I grew up in a house where abundant praise was given for completion of the most mundane of tasks. Failures were justified and assigned an appropriate cause that absolved me of any wrongdoing.
Exactly the opposite of my experience. My father never praised us. Ever. My mother rarely did. We were routinely punished for anything less than perfection: homework, grades, even washing the dishes (Do them again! Not clean enough!)
And yet they must have been doing something else so subtly that none of us ever noticed. Everything about the way they treated us led each of us to believe that we could accomplish anything, as long as we worked hard enough and didn't expect anything given to us. We were special but not entitled.
I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential.
There both gone now and I think about them every day. Even more so after posts like this one. Thank you, OP.
"I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential."
That's a pity. You should not do that. Please don't do that to your children or they will become miserable and angry too, and their children too, and so on. This is an awful way to live a life.
A man is born for happiness like a bird for flight.
Sacrificing large part of your life to misery for the questionable future success is a very bad deal. Not suggesting anyone take it.
I agree that is rather harsh. Children most of all need love and affection that is a solid base for everything else to grow on.
The response to avoid excessive pointless praises for every simple task it not constant harshness and lack of affection. There is a balance, but rather it is praise for hard work.
My parents never told me I was gifted or smart instead they always praised my hard work, and taught by example -- for example, never to half-ass a job, always try to do the best you can.
In the end I don't think I am gifted or better than anyone by some genetic fluke or something. However I am persistent and will never give up until I reach my goals.
Praise is an expression, and it may or may not express love. Love and affection are emotions.
It is entirely possible to love and feel affection without expressing it through words, or even actions. As an example: simply paying attention and listening, without having your own thoughts, preconceptions block you from actually receiving what that other person is saying.
Love is a state of being, not something you do. So yes, children need love and affection; that may or may not have anything to do with praise.
PS. It is far easier to tackle challenges when you love yourself, and have fun with what you are doing. Failures don't feel like the end of the world, and you can acknowledge and examine them with the same neutrality as you would with successes. At that point, it is no longer a matter of success or failure -- you feel loved anyways.
There's this big fallacy that desire and punishment are necessary, otherwise someone will become lazy, apathetic, and won't have the "drive". This is a big fat lie. The lie comes from the notion of having to trade success for affection.
Couldn't have said it better. My father was never one to give demonstrative praise in the typical sense, but it was clear to anyone who saw that he was one of the most caring and loving parents. And even though praise may not be explicit, it's certainly possible to tell when someone is happy with you or takes pride in your accomplishment, even if they never actually mouth those words.
I could not disagree more strongly. I believe that for every one case in which what you experienced is true, there are nine cases in which a childhood that consists of a general lack of praise and constant punishment for lack of perfection results in adults with low self-esteem, low confidence, a lack of discipline, and a general hatred of their parents' culture and of doing the things that they were pushed to do.
I think what the article's author posted and your experience are two extremes of parenting. It just so happened that the article shows the "failure case" of excessive and unmerited praise; there are undoubtedly many well-adjusted adults who were constantly praised for mundane tasks and told they would achieve great things as a child, just like there are adults who turned out to be well-adjusted despite the other extreme of parenting.
Like others have stated here, I believe that the right balance is a childhood in which parents praise effort and not talent and where the enforcement of discipline is firm but not rigid.
I remember hearing recently (I think it was from the book Outliers) that children whose parents tell them their achievements are due to natural ability fair far worse in life than children whose parents tell them their achievements are the result of hard work.
"People can also learn these self-theories from the kind of praise they receive (Mueller & Dweck, 1998). Ironically, when students are praised for their intelligence, they move toward a fixed theory. Far from raising their self-esteem, this praise makes them challenge-avoidant and vulnerable, such that when they hit obstacles their confidence, enjoyment, and performance decline. When students are praised for their effort or strategies (their process), they instead take on a more malleable theory— they are eager to learn and highly resilient in the face of difficulty."
Carol Dweck developed the theory called mindset that shows that how children are praised (for effort, or intelligence) can determine how they approach problems, how long they persist at trying to solve problems, and even whether they will tend to choose to solve new, harder problems or choose to re-solve ones they already know. http://mindsetonline.com/
This was probably taken from the work of Carol Dweck[0]. I recently read a book she wrote (Mindset[1]) that was recommended on a thread here. The book title sounds like some corny self-help book, and honestly some of the stories in it seemed a bit sappy to me, but I think the underlying idea is solid and I definitely see it myself a lot in my day to day life (full disclosure: recovering fixed mindset person :)).
