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FinnWing's picture

Gravitating

  This is a very interesting and thoughtful discussion.  I am particularly interested in how, in the entity perspective, being labeled as someone who is good at something causes one to gravitate to that thing.  If one is told that she is good at writing, but actually she really wants to be mathematician, I wonder how being told that she is good affects her choices?  This seems to be quite dangerous in a similar way to Skindeep's argument about the boy gravitating towards engineering rather than photography (although the pressures are slightly different).

   It seems that the most dangerous consequence of praise, whether entity or incremental, is that we are usually praised for what we are good at, and not always what we love.  I've seen many cases where someone loves something, e.g. basketball or acting, and they are not good in the beginning, but they are great at running for example, so rather than face the uphill battle of doing what they love but are not good at, they gravitate towards the praise and run downhill.  In the long-term this seems to have two bad consequences: 1) that person does not really to push themselves for love of the action, but rather for praise; and 2) that person does not love what he is doing and so he is probably not as happy as he could be doing what he loves (and most likely if he loves basketball or acting that much, he will become good at it).  

  Anyway, those are my 2¢'s...

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