Category: Classic Post

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My Buying Power has a Massive Influence on how I Feel About a Place

In the last couple days I’ve discovered the existence of the “Blue Dollar”: a euphemism for the not-so-underground black market for US dollars here in Argentina. Due to government restrictions, the official exchange rate is kept low while a parallel market tracks closer to the true value.

If you have US currency, you can exchange it for pesos at the black market rate, which currently is more than double the official rate.

So what does this mean for me?

My buying power more than doubled overnight.

Things that previously seemed moderately priced or even a tad expensive are now very affordable. Things that were already cheap… Are basically free.

I can now get a decent bottle of Malbec for $1.50 USD. Unreal.

The really interesting thing, for me, didn’t occur until after I began walking away from Western Union with a massive stack of cash in my pack. I started thinking about all the things I could do now that I didn’t need to worry about the cost. A whole new world of opportunity was available to me, guilt-free.

Immediately I felt considerably more excited about the city and my general feelings towards it improved dramatically.

Don’t get me wrong: I already liked the city quite a bit. But where there was once a mindset of thrift and having to hold back in a lot of ways, there is now only opportunity. And that mindset shift is huge.

I thought back to some of my favorite cities and places in the world, and realized that a huge contributing factor (sometimes perhaps the main factor) was simply how affordable they were.

Cheap and great tacos in Mexico, cheap drinks at my favorite college bars, cheap… Everything in Colombia. When you don’t have to worry about what you’re spending, you simply have a better time.

And then I thought a little more.

As long as things are affordable to me, I could feel this way anywhere.

If I was making $500,000/year, I wouldn’t think twice about a $30 cocktail. Just about any restaurant or bar in the world would be so affordable to me that I could just go and have a great time without worrying about the cost at all.

This all just sort of taught me that “cheap” and “expensive” are relative, and more importantly: that things are a lot more enjoyable if you can afford them without any issues.

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Not Working Out is an Emergency – And Perhaps Others

I was looking through my workout results from the week and had a realization today. Any time I’m not consistently working out, I should consider it an emergency in need of immediate remediation.

I only took off something like 5 weeks of working out. Partially due to having COVID and generally being constantly sick, and partially due to traveling and not being able to find a gym that would let me sign up.

Regardless of the reasons, the results were dire. In taking 5 weeks off, I lost something like 5 months of strength gain.

Now, to be fair, there are some confounding factors. I was sick a lot and that likely contributed to a greatly increased rate of muscle loss. I didn’t eat nearly as much and barely moved for a while.

Additionally, there are three factors which all currently have an unknown impact on my strength:

  1. I’m in Mexico City at something like 7500′ of elevation. Thinner air might affect me greatly
  2. I’m in Mexico City, along with its pollution
  3. I recently recovered from COVID, and it’s entirely possible that it left me weaker than before (decreased lung capacity, etc)

For the first two, I’ll soon find out if they have any real impact on me once I return home. For #3, I may never know. I do know I’m regularly out of breath even when I’m not doing anything, though all three together could play a part in that.

But ultimately, in just a very short amount of time, my inactivity undid a monumental effort I put in to build strength in the preceding months.

In 5 months I probably spent something like 150 hours working out to achieve a certain level of strength, but it was the missed 35 hours of workouts here that undid it all.

Using those numbers, the missed workouts were more than 4 times as influential in terms of my results. That’s insane.

So if I find myself in another position where I’m not working out, I need to treat it like the emergency that it is and fix it immediately.

But this also got me thinking… With my workouts, my results are tangible and, conveniently, numerical. There’s no guesswork and nothing subjective. I can see when I do better or worse, and by how much.

As a result, it was very easy for me to identify that this is a major issue and that I need to go to great lengths to avoid it happening again.

But what about… You know, everything else?

I have lots of goals and lots of things I’m learning and developing. I often take large breaks from those as well. Could it be that taking time off is just as damaging for those, if not more?

And I’m thinking that the answer is: definitely.

So when I’m home and I take 3 months off from really practicing Spanish, I think it’s pretty likely that I’m doing massive damage to my progress.

Now it’s true that I think knowledge is a bit more indelible than muscle. In a year you’d likely lose 100% of the muscle you’ve gained from weight training. But you’re never going to forgot 100% of something you’ve learned well.

But even so, I think consistency with all things is perhaps even more important than we’re told.

I need to focus more in my life on consistency over time in all pursuits. Always keep moving forward!

