09 Sep This Mindset Matters as Much as Intelligence and Grit for Success
via Inc.com by Jessica Stillman
Will intelligence help you get ahead in life? Sure. Will determination help you reach your goals? Absolutely. But, as we all know, it’s possible to be both smart and gritty and still end up banging your head against a wall of failure year after year. So how do people keep going? A new study says the answer is a strategic mindset.
The mindset all successful people have.
The study, which was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academic of Sciences and highlighted on BBC Worklife, identified “the strategic mindset” as the key difference between those who succeed in reaching all their goals and those who fail. As the BBC’s David Robson explains, this mindset essentially comes down to what researchers call metacognition.
The name is a little unclear, but metacognition itself is actually straightforward. It’s the practice of thinking about your thinking–for example, by reflecting on the flaws in your process and actively searching out more effective strategies. It’s the opposite of plugging along head down on a fixed course relying on sheer will to plow through all obstacles.
Metacognition means having your head up and your mind alert for easier ways to reach your goal. “Suppose you are an expat learning French,” Robson offers as an example. “Metacognition would help you recognize that something like self-testing is a better way of learning new words than simply reading vocabulary lists. You might recognize difficulty in following dialogue and decide to spend more time watching French films to improve your ear for the language (rather than, say, fruitlessly focusing on the grammar).”
As the name implies, the strategic mindset supplements hard work with a careful attention to strategy. And whether researchers monitored people trying to lose weight, followed students’ academic progress, or even asked volunteers to figure out how to best separate egg whites from yolks, having a strategic mindset led to vastly greater success…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE
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