What the Best College Students Do

Failures can be painful, but they also can teach useful lessons. Successful students embrace failure and learn from it. Failure also can lead to unnecessarily negative outcomes. A confident student can have a bad experience in a difficult class and decide to avoid challenging courses in the future. Summertime fun may distract a student from study preparation until time runs out and he can’t pass the exam, so he explains away his mistake with the belief that he’s just not that smart anyway.

A common thought error that limits success is to believe that intelligence is fixed and that either people are smart or they aren’t. In fact, intelligence is trainable, and effort is more important than native talent. A group of 10-year-olds were given a set of puzzles to solve: The first puzzles were fairly easy, and all the kids got the answers right and enjoyed themselves. The second set of puzzles were too hard to solve in the time allotted. One group of children struggled and gave up; another group kept trying. The ones who quit spoke as if they believed they weren’t smart enough; those who persisted seemed to feel that, with time and patience, the problems could be solved: “they didn’t see failure as a sign that they were dumb. They saw it as something they hadn’t learned yet” (108).

IQ tests reinforce the idea that intelligence is fixed. Some teachers believe that the smart students will “get it” and the rest won’t. Adults often compliment children on their brains, but it’s more powerful to praise them for their efforts. When people believe they’re born smart, they often become passive in the face of challenges. If, instead, they believe they’ve become smart through practice and training, they’re more adaptive when big problems loom.

Tom Springer and his brother listened by the hour as their mother read them challenging adventure books—Mark Twain, L. Frank Baum, and the like—and they loved school. When the family moved to Michigan, the school was much less demanding yet more regimented, and Tom became a listless student, graduating with a C average. He bounced around from job to job until, taking courses at a community college, he discovered a love for writing, earned a master’s degree in environmental journalism, became a filmmaker and published writer, and worked as a project manager at the Kellogg Foundation, helping kids get inspiration through reconnecting with nature.

Tom found his way to a successful career helping others because his love of learning began early with his mother, from whom he discovered the sound of good writing, and because he never gave up on his ability to become smarter and more capable even in the face of his own doubts.

Much of success in the face of failures depends on how a person interprets a setback. Is it because of inner limitations? Is it because of external factors that can’t be changed? Or is it a situation that can be improved or worked around? If a problem appears to be out of a person’s control, that person will give up, but if they think of the problem as solvable, they persist in seeking a path to a successful outcome. This is called “self-efficacy”: “You must know how to do something, but you must also believe that you can” (118).

The spectrum of intelligence once was seen as a fixed ladder, with some people at the top and the rest farther down. This view evolved toward the idea that people on lower rungs could climb higher with effort. Paul Baker suggested that intelligence isn’t a ladder at all, but more like a tree whose branches and leaves grow with time. In that respect, each student brings a unique viewpoint and set of abilities to each problem or challenge under study. Education becomes less a competitive sport and more of a collegial and cooperative venture.

After college, Jeff Hawkins worked at Intel, where he wanted to do research on brain theory, but there wasn’t yet enough knowledge about the brain to begin such a project. At GRiD Systems, Jeff helped develop the first tablet computer. He realized that mobile devices might be the future, but, again, the knowledge and technology just weren’t there yet. He attended graduate school in biophysics, then started the companies Palm and Handspring, which launched the mobile device industry. Then he co-founded Numenta, a company that studies the brain and how its intelligence can be translated into machine learning. Jeff’s persistence and success comes from his belief that, if an obstacle arises, he would “try to find a solution if I could” (125).

A study by Columbia and Stanford researchers recruited inner-city middle-school kids, who had performed poorly on math tests, to take a course on improving study habits. Everyone received the same training, except that some students read aloud an article that explained how the brain can grow with learning practice, while the other students read about how memory works. The first group improved motivation by 27%, while the second group’s motivation grew by only 9%. The first group’s math performance improved as well.

Debra Goldson, a Jamaican immigrant to New York, studied hard in school so she could become a doctor and help her mother, who had a poorly understood heart ailment. Debra loved math and reading, and her efforts produced good grades, but along the way she was sometimes discouraged by counselors and professionals who didn’t believe in her. Debra received a 99th-percentile score on the MCAT exam, but the first medical school that accepted her required all Black entrants to take remedial summer courses; she turned down the offer. A much more highly ranked school, Columbia, accepted her. Debra excelled in differential diagnoses and was praised for her clinical work. She later established a highly respected practice in New Jersey. A chief lesson Debra learned is that “I now define being smart in terms of how hard you try” (132).