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I’m Way Better at Revising Than Creating

I’ve known this for a long time, but I think that I’m way better at revising than I am at creating.

Or, at the very least, it is way less mentally and emotionally draining to revise than it is to create.

In context of work, this means that starting something from scratch is always super daunting to me. Whether it’s writing a proposal, researching and/or putting together something that I’ve never worked with before, or even building a website, it always feels like a massive burden to do the initial work.

However, once I’ve done that, it is usually very easy to tweak it or improve upon it. It doesn’t take much mental effort and it usually goes very quickly. What’s more, I am often much more able to take a step back and think critically about it and make required changes.

So what does this mean?

I think it means that I need to put a lot less pressure on myself when creating something new. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Heck, it doesn’t even need to be good!

I’ve found that usually it’s better for me to just start with something and then work with it until it’s usable.

It feels sort of like loosely molding a lump of clay into the general shape until proceeding to add detail and turn it into art. Not that I’ve worked with clay much in the last 20 years…

Even recently, I’ve found that I’ve just put off certain types of work and they become huge roadblocks to getting anything done. They make me stressed and totally unproductive. And it’s because I’m putting off the incredibly mentally-draining task of creation.

But if I focus more on simply “throwing something together”, I think that would take a lot of the pressure off and make things easier.

I’ve sort of done this in the past with proposals. I’ve broken the process up into several steps. The first one is just to basically just read my notes and break off any actionable items into another document. And it helps tremendously!

I still feel the pressure to ultimately make an entire, good proposal all at once, though. And I need to stop that because it’s slowing me down.

I’m sure this applies elsewhere, too. Creation is hard. But you can always work your creation into something usable, and sometimes that’s way easier.

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Maybe we Should Learn Nothing from our Mistakes

This is something I think about so often, I’m shocked I’ve never written about it before.

While you constantly hear people talk about failures as opportunities and mistakes as opportunities to learn, you never hear anybody talk about the dangers of doing that.

What if the lessons you learn are actually detrimental to your progress?

If I were to ever put this in a book, I would cite plenty of studies to show that people learn more indelible lessons from very bad experiences than they do from good ones.

If you burn your hand on the stove as a kid, you might be afraid of the stove forever and never really use one.

But if you cook a really great stir-fry, you’re never going to swear off other forms of cooking and only use that.

And because of that, I honestly think better advice would be, “DON’T learn anything from your failures.” Even just saying that sounds so completely contradictory to everything I’ve ever been told that it sounds absurd. But seriously, I think it’s true.

Now, as a quick aside, I want to make it clear that what I’m referencing here is times when you’ve tried at task or job and been unsuccessful at it. I’m not really talking about moral or ethical failures which should almost universally be learned from. I am absolutely not suggesting that you should keep being a bad person because it might pay off one day. Okay, we can move on!

I think that rather than refining their strategy and constantly improving, most people “learn from their mistakes” and accumulate so many aversions and fears over the course of their life that they eventually reach a point where they don’t take any risks, never learn anything new, and just stay in their comfort zone.

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense. In caveman days, you would have been in constant mortal peril, and it was more important for you to learn about all the dangers and avoid them than it was for you to innovate or master a valuable skill.

An inventor trying to perfect new weapons would have been more likely to get killed by an animal when it failed than actually succeed at creating something new.

I recently had an interaction with an older potential client that I found baffling. We were in the proposal stage of quite a small project. In that proposal, I described our billing schedule which was half of the fee up-front, and half when the project goes live. It is so ubiquitous within my industry that clients often just assume that’s what it will be, and are correct.

He balked at the notion and almost seemed offended. He told me that with that schedule, there’s no way to hold me accountable to doing a good job, and that he’d been burned in the past. He told me he wasn’t interested in working with me.

At first I just had to wonder what he had been through to develop that degree of cynicism. I’ll never know for sure, but it’s obvious that he learned some painful lessons, and I would argue that those lessons are extremely detrimental to his success.

Because if that’s his non-starter, how is he ever going to get this project done? That question is, of course, rhetorical: he won’t. His website has clearly been untouched for probably 15+ years, and at this point it’s never going to happen. He’s not going to find an agency that will perfectly meet all of his requirements without spooking him.

He’s just learned too many painful lessons and is now too afraid to take any kind of risk, even when that risk is minimal.