The basic premise is there are two types of mindsets, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Those with the fixed mindset are those that believe that intelligence, ability, etc.. is basically fixed. You have some certain amount and that's that. The growth mindset believes the general range of these things may be strongly influenced ('fixed') by things like genetics, life circumstances, etc... but improvement within this range is definitely possible and the key to that is hard work and honest assessment of where you are relative to where you want to be.
This relates to the achievement vs. hard work thing because she claims children who are praised for 'being smart' or 'being good at X' tend to gravitate towards the fixed mindset (i.e. 'I get praised because I am smart, I am smart because I can do X well/X comes easily to me, if something doesn't come easily to me it must mean I am not smart/talented'). This causes them to not put in effort when the going gets tough and in fact to avoid challenges because if they fail they view it as a judgement on their core self/competency (not simply an indication of an area for growth).
The growth mindset folks (children praised for doing well because they worked hard at it as opposed to some natural talent or 'smarts') tend to seek challenges as they view them as the engine of growth/improvement.
Using these frameworks as a lens on which to view human behavior can be interesting. I have definitely seen both mindsets in action (in myself and others). I definitely , consciously, try to stay in a growth mindset now, but I think our culture heavily pushes a fixed mindset where someone either has 'it' or they don't, they are smart or they are not, they are talented or they are not. We prefer the 'instant success due to massive talent/smarts' story over the 'worked their ass off for years to build amazing talent and then succeeded due to that hard work'.
The book Talent Is Overrated[2] also touches on this and points out most people that we generally consider 'naturals' at things, if you interview them/study them/look at their past, all have something in common, a tremendous amount of effort in learning/training, above and beyond what most people put in. This also veers towards the 10,000 hour theory of Anders Ericsson[3]
EDIT: Fixed a bunch typos/misspelling I saw in re-reading. Originally typed in IE with no spell check. Area for improvement: spelling.
The problem I have with this is that in real life, it doesn't matter how hard you work on something; what matters is the quality of the result. While I understand that praising kids for being smart causes problems, as Dweck suggests, I'm concerned that the approach she recommends will encourage the belief, already widespread, that effort alone is deserving of reward. This belief encourages struggle and mediocrity.
I think the hidden assumption is that "hard work" is also applied to learning not just pure rote doubling of effort to pick twice as many apples in a day. Rather the key is "persistence" and even more saw "persistence in learning".
This can make a huge difference if a breakthrough occurs on a meta-level and eventually you get better at learning, by repeatedly trying to learn something, you learn how to learn better, then learning anything is easier.
When you focus exclusively on the quality of results, you stop growing.
It's not about "effort", so much as the deliberateness in which you go about things. (The word "effort" is weighed down with a number of baggage and connotation). Or to put in different words, how mindful are you as you are doing whatever it is you are doing?
Actually, I think what matters is the right mix of quantity and quality. Too much perfection wastes time for nothing. And sometimes I am too perfectionist unfortunately.
If you are simply focused on that task in front of you, sure, it looks like that. The change is in the person and how they approach future problems and tasks.
Yes, I likely oversimplified her message, sorry. She never advocates praising effort in isolation from outcome. She advocates praising effort as the key factor in successful outcomes, and analyzing failures to understand what caused them and how you can grow your skillset to avoid them in the future. Her concern with a fixed mindset is that a loss/setback simply means someone else was better/smarter than you and there isn't much you can do about it. That or, to protect your ego, perhaps they cheated or the judges liked them better, or they were born to wealthy parents and had advantages you didn't or whatever other excuse people come up to explain a loss when they feel a loss labels them as a loser for all time. If you have the mindset that you can learn/improve from these experiences then a loss/failure isn't something to be hidden in shame, but something to be analyzed and used to make yourself better.
