A very typical morning for me involves going to the gym and throwing on an audiobook to get my brain moving while I work out. Today I was listening to a book called, "13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do, Chapter 10: They Don't Give Up After the First Failure." I wanted to share what Amy Morin said because I agree with everything she said and I couldn't stopping thinking about the message all day.

Deliberate practice is far more important than natural talent AND grit is a far better predictor of success than IQ.?

Although we’re often led to believe that we are either gifted with natural-born talent or we aren’t, most talents can be cultivated through hard work. Research studies have found that:

  • After 10 years of daily practice people can surpass others with natural talent in chess, sports, music, and the visual arts.?
  • After 20 years of dedicated practice many people who lack natural talent can gain world class achievement.?

Clearly not everyone with a high IQ reaches a high level of achievement. In fact, a person's IQ isn't a very good predictor of whether he or she will become successful. Grit, defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals, has been shown to be a much more accurate predictor of achievement than IQ.

Often, we believe that if we weren’t born with a specific gift we won't ever be able to develop enough talent to become successful. This belief can cause you to give up before you've had a chance to cultivate the skills necessary to succeed. If you refuse to try again after you fail once, it's likely you've developed some inaccurate or unproductive beliefs about failure. Those beliefs influence the way you think, feel and behave towards failure.

Attributing failure to a lack of ability leads to learned helplessness. If you think that your failure is caused by a lack of ability, and you think you can’t improve upon that ability, you're likely to develop a sense of learned helplessness. Instead of trying again after you fail, you’ll either give up or wait for someone else to do it for you. If you think you can't improve you likely won't try to get better.?

Don’t allow inaccurate beliefs about your abilities to hold you back on becoming successful. Spend some time thinking about your beliefs surrounding failure, look at your path to success as a marathon and not a sprint. Accept that failure is part of the process that helps you learn and grow.

According to a biography written about Thomas Edison in 1915, Edison had to issue a swift retort to a young assistant who had grown weary of perpetual experiments, thousands of them, which had all alike failed to reach the desired end. “It’s a shame,” said this young fellow, petulantly, “that we should have worked all these weeks without getting any results!”?“Results!” cried Edison, in surprise, “No results? Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work!”

As the overly stated quote goes, "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard!" Believe in that and never stop grinding!

Share this article on LinkedIn & connect with?me for gems about mindset + growth

要查看或添加评论,请登录

Zachary Marble的更多文章

社区洞察

其他会员也浏览了