Hard-work and Success
My daughter (7 y.o) has started noticing that certain skills come naturally to her while she needs to put in effort to learn others. This causes considerable frustration when it comes to school (or other structured) work. What looked like play earlier (English — with reading/writing; Drawing — coloring/basic-sketching) now looks like work (English — Grammar; Drawing — Shading techniques like Hatching/Cross-hatching). And what looked a bit annoying earlier (Math — multiplication tables) now looks like play (Word problems). You get the idea!
When we (parents) offered her standard advice about how one needs to work hard to get good at things and achieve success (“success” here meaning appreciation from her teachers); no-pain-no-gain; and other such cliches, she asked if it was ‘guaranteed’ that hard-work would lead to success. Though it was enough to say ‘Yes’ to it and she would have been entirely satisfied with it, I did not want to do that. The skeptical man-in-the-mirror was staring at me. So I tried to get into the nuance and explained that ‘hard-work’ coupled with ‘constant feedback loop’ and ‘smart pivots’ is what will lead to success. Her next questions were ‘Okay, is it guaranteed that with those feedback and pivots success is inevitable’ and ‘Should everyone do this? Why do some people seem to have it very easy?’ (The reference being some friends in her drawing class who do certain things effortlessly).
This is when the consultant in me woke-up and decided to do a 2x2 and explain that some people can get successful without effort and some people can fail even with hard-work (and feedback loops and smart pivots) but in when accounted for probability, we better work hard than otherwise.
I was pleased (!) with my effort that I decided to present it to y’all here.
How to read this:
- Everyone start at bottom-left. Low-success and no hard-work
- Some people go to High-Success without effort — This could be due to being a ‘Genius’ or pure ‘Luck’. But this is very less number of people (2% — and all other percentages here — being an indicative unscientific number pulled out of thin air)
- 70% people simply get stuck at bottom-left. They do not even try.
- 5% of the people work hard and see results immediately. i.e. They move to the top-right
- 18% of the people work-hard, do not see immediate success; but continue to work hard (engage in deliberate-practice blah), get feedback, pivot and then move to the top-right
- 2% of the people may do all of the above but still do not see success. The key here is not to give-up and continue working (“it will all be good at the end; if it is not good, it is not the end”).
This made sense to her to not leave things to luck/genius and work hard. (Or she was sufficiently confused and bored that she thought shading techniques like hatching were better in comparison).
Makes sense?
(Update: I re-read Dr. Seuss’ “The places you go” recently. And realized that he says success is 98 3/4 percent guaranteed. My estimate is close, no?)