She has a story about a parent whose daughter was competing in gymnastics and at the local level always did pretty well without much practice. She went to a regional meet and did well relative to her skills but was outperformed by others and ended up not winning any medals/ribbons. On the way home the dad basically told her she didn't win because she didn't deserve to, i.e. the other competitors had put in more practice than she had and it showed in their performance. He didn't say 'they beat you because they are more talented' or 'they beat you because they are superior athletes', those are the kinds of statements that imply there is some core quality that the winners had that his daughter didn't have and thus she could never be better than them. Instead he basically said 'they buckled down and put in the long hours, if you did that you would have had a better chance'.
Dweck pointed out that he wasn't saying this to be a dick, and of course feedback like this much be couched correctly for people to hear it, but he wanted his daughter to know that to compete you have to put in the effort to learn/practice. If others put in more effort than you then they deserve to win, all else being equal. The story ended with her doubling down on her effort/practice (since she realized her local competitors which she could easily beat were only indicative of her talent vis-a-vis them, not some absolute barometer for her skills) and going on to compete successfully at a national level.
You are right that if I try and deliver some project at work and it fails I can't tell my boss 'but I tried really hard!' :) That said, if you look at most successful projects/people you see a LOT of hard work at some point to deliver on things. Some people make it look easy, but that is likely because they have done all the hard work years earlier building their skillsets. If they have done more of that than you then it shouldn't be surprising that their skills seem so superior to yours. They weren't born being masters of anything (hell, babies can't even manage to not shit themselves for a few years :)), but they put in time and effort even when there was little/no reward for that investment (in the immediate here and now, obviously there is reward later when you are able to do seemingly super-human things easily).
One a related note: Aaron Swartz wrote an article series he calls "raw nerve". One of those articles expands on Carol Dweck's work: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck
>The problem I have with this is that in real life, it doesn't matter how hard you work on something; what matters is the quality of the result.
What makes you think the two are unrelated? If one is hopelessly incopetent maybe, but for most people hard work equals better results.
It's something that has been stated time and again regarding geniuses / very productive people et al, in the form of, say, the "10,000 hour rule", or the "99 perspiration, 1% inspiration".
Results may be correlated with effort if you consider a single person. However, in real life, you're usually competing with someone else.
Let's say we're comparing two employees: X works hard 80 hours a week; Y works only 40 hours a week and takes long lunches. But somehow, Y still ends up producing more results of a better quality. A rational manager should pay Y more than X, since it's only the end results that are of value to the company.
> I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential.
I feel absolutely the same. I've spent a lot of time trying to reconstruct how my mother raised me. Things I consider average and normal human potential seem outrageous to a lot of people i meet.
For my brother when people were always telling him how great he was, she was the one pulling him back on earth.
One thing I noticed is that once you start believing that you're awesome, you stop becoming awesome.
Low fertility rates, high cost of child-rearing, families starting later... it's probably quite normal for parents to give their only child the Royal treatment.
> I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential.
This is the best line I've read in a comment here in some time. I had this same epiphany once I went to college. My father and I had never really gotten along. I had tremendous respect for him (and a mild bit of fear), but I never really "liked" him. He preached personal responsibility and hard work. Over and over.
When I was in karate as a 10 year old, we would work in the basement for hours every night. Perfecting every move, learning all the forms. He would sit there and critique. I hated it. I won a lot of trophies in competitions as a child, but I never cared. There was no praise for winning. I hated the constant practice, the drilling, the ceaseless work. As I got older I realized the message he instilled. If you want to excel at something, this is what it takes. This is the amount of effort required to be competitive. And you do things because you want to be good at them, not because someone will praise you for it.
Every day of my life I'm glad he taught me that lesson. I get so tired of self-entitled whiners like the author of this article. It's not fair of course, the author never had a parent that taught them what hard work and success really looks like. The real shame is that he's probably more the rule than the exception these days.
There is a middle ground to this. Always praise effort, never skill. They did studies on this, if you praise children for their talent, they will do worse than if you praise them for their effort. Effort is in their control, talent is not. This doesn't mean you need your children to hate you/be super strict.
If you said "results" instead of "effort" it would ring even more true. In the real world effort doesn't matter as much as results. "Trying your best" is just a means to the end of getting maximum results, and doesn't in itself earn much reward.
If someone tries their best but still raises a rotten child because they're just not good at parenting, do they deserve as much praise as someone who raised the same child to be a great man or woman?