Now, I’m being partly facetious when I say that you shouldn’t learn anything from your mistakes or failures. If you really, truly mess up and especially when it is definitely your fault, you should definitely learn and not do that again in the future.

And even in other situations, you should of course try to learn lessons, but you have to be careful what those lessons are.

And more importantly: you need to learn to weight those lessons appropriately.

We tend to remember painful experiences much more vividly, and our bias towards avoiding similar situations is disproportionate to the actual risk. And that bias only increases as we grow older.

So I think it’s important to just see things for what they are. Sometimes bad things happen, and it’s not our fault. Sometimes it is our fault.

Sometimes there may be nothing to be learned. But other times it might just be a matter of knowing the risks and learning to watch out for them without becoming unreasonable.

We’ve all traveled with the neurotic family member who has tunnel vision for one specific problem and constantly talks about it despite it not being a big deal.

People do it with their careers, too, and even their lives. Your focus on what could go wrong should be commensurate with the true risk.

It can be extremely difficult to take a step back and determine whether you are letting the fear of something hold you back, but it’s absolutely worth the effort.

“Most men either compromise or drop their greatest talents and start running after, what they perceive to be, a more reasonable success, and somewhere in between they end up with a discontented settlement. Safety is indeed stability, but it is not progression.”
– Criss Jami

 

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Would I Go Back?

So the question today is: if I had the option to go back in time to, say, high school or college, would I do it? And if so, what would I do differently?

It’s something I’ve pondered many times. The answer to the first question is always, “yes”. But the second one is understandably harder to answer.

In essence, I feel that I’ve spent so much time since then on self-improvement. Successfully, I might add. I needed to grow so much to be able to get to where I am now.

Let’s assume that in this imagined scenario, all of the self-improvement I’ve done is lost, but I still remember everything so I know where I ended up, all of the improvement it took to get there, and what methods I used along the way.

In this case, the question then becomes: how can I fast-track the improvement in both myself and and my situation to get there more efficiently? And in the real, non-hypothetical world, how can I use those lessons to fast-track my current development?

I guess as a starting point, I should determine the positive things all of that development has led to. Upon self-reflection, I don’t think very much of it is really personality-based. Reading has taught me that personality-focused self-improvement efforts are generally not very effective and creating real change. I think it’s mostly because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to artificially alter your own personality.

The answer I keep coming back to is ‘habit’. I’ve developed good habits that have enabled any success I’ve had and generally explain all of the parts of myself that I feel are improved over what they were in my younger days.

Sure, my knowledge is greatly increased in a huge variety of areas. Some of that is just experience which comes no matter what. But perhaps an even larger portion has come from reading non-fiction books, which is a habit I’ve cultivated over the course of years.

Another large chunk comes from intentionally studying and practicing certain topics and fields.

And yes, I’m much more “mature”, but many elements of what make up maturity have been developed through intentional effort. It seems evident to me that not everyone develops much emotional intelligence beyond college.

While it’s hard to judge myself in terms of how I compare to others in this area, I can say without a doubt that my emotional intelligence is worlds better than it was in college. And that has come through habits like really listening to people, looking for subtle clues about how people are feeling, and generally putting effort towards real empathy.

I think the biggest thing I would do to improve more rapidly would be to immediately acknowledge that I had a long way to go and that immediate, deliberate, and constant improvement was necessary. I wouldn’t say that I thought I didn’t need any improvement, but I also wouldn’t say that I recognized the need to put a great deal of effort into improving either.

So that’s what I would do. Acknowledge what’s needed, recognize my own deficiencies, and then put consistent, deliberate effort in towards improving them.

Something tells me I can apply those same lessons to myself right now, too. I’m certainly more focused on improving myself now, which is great, but I’m sure more can be done.

It might be worth it to really dig deep and outline the areas in which I really want to focus now. It might even help to imagine what I’d like things to be like down the road, and try to figure out how I can get there.

Perhaps that’s a good topic for a future post.

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I’ve Always Been Restless but My Interpretation of that has Completely Changed

I feel like I’ve always been quite restless. I’m always thinking about the future and my current state and get a bit antsy.

But in the past, I feel like it made me uneasy and anxious. Now it makes me feel motivated.

So what changed?

I wish I could say it was some huge, profound realization inside myself that allowed me to break old scripts and get out of self-destructive patterns.

But it wasn’t at all.

I owed a lot of money before, and now I don’t. That’s it.

