- Towards the beginning of this chapter, Bain tells the story of Joe who went from believing he was smart because that was what everyone told him, to later in life starting to question his abilities because he was told things like he could be getting better grades. People would say things to Joe like, “‘You used to be so smart. What happened to you?’ Gradually, Joe decided that he wasn’t all that bright and that he would never be a really good student. ‘I’m just an average guy,’ he would tell people, finding comfort in being ordinary” (Bain, 2012). I feel like I can relate to Joe in some ways. Throughout highschool, I always went above and beyond and got really good grades. I was even the salutatorian of my graduating class. But, as I’ve made the transition to college, things are different and I don’t feel like I’m doing as well as I did in high school. It can be easy to adopt the idea that you are just “average” and be hard on yourself when it comes to things like school, especially if you compare yourself to the people around you.
- There are a lot of connections to the ideas Bain presents in this chapter to Dweck’s concept of the growth mindset. Bain emphasizes that not only does everyone “fail” at some point in their life, but failure is even necessary to later become successful. On page 100, Bain states that, “People who become highly creative and productive learn to acknowledge their failures, even to embrace them, and to explore and learn from them.” This directly relates to Dweck’s point that we should praise processes rather than outcomes. Everyone has different ways of learning and strategies that work best for them, so through failure we can figure out what doesn’t work in our learning processes and what does work.