You don't want to praise for results because results are often out of your control. If you grow up thinking that results are all that matter and then your first startup fails because market conditions change, what does that tell you? That it was all worthless? You end up becoming incapable of dealing with randomness, and hence shy away from situations where the results may not be entirely under your control.
Results should be looked at as a feedback mechanism to give you a reality check on your effort. If you gave it your all and still failed - what could you have done differently? Were you directing your effort at the things that are most important? Was it a goal worth doing in the first place? Could you have adjusted your actions to get a bigger payoff for your effort?
(And the parenting example is a good one. IMHO someone who does their best at raising a child with random genetic disorders like sociopathy, schizophrenia, or Down's Syndrome absolutely deserves as much praise as someone who raises a bright genetically-endowed child to be a great man or woman.)
I agree with these things in general and being a father, I try to keep up on these "outlier" type conversations on parenting. However, being a father of two young children I am also starting to realize that people are programmed a certain way at birth. Some are naturally ambitious, some are cunning, some are observant, some are curious, some are naive, others sensitive, others tough, etc. You can see it very early on. There is no set rule or path to "Success". Not everyone is going to achieve "Success" no matter what you do as a parent. I grew up with three siblings all with the same parents in the same home...three different outcomes. I think that those who read these books (including myself) are part of the group of people who question if they fully optimized their potential and perhaps want to see if they can help their kids along in a different way. There are some kids that don't need an ounce of motivation and others that need to be nurtured at every step. You have to look at each individual differently and adapt to them and their needs. Bottom Line....to paraphrase from Barbara Corcoran's business book... I am trying to help my children "use what they've got"
> (And the parenting example is a good one. IMHO someone who does their best at raising a child with random genetic disorders like sociopathy, schizophrenia, or Down's Syndrome absolutely deserves as much praise as someone who raises a bright genetically-endowed child to be a great man or woman.)
That's not the question he asked. You're comparing parents who face different challenges. The question was about parents who face the same challenges, and both sets of parents put a lot of effort in, but one set is good at parenting and the other set is bad at parenting.
Like perhaps one set of parents consist of an orphan and someone who grew up in a household with mentally-ill parents, while the other set come from comfortable intact middle-class nuclear families? And the first set just don't know how to parent because they had shitty or no role-models growing up?
I would still respect the first set of parents. They did the best they could with what they had to work with. It's a sad situation though...in a perfect world effort would equal results, but the world ain't perfect.
The parent is referring to a well documented phenomenon in which effort (and feedback loops which encourage effort over talent) is tightly correlated with success.
I believe you are incorrect in jumping to the conclusion that encouraging "results" would be superior to encouraging grit, effort and work. For one, the research is absent, and for another it makes the "how" incidental - whereas it is not.
My degree, for instance, is in part only as meaningful as the work I put into it. Lying, cheating and stealing my way towards it would not serve me in the long run.
Note, there's a distinction between "praising someone for their effort" (where you say something is good because they worked hard at it) and "praising their effort" (where you literally praise the effort they put into something).
This is an important distinction. The studies say that, in general, you want to say to a child, "great job for being a hard worker" rather than "wow, you are so smart."
It turns out that if the kid associates his/her self-image with being smart, they tend to avoid hard stuff later that they may not look so smart it. If you praise effort, their more likely to work hard a hard problems.
My personal take on this is that it helps to show/teach kids what the expected results are and then praise them for their hard work in trying to reach that goal. For instance, I think it is healthy to go outside and play basketball and say "The goal is to get the ball in the basket". If you miss the basket, try to figure out why you missed and adjust. I think that if your kid gets progressively closer to the hoop and they are trying different things to adjust, that they should be praised for their hard work/effort (even if then do not get any baskets). The kids will focus on both the goal and the process of trying to adjust to achieve that goal, both of those having rewarding outcomes. However if you only focus on the Result, certain kids that are not analytical or highly gifted athletically, could get discouraged when they are not attaining those results as quickly as others. Better results are attainable for others, however they need more nurturing and more practice. On the other hand, to go out and show a child exactly how to shoot the ball in great detail, does not allow the child the room for experimentation to learn how to adapt.
It is important to realize that there are some very successful guys in the NBA that can't really shoot that well (they can sure dunk or pass)....and some team owners that can not shoot at all. Each kid will be different. Find out what your kid is good at and help then along with that.