More specifically: I owed a lot of bad money like credit card debt, and it wasn’t really going away at all. It wasn’t growing much but it was still always this huge burden that made it feel like I wasn’t succeeding at all.

Recently, after a string of good financial moves, I’ve been able to quickly pay off a ton of debt, including all credit card debt. Every month, I’m able to pay everything down to zero on personal cards and in my business. I also paid off my student loans completely.

And it’s made all the difference.

In the past, I’d be thinking about the future and just worry about all the debt I had, and how it’s been years and I still hadn’t managed to really get control of things financially. It always just felt like this specter I couldn’t get away from.

And when I started feeling that way, I feel like it just turned to general anxiety and actually crippled me from getting things done and really succeeding, which probably kept me in that state a lot longer than I should have been.

But now that’s gone! I’m running a massive surplus of cash every month which I can use to pay off anything or even start investing. Whereas before it felt like I had no opportunities at all, now I can do anything I want!

And so when I feel that familiar sense of unease, I’m interpreting it as excitement and a sense of unlimited possibility in the future, and that’s actually quite liberating and motivating. Suddenly I feel like if I really focus on something, I can really take this business off the ground and do whatever I’d like with it.

That’s a great feeling.

And it really just comes down to interpreting how I’m feeling differently, not even necessarily feeling differently. I think the Buddhists would have a lot to say about that, but it’s still a really interesting thing to experience myself.

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Here’s the Plan

I always feel the need to plan things out, yet I almost never do it. I love thinking through all the top-level things that need to happen or that I want to try, but I don’t necessarily follow-through and make an actual plan.

That needs to change!

So right here and now, I’m making a plan.

I’m re-reading “The One Thing” and it has a format that I like. Obviously, the “focusing question” from that book is something along the lines of:

“What’s the one thing I can do right now that will make everything else easier or unnecessary?”

But further than that, he breaks it down by time frame, so what’s the one thing I can do in 5 years, 1 year, etc. By starting at the end and then breaking things down, you can get to actionable items right now that, over time, will lead to that goal.

So what do I want?

I want to make enough from my business that I can essentially do whatever I want and retire early, but also be able to work entirely remotely and spend very little time on the business.

How can I get there?

Well, let’s try and figure out what that means. I could pluck a number out of the air, but I want to say that it means somewhere around $500,000 in personal income for the year, while working 10 or fewer hours per week.

I like the idea of continuing to use hosting, updates, and WordPress maintenance as the main source of income, because they are all scalable.

If I continue focusing on WordPress, I think that for each client I could expect something like $150/year in profit on hosting, $75 for updates, and perhaps $150 for maintenance.

So that’s $375 in profit per site, per year. To get to $500,000 then, I would need 1,333 and 1/3 clients.

That’s a lot of clients! But honestly, that’s totally doable.

I’ve got maybe 275 hosting clients now. They aren’t all WordPress and they won’t all bring in $375, but I’m working up to that. To be safe, let’s say I need 1500 clients in 5 years.

With the 275 I have now, I still need 1,225 more, or 245 new ones per year. With attrition, that number is going to need to be closer to 300, most likely.

Now, my goal for this year was 100 new hosting clients, and I still intend to exceed that goal. Obviously that won’t cut it if it’s all I can do each year.

However, this first year is going to be the most important one, because it’s where I’m going to figure out how to rapidly get new clients. I’m going to experiment and try things and hopefully accomplish something that’s repeatable.

So without further ado, here is my priority for each time range.

The one thing I can do in 5 years:

Service 1,500 website hosting clients

The one thing I can do in 1 year:

Figure out a scalable, repeatable method of acquiring new clients and investing heavily into it, resulting in 100 new hosting clients.

The one thing I can do in 1 month:

Test a variety of different methods for acquiring new clients and see what works.

The one thing I can do in a week:

Put a plan together for what I’m going to test and put concrete timelines on everything.

The one thing I can do right now:

This!

 

There, I did it! I’ll need to review and plan over time to see how things are going, but I think this is a great start.

In “The One Thing”, he recommends spending literally 4 hours per day on advancing your “one thing”, and that definitely makes sense. I think to start I might start blocking off 2 hour chunks and really hitting it hard.

I think it’s really, really important that I actually do this. If I think back to how my time has been spent historically, only a tiny fraction of it has been spent on improving the business and implementing actual plans that I’ve had.

