It’s The Attitudes In The Head Of The Person
Every four years, students around the world take The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) test. Along with the exam, students are given a questionnaire designed to collect contextual information about the factors influencing achievement. It asks about things like how much time the student spends on homework, what kinds of resources they have access to, and how much pressure they feel from their parents. It’s a really long questionnaire—about 120 questions long—and so, many kids don’t finish the questionnaire. A researcher from the University of Pennsylvania named Erling Boe had the idea to rank countries by the percentage of students who completed the survey and compare those rankings to their performance on the math portion of TIMSS. The two rankings were identical—countries where students completed more of the questionnaire were the same countries that performed better at math. “In other words,” Malcolm Gladwell explains of Boe’s finding, “if you want to know how good a country does at mathematics, you don’t have to ask that country’s kids any math questions. You just have to make them do a task that requires them to sit down at a seat for an extended period of time and focus on a task. And if they can do it, they can get good at math. So when we look at the TIMSS rankings, what we’re seeing is not some underlying difference in talent or aptitude, but a difference in attitudes towards work and effort…And that tells us where the deficit in mathematical education lies. It’s not in our curriculum, it’s not in the quality of our teachers, it’s not in the size of our classrooms, it’s not in the amount of money we spend on schools, nor is it a problem in our genes. It is the attitudes in the head of the child as he or she sits down to work.”
The attitudes in the head of a person as he or she sits down to work—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Wow. There’s No Sign That You Have Any Talent.
Both the author Michael Lewis and the radio personality Ira Glass are today among the best in the world at what they do, but they had a long conversation about how that wasn’t always true. Talking about how long it took them to find their voices as storytellers, Lewis and Glass traded stories about their early work. A couple years into making the Pulitzer Prize-winning radio show, This American Life, one of the show’s producers, Alix Spiegel, pitched a story similar to one Glass had made years and years earlier, at the beginning of his career. Glass suggested that they dig up the old episode to see if they could salvage anything from it. After they listened to it, Spiegel said, “Wow. There’s no sign that you have any talent for radio. Like there’s no sign that you’re going to make it. There’s just nothing good in here.” Not only was she right, Glass said, but he revisited other episodes from his archives and was struck by how, even in his mid-30s—15 years into his career—there was still hardly any sign that he had any talent for radio. Lewis laughs and says, “I think we shared this quality, in that neither you nor I cared all that much if there was a sign that you were going to make it. You were just going to do it anyway.” “Yes that’s very true,” Glass replies. “Yes, I liked doing it and I was just going to keep going.”
The One In The Driver’s Seat
At a friend’s house, the poet David Whyte was filled with the “demon of envy” when he saw his friend’s “little working paradise”—a space filled with bookshelves, lined with first editions, surrounding a desk perfectly positioned before a window overlooking a stunning mountain landscape. “I gazed upon that meticulously put together and maintained study as a motorsport aficionado might gaze openmouthed upon a racing-green 1959 Jaguar XK 150 roadster,” Whyte writes. “I wanted to turn the key and drive this study off into my literary future.” As he imagined how such a space might enhance his creative output, Whyte snapped out it when recalled once sitting on a crowded train across from “a man crouched on the scruffy floor,” scribbling furiously on a notepad. Nothing could break the man’s focus—“not the accidental kick of his pad by passengers getting on or off at the stops, not his falling back onto his bottom when the train halted in the tunnel. He simply picked up his pen again in whatever position he now found himself in and carried on writing energetically.” As he stood there in his friend’s little working paradise thinking about that man who didn’t need a little working paradise, Whyte realized, “If I look closely at what I need for work, the prized, internal possession of focus is much more important than the external environment that I might lust after in the abstract.” Like the way someone driving a Ford Focus might be happier than the person driving the Jaguar XK 150, Whyte writes, “It is the one in the driver’s seat, setting the destination and the attitude for the journey of work and vocation, who seems to make up our real possibilities for satisfaction over time. The difficult truth is that our kingdom does not have to be very big at all in order for us to do good work: what is difficult is simply starting the work and carrying on with it day after day.”
Feed The Meat-Covered Film To The Sharks
When he was 17, in 1981, Quentin Tarantino dropped out of school and moved to Hollywood. He got a job making minimum wage at a video store called Video Archives, and every dollar he made went into making his first movie, My Best Friend’s Birthday. Three years into working on it, Tarantino showed it to a Hollywood producer. “Quentin,” the producer said, “what you need to do is…wrap this film in meat, go out into the sharkiest waters you can find, and feed the meat-covered film to the sharks.” Tarantino didn’t feed the film to the sharks. But he did tell his cast and crew that a huge chunk of the film was destroyed in a lab fire. There wasn’t actually a fire. It was just a way out of releasing what Tarantino realized was a terrible movie. Privately, Tarantino said, “I was very depressed.” “I worked for three years on this movie…And it ended up being nothing. Absolutely nothing!” Years later, after he established himself as one of the great filmmakers of his generation, Tarantino said, “Of all the accomplishments I ever did in the course of my life, the one I’m the proudest of is the two weeks after that movie failed. The fact that I didn’t quit after that movie failed is my single most proudest moment of character.” That, though he didn’t have natural talent or aptitude, there was something in his head that compelled him to keep going—“I’m just proud. Everyone I knew would have quit. There’s not anyone I knew at that time—after donating three years of their life and having it not be good—who wouldn’t have quit.”
Because I Wasn’t Going To Give Up On The Game
When Kobe Bryant was 12, he played a 25-game basketball season without scoring a single point. “I was terrible,” he said. “Awful.” Not a single point. Not a free throw, not a lucky bounce, not a breakaway layup—not a single point. When asked about that season, Kobe said it taught him to take the long view. “I wasn’t the most athletic,” he said. “I had to look long term. Because I wasn’t going to give up on the game, right? So I had to say, ‘Ok, this year I’m going to get better at this. Next year, that.’ And so forth and so on. And patiently, I got better.” Patiently, he repeats. “It was piece by piece. It was the consistency of the work. The consistency of the work: Monday, get better. Tuesday, get better. Wednesday, get better. You do that over a period of time—three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years—you get to where you want to go.” “It’s simple,” he said. “It’s simple math.”
One Of The Very Interesting Things That Happens
Asked if she’s noticed any patterns among the people she’s been able to help and those she hasn’t been able to help, the psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke said, “one of the things that i’ve noticed over the years is that a patient who comes in and tells their story in a way that blames everybody else for their problems—that person is,” “They’re fucked,” the interviewer interrupts. “That’s the case with everything.” Dr. Lembke replies, “Let me just say it’s a slow road. I wouldn’t say that they’re definitely not going to get better because one of the very interesting things that happens in the process is people start telling their story differently.” They change the attitudes in their head as they sit down to work, realizing, it’s the one in the driver’s seat who seems to make up our real possibilities to improve over time.