This makes good sense. As I recall, the new results focused on what you said after a successful result. Praising the kid for being smart tended to make them shy away from intellectual challenge, because they didn't want to be seen as not smart enough. Praising them for working hard for their result, on the other hand, resulted in kids not afraid to try hard things.
Same experience here. I played little league baseball as a boy and my dad would make me practice almost every day. Fielding, throwing, batting, everything. I enjoyed it about 25% of the time but for the most part it felt like "work".
I remember crying a few times when I kept making mistakes and he would keep making me do it over and over until I got it.
He even built a batting cage for me and I would hit hundreds and hundreds of pitches.
Did I get significantly better because of all this practice? You bet I did. I had less natural talent than almost everyone on in the league but I was one of the best players because of all that practice. I saw the correlation between how much I practiced and my performance in games.
And you guys are absolutely right, I didn't like my dad when he was being so tough on me. But it was for the better, and I could see that when I became an adult.
It taught me that if you want to be good at something, you need to work hard, and it's not always fun. Perseverance and grit are very important.
As a father to a new baby I am really looking forward to (hopefully) passing on these lessons to her when she's old enough. I guess I won't be her best friend but I suppose that's just the price you pay.
I can't find the article, which is a huge shame, but the gist of it was the difference between Asian parenting and American.
Many Asian parents praise their children's effort, rather than the outcome of that effort.
It sounds like your parents did half: Encouraging hard work, and not praising accomplishment, but not giving recognition for the hard work.
If you have kids and find yourself with a similar attitude as your parents, I'd add in that you should praise how hard they worked, regardless of their outcome.
Hope that makes sense...
Also, disclosure: I'm 28, with no kids. Take any parenting advice with a grain of salt :D
> "Many Asian parents praise their children's effort, rather than the outcome of that effort."
As an Asian who knows many other Asians, I found it to be the opposite. Effort was only a necessary component of outcome - and outcome is the ultimate goal. Regardless of how much (or little) effort you put in, negative outcomes are unacceptable.
That more or less reflects my world view now - it's not about working hard, it's more often about working smart. If we make it about effort we leave out of the box solutions on the table. Optimize for outcome.
This is suboptimal. You ought to have some internal motivation. Someone screaming at you isn't a good way to motivate yourself. Should probably be illegal.
Internal motivation is doing things that you like.
And then: doing things that you don't really like that much, but that allow you to progress in doing things that you do really like.
People who play a lot of computer games tend to eighter bore themself and move to different occupations or branch into game testing, game journalism, game translation and ultimately game development.
But yes, if all what 90% people want is playing computer games, that's what they should do. I just think you're off by an order of magnitude.
The only reason people enjoy things other than computer games is because computer games aren't yet good enough.
An environment created especially for the purpose of making us happy has an inherent advantage over reality. (Btw, don't forget the fact that our creative desires can also be realized in computer games.)
Cut back the welfare state and let natural selection regain her course...
"Internal motivation" is a resultant of complex social forces, rather than some absolute immutable physical law.
Btw "progress in doing things that you really like" takes on a new dimension with people who are "internally motivated" to be rapists, murderers or pedophiles. I know the GP is probably only considering this in the context of "effective parenting", and I apologize for the ad-absurdum, but I don't feel screaming at villains should be made "illegal". Nor everybody's "internal motivation" and "following their passion" universally glorified, as I often hear suggested by neo-hippies.
Of all robberies, murders and rapes only a tiny minority is committed by people feeling deep internal motivation to do so. Most are done by stupid people in a bad situation. Maniacs are pretty rare. Stupid people are a plenty. And they don't dream the life of violence. They have it all right already, some from the birth.
Talking about this tiny minority, I don't see how our yakyaking about following our dreams can affect them. Those people are deeply ill and should see a doctor. I don't see why we should take them into account when talking about how a sane majority of people should live.
I don't think anyone knows what they really like when they're young, and I believe even more firmly that parents are usually a better source of influence than peers. These are obviously generalizations, but I think Mike Rowe explains it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRVdiHu1VCc
I might be not representative, but I always liked tinkering with computers. Since I got one, my aim was to spend as much time with computers as I could while avoding "education" whether possible. And it turned out well since now I tinker with computers for a living.