That really needs to change! And it will only happen by actually blocking off time. I’m making a note to figure out all of that tomorrow!

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Knowledge, Experience, and Insight – Turning Mazes into Staircases

In reviewing my old blog posts, I came across this “classic”. And I had some new insights.

In it, I argue that most real-life goals can’t be attained in the same way as climbing a simple set of stairs to get to the top. Instead, there are countless maze-like paths to choose from. Some will get you there eventually, some won’t. Some might even have tons of extra obstacles you’ll need to overcome.

I still agree with that, but I missed out on discussing something that I think is really important to note: with increased knowledge, experience, and insight, you can effectively gain an overview of those “maze” paths and make things much easier.

I know I’m going to risk taking this analogy too far, but I think that with enough knowledge, experience, and insight (I’m just going to say KEI from now on), you can really simplify everything.

Imagine that the maze leading to your goal has multiple entrances and countless paths running through it. Only one leads to your goal.

Without any KEI, you’re just guessing where to go. You power through, you try everything, and there’s no way to know which one will get you to the end. The only way to the top is to just try everything and figure it out.

But with enough KEI, you might get an overhead-view of the maze. You can see which paths go where, and eventually trace through which one leads to the top. Imagine how much easier it would be to get there!

Sure, you’ll still have to put in the work of actually taking that path, but you’ll be armed with the confidence of knowing you’re on the right one, which will allow you to power through it and waste minimal time on other paths.

I think that we intuitively know this is all true. When thrown into a totally new situation, things are often overwhelming. If you are lucky enough to even know what your goal is, there’s a good chance you have no idea how to get there. You have some things you can try, but you don’t know which will work.

But after many attempts, you start learning. Through experience, you learn things that don’t work and eliminate those as possibilities. You start to develop a sense of how things will work out before even trying them.

You might even read books and research methods and concepts, which will increase the knowledge you have on the topic. This also will guide your decision making.

And through both of those things, you gain insight into difficult problems. That all helps you figure out the best way forward.

After time has passed, you end up gaining confidence and an understanding of how things work, and suddenly achieving those goals doesn’t seem as daunting.

Within my own career, it is very much true. When I first started and clients would report problems with their websites, I would often have no idea what was wrong. All I could do was try things and hope they worked. If they didn’t, I’d keep trying and researching util I found something that did.

Over time, through making mistakes, researching, and reading, I gained KEI. And now, it’s very rare that a client will bring me a problem I can’t solve quickly. And if I don’t know the solution right away, I’m always confident that I can do some research and figure it out.

So what do I do with this knowledge?

I think it’s important to maximize KEI as quickly as possible. Here are some ideas for doing that:

  1. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Experience comes from both successes and failures, so both can be beneficial to maximizing that experience.
  2. Gaining as much knowledge as you can from external sources is critical. Reading and learning are so important.
  3. Above all, action is key. If you aren’t applying your knowledge, then you aren’t getting experience and it is essentially wasted. Sometimes it’s better to act instead of seeking more knowledge, and it’s almost always better to act instead of becoming paralyzed when you aren’t confident enough to make a decision.

I think these ideas are particularly helpful for accomplishing more nebulous goals such as “being successful”.

It’s just so hard to know what path to take, but knowing that the path will become more clear with more knowledge and experience should be key to actually achieving it.

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Resting Instead of Phone Use

I have a bit of a theory. What if our constant viewing of entertainment was actually robbing us of all our willpower?

In reading ‘The ONE Thing’ again, I’ve been thinking about the chapter on willpower. He basically calls it a finite resource that needs to be managed.

Studies have shown that taking a break and having a snack or meal or resting tends to restore blood sugar and also seems to increase levels of willpower.

But what do I (and everyone?) tend to do when I don’t feel like doing anything? Sit on my phone immediately, and find some entertainment. No, we’re not using up any willpower to do that, but what if we’re preventing it from replenishing and starting an endless loop?

I think I need to try literally just taking 20 minute breaks where I maybe have a quick snack and lay down to rest my eyes for a bit. Often times my phone binges last way longer than that anyway, and if I had new willpower, I could get back to doing whatever needed to be done!

For the moment, I think it’s at least worth a shot. So I plan on doing that, and reporting back results.

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Success in School (and Life) Probably has Almost Nothing to do with Intelligence

To properly explain my thoughts here, I have to explain the series of thoughts that came to that conclusion.

