I.Q., Mindset, and blue skies…

What do you believe about your intelligence?  Have you ever taken one of those intelligence tests?  Are you afraid to discover your number?  Are you proud of your percentile ranking?

I’m in the middle of another book about the mind, this is the second one I’m reading as part of the fallout of devouring the book Drive, by Daniel Pink.  This one is titled Mindset, by Carol Dweck and has a strong resemblance to Leaned Optimism, by Dr. Seligman.  Yes, I’m weird.

What is even stranger, however, is that more than half of the minds out there, believe that their intelligence is fixed.  Loads of us simply believe that whatever we score, we score.  If we pretty much suck at school, or sales, or something else, that’s just the “hand we were dealt.”  If we have loads of debt, lots of kids, and a lousy job, well that’s just our “lot in life” and we had better make our peace with that.  Some people get all the breaks, and we aren’t some people.  

All kinds of research about talent tie directly to the individuals mindset.  Read Talent is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin or The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle and you will see how the “growth” mindset drives one to work to improve their performance, while the “fixed” mindset causes another to Eeyore up, “oh, bother.”

What’s your mindset?

What do you believe about your abilities to learn and develop?

What do you believe about your performance ceiling?  Is it fixed or is it bent by your will and by your willingness to work?

Interestingly, Alfred Binet, the dead Frenchie that created the I.Q. test believed something that might surprise at least a few folks.  Here’s a snippet of his that Dweck sites on page 5 of her book.

“A few modern philosophers…assert that an individuals intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased.  We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism…With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.”

Do not settle.  Do not believe anyone that tells you what your ceiling is.  Do not stop dreaming because others around you do not see the point, lack the passion, and want nothing more than to rob you of your purpose.  Do listen to negative feedback.  Run it through your strong CORE.  Turn some of it into instruction and put it to work. Turn some of it into noise and let it go.  Over time and through adversity, you will get stronger.  AND, the tiny crack in your performance ceiling will give way to blue skies.

Yea, BABY…