But I still have this large bill of all the hours ruined on "education" with nobody to compensate it to me. Will you?
I watched this video once before, and there was a segment in it that struck me as so strange and incomprehensible that I have taken the trouble to transcribe it. It starts at 11:20 and runs through 12:20.
"Follow your passion." We've been talking about it here for the last 36 hours. "Follow your passion" -- what could possibly be wrong with that? It's probably the worst advice I ever got. "Follow your dreams and go broke," right? I mean -- that's all I heard growing up. I didn't know what to do with my life, but I was told that if you follow your passion it's gonna work out. I can give you 30 examples right now. Bob Combs, the pig farmer in Las Vegas, who collects the uneaten scraps of food from the casinos and feeds them to his swine. Why? Because there's so much protein in the stuff we don't eat, his pigs grow at twice the normal speed, and he is one rich pig farmer, and he is good for the environment, and he spends his days doing this incredible service, and he smells like hell but God bless him. He's making a great living. You ask him: did you follow your passion here? He'd laugh at you. The guy's worth -- he just got offered like $60 million for his farm, and turned it down, outside of Vegas. He didn't follow his passion! He stepped back and he watched where everybody was going and he went the other way.
This makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. For starters, it's completely clear to me that Rowe is totally passionate about the work he has been doing for Dirty Jobs! (If that's not clear from this short segment, watch the whole video.) I don't know that in his youth he would have been able to identify this work as his passion, but it seems clear enough to me that he has, as an adult, found it -- if not "the" passion of his life, then certainly "a" passion.
His story about the pig farmer makes no sense to me either. How exactly can we conclude that the pig farmer isn't following his passion? I'd say that the fact that he doesn't want to sell his farm is evidence that it is, in fact, his passion, and the clever way he's found to feed his pigs, to me, supports that conclusion rather than contradicting it. Where is it written that no one could possibly be passionate about pig farming?
And tucked in the middle of all this is the line "'Follow your dreams and go broke,' right?" Again -- where is that written? I've never assumed that following my dreams would lead to penury; quite the contrary.
Rowe is thus an example of a curious phenomenon I've noticed -- people whose passion seems to be telling other people not to follow their passions. (Cal Newport is the other example that comes to mind.)
The only explanation I can come up with is that these people don't really get what a passion is or how to identify it. I suppose that to the extent that there are a lot of people out there who don't get that, telling them not to follow their passions is, for them, sound advice! But I find it rather unsatisfying.
I'd guess the point is that the guy didn't follow his passion to become a pig farmer, but became a pig farmer because it was expedient, and later learned to be passionate about it.
Not that i've actually watched the film or anything, you understand
My parents never forced me to do my hw. I never did chores. Almost no praise and no punishment. All in all they were pretty hands-off. I'm from a low income family and lived in a crappy neighborhood in NYC, went to some crappy schools. And yet, I managed to get a Bachelors in Engineering and a Masters in Computer Science. I have a very strong work ethic. What worked? Who knows.
The author of the piece still doesn't get it. He blames other people for his belief that nothing is his fault, oblivious to the irony of that logic. His twitter bio starts with the words "Trying to figure myself out". He looks inside himself and sees nothing; His reaction to that void is to just keep looking.
He wants more than anything in the world to be a game journalist, or a story writer, or an animator, or a game designer, or whatever, which is fine if you're a freshman, but seriously fucked up if you're several years out of college. He hasn't realised that you don't need anyone's permission to write games reviews or make short films or put together a little indie game, you just fucking do it. He is sufficiently preoccupied with the question of identity that he fails to understand that "doing x" precedes "being x".
He uses the world "passion" more than anyone who understands the meaning of that word. Put bluntly, he's a pathological narcissist. I feel desperately sorry for the guy, but not as much as I feel sorry for the people who live with him.
It's a curious trait amongst what seems to be a lot of gen-Ys. The inability to see the forest for the trees. I remember an online debate with one gen-Yer (I'm an Xer) who I've shared a forum with for years and hence know she's not stupid. The debate was on which gen of the last three had it harder growing up. After I outlined the things the boomers started with and were fundamentally involved in changing (like various forms of civil right movements, the sexual revolution and so forth), the responses I got were things like 'we can't have peanut butter in schools' - intended as an argument as to why it's harder to grow up Y.