I’m currently in Colombia, trying very hard to learn Spanish. I took it in high school (and earlier) and even in college, but never really progressed. My first thought was to question why that was.

My immediate answer was that we didn’t utilize our time that efficiently. I remember just pounding away trying to learn grammar rules and would spend an entire class period (or week?) learning how to conjugate one verb in one tense, or learning some other concept that really shouldn’t take that long.

Part of it, too, is that they are teaching at the rate of the kids who need the most time to pick it up. Which, as I’ll get more into in a moment, probably isn’t the dumbest kids, it’s the kids who don’t care and aren’t paying attention.

So I thought: I’m doing about an hour of flashcards per day, which allows me to learn and retain about 40 new cards every single day. In my  case, that’s usually about 8 new verbs, with examples. It’s a fairly rapid rate.

And then, of course, any time spent actually speaking is extremely valuable in getting better.

But then my next thought was, “Well… You learn concepts and whatnot in class, and then you’re expected to actually study and review vocabulary and concepts at home, right?”

Which is fine, but let’s think about this now. Is everybody going to actually study at home? Absolutely not. The kids who consider themselves smart, and who think they are “good” at it probably will, because they feel good about it and believe they can succeed.

And who is not going to study? The kids who think they are dumb, and the kids who don’t care. And, as a side note, I would bet the kids who “don’t care” actually think they aren’t smart or are bad at the subject, and just “don’t care” as a defense mechanism. That’s a separate topic though.

So in a class where it’s expected that you need to study in order to succeed, what happens if one group actually does study, and the other doesn’t? Even if they are just as intelligent, the group that studied is clearly going to do much, much better.

So now the grades come out. The ones who studied scored highly, and they feel good about themselves. They think, “I’m smart, that’s why I succeeded.” Their parents praise them and tell them how smart they are and they truly start to believe it. They continue to take interest in their studies and continue to succeed, creating a virtuous cycle.

But what about the other kids? They get a bad grade. They know they didn’t study, but still… This must be evidence that they are dumb! Their parents punish them. In some households maybe they even call them stupid or had already been doing that.

It wouldn’t take too long before they would feel stupid. The next time, they might put in even less effort, because what’s the point? They believe they won’t succeed anyway so they aren’t going to bother doing everything the ‘smart’ kids are doing.

And in this way, it’s a cycle. The ‘smart’ get ‘smarter’ and the ‘dumb’ get ‘dumber’. And if you’ve been paying attention — to the extent that intelligence is, in any way an actual, quantifiable trait — the so-called ‘dumb’ kids are very likely the exact same intelligence as the rest.

And now they’re going to go through life thinking they are too dumb to succeed. And that seems like a tragedy.

Additionally, in a school-setting, concepts absolutely build off of one another. It’s much easier to grasp something new when you have all of the underlying concepts memorized. Someone who just “instantly gets” something may only do so because they understood all of the preceding material, not because they are “smarter”.

This might be more fit for a totally different conversation, but I think our emphasis on “intelligence” is also way off-base. It’s a terrible predictor of success (at least as measured by IQ), and I think our very focus on it actually leads to poorer results.

If people think that being “smart” leads to success, then they’ll start thinking that their successes are due to their intelligence, and their failures due to their lack thereof.

This is a terrible outcome for two reasons. Firstly, you can’t (really) do anything about your intelligence. It’s more or less inherent and unchanging. So focusing on it cannot possibly improve your life.

Secondly, it completely takes hard work and sacrifice out of the equation. Literally anything that someone has done to get where they are is overwritten by saying that they are just ‘smart’, or even ‘naturally talented’. Research says that ‘natural talent’ is almost entirely a myth, and I don’t think ‘intelligence’ is that far off in the context of explaining success.

So when it comes to school-age children, I think it’s much more important to tell them, “good job, you studied hard and earned that grade!” instead of saying, “you’re so smart!”

One of those things will help them deeply to understand how to succeed, and the other is only helpful as a confidence booster. If people think their success is due to one, inherent and unchanging metric, then they will not take any responsibility for their successes or failures. They won’t truly understand that the actions that they take lead to their outcomes.

Thinking back to when I was in school, I remember always being in the “honors” or “gifted” classes. I think we all genuinely believed that we were much smarter than the kids in the “regular” classes.

My two thoughts on that now are:

  1. We were foolish and wrong for thinking that.
  2. What does it matter? You can’t pay the mortgage with ‘intelligence’.