She couldn't see beyond the trials she had personally had, couldn't empathise with a world she didn't grow up in. The boomers had become this boogeyman that weren't a generation that figured it out as they go (like all generations), but this vague conspiracy to intentionally screw over later generations. I think my favourite part was "We were promised a light at the end of the tunnel and didn't get it unless we worked hard". Well... no generation before was even promised that. You just got 'work hard, deal with it'. There was never an 'it gets better'.
I used to think, like the author, that the "everyone gets a trophy" epidemic in America was a major problem. Lately, I've come to realize that this is but half of the problem. The other half is America's growing culture of Celebrity Worship. You see it all over: in the way America's youth treats Facebook and Twitter, in the exponential growth of "reality" shows and "talent" competitions, in the rise of celebrities who are "famous for being famous".
With the way that America treats celebrity, not just as something to be desired but something to be expected, it's hard to blame parents for having that "everyone gets a trophy" mentality. The reality is that someone needs to sweep the floors. Someone needs to build the buildings, dig the ditches, and work the assembly line. The fact that America seems to have forgotten how to do those jobs and still maintain a sense of accomplishment, a sense of self-worth, is directly reflected by the employment crisis the country currently finds itself in. When everyone is trying to be a celebrity, you end up with a country full of celebrities and drop-outs, of highly-paid, highly-skilled workers, and McDonalds' cashiers.
‘You treat “America” as some culturally monolithic thing, when it’s not.’
I second this. The United States alone are basically a loose collection of countries held together by the dollar and a certain amount of federal guidance. I use the term “countries” in the broader sense of “land”; they don’t necessarily correspond to state boundaries. And this is to say nothing of the rest of America.
I used to struggle with the same thing. Always being told that I was special. Graduating at the top 2% of my high school, slated for MIT, "you'll go far kid."
But here I am, feeling normal and useless. I lead a moderate sized club at RPI, but I don't even feel accomplished for it. I haven't seen any of the job offers that I felt were promised to me when I enrolled at the school, I haven't gotten any major internships.
As a kid I used to hit the video games pretty hard, but at some point I started to realize how fake the achievements felt. I literally can't stomach playing video games anymore. It feels like taking some sort of numbing drug. I have good memories, and I don't even regret most of the weekends I devoted entirely to video games (and the costs associated).
But I feel ill equipped for criticism. Not only am I ill equipped to hear criticism, but my peers are ill equipped to give criticism. Did my speech go well? What could I improve? Even when I can tell that my peers did not like what they saw, it's hard to figure out why, I don't think that some of them even know how to criticize someone within their own mind.
I worked a job last summer teaching kids. I still visit from time to time, and the trend of positive reinforcement and lack of criticism seems to be gaining momentum in our youth. My boss would not let me criticize my own students. And this worries me. What happens when everybody hits the real world, ill equipped for the failure that most adults will tell you happens regularly?
And what can we do to address the issue without swinging the pendulum in the exact opposite direction, to the fabled 'tiger' parenting that seems to carry it's own hefty share of negative consequences?
> But here I am, feeling normal and useless. I lead a moderate sized club at RPI, but I don't even feel accomplished for it. I haven't seen any of the job offers that I felt were promised to me when I enrolled at the school, I haven't gotten any major internships.
I struggled with this as well. A big turning point for me was dropping entirely the notion of being entitled to anything. In reality, no one owes me anything just because I think I'm smart or because I think I work hard.
> As a kid I used to hit the video games pretty hard, but at some point I started to realize how fake the achievements felt. I literally can't stomach playing video games anymore. It feels like taking some sort of numbing drug. I have good memories, and I don't even regret most of the weekends I devoted entirely to video games (and the costs associated).
Me too! It sucks sometimes because I want to enjoy playing a game but don't. I've found that I can't play games, like Skyrim, that are just time-based grinds. Instead, I play games for the nostalgia, the story, for creativity elements, or for the competition/skill factor. Sometimes even then I feel uneasy playing games because I feel like I should be doing something more productive.. that's a tough feeling to get over.
> I worked a job last summer teaching kids. I still visit from time to time, and the trend of positive reinforcement and lack of criticism seems to be gaining momentum in our youth. My boss would not let me criticize my own students.
I don't think these things are mutually exclusive. You can certainly criticize and be positive (or at least not negative) about it.
Hey, I'm an RPI student too. I think fundamentally your feelings of "fake achievement" come down to the fact that job offers, internships, fame, etc don't spawn from going to MIT or any other university: it's what you create that matters. College isn't a guarantee of anything: it's just a great opportunity to learn a ton of stuff if you put your mind to it.
Sidenote: I saw this post in your profile, "How can I learn to code in a practical environment?" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4326920). I'm someone that comes from the practical side of things, in terms of software engineering. Feel free to send me an email if you'd like to discuss.
I think this is another case of "Failures were justified and assigned an appropriate cause". In reality, the author didn't have the discipline to balance work and entertainment. This sounds like tantamount lazyness to me; who doesn't want to be having "fun" all the time instead of work or school?
I have difficulty putting it into words but this sounds like one big excuse blaming society/parents/school for his failures rather than himself, which is where they lie.
It's hard to expect him (looking at the child growing up, and the kid in college less than the adult) to know how to balance work and entertainment when he was never taught these things.
Discipline isn't something that you are born with, and if nobody is there to teach it to you then you have to teach it to yourself. It sounds to me like the author is beginning to learn his lessons, but that doesn't change the failures of his childhood parents/mentors who clearly did not adequately prepare him for college.
One of the reasons that I like college as an institution though is that it is a 'safe' place for you to learn the gaps in your childhood education. It's more or less a safe haven for you to finally be on your own but with still lessened consequences.
When you always have a group of people supporting you (like your parents), it's difficult to realize that you lack discipline, and it's difficult to realize the full consequences of your laziness.
I reject the notion that a child needs to have great parents in order to recognize basic cause and effect.
In my opinion, we need to stop perpetuating this idea that children are some kind of tabula rasa that must be filled with knowledge from their parents, as if to say that children are incapable of figuring things out for themselves. This thought process is what the excuse makers in life thrive on.
In more juvenile terms, I'd put it as "Oh, I'm sorry, let me call the WAAAAAAAAHmbulance".
So far I have met very, very few people who didn't have some sort of mental breakdown during their 20s. Attributing it to "youthful idealism", or what have you, sounds rather disingenuous. Also, there are definite problems with the reverse idea of "you're not special, you're just a cog in a machine" -- namely that once you think that way about yourself, you also start thinking that way about other people and then you're thinking of people as things.
Besides, you are special. You're just not more special than the guy next to you.
I believe this culture arose in 90's as a reaction to the 70's where in the US, the education system mainstreamed almost everyone and praise was nonexistent.
Today's 40-50 y/o so-called rocket scientist sat through exactly the same coursework, at the same pace, as the lowest passable student. Some schools even placed everyone in the same large room regardless of age.
To make things worse, grading was heavily weighted on rote assignments being completed; boredom could turn a 99th percentile tester into a C student and nothing was done.
Somehow though college admission was surprisingly objective. You could get into a respected public engineering school with any GPA if your SAT score was high enough.
The opposite is true now, where GPA is who you are "intellectually," and "honors" courses that allow you to get a 5.0 on a 4.0 scale almost ensure that the valedictorian will have more than a 4.0/4.0 GPA. Compliant, hard workers can grow up thinking they're also PhD material.
There is some validation in real life for the old system however. "Success" in real life is mostly just showing up consistently and having social skills to keep your customers (or bosses) happy.
Like ideas, raw intellectual horsepower doesn't go far without execution.
Heh, I remember the "honors 5.0" thing being really hilarious in high school -- it actually penalized people for taking an extra language class (for which honors wasn't offered), so the valedictorian basically was the person who took all honors (there were a fair number) and took the absolute minimum of electives. I'm glad I dropped out :)
We lived in the US for a couple years when I was in grade school. My parents always laughed and mocked the stickers that my teacher would put on our assignments: "Great Job!", "You're the best!", "#1". (almost 20 years later, it is still a recurring joke in my family).
An English professor of mine in college loved to dissect differences between the French and English language, and how they highlighted the differences in how anglo-saxon cultures and French culture approach education.
French schools mark out of 20 (0 being worst, 20 being best); but no one ever gets 20. In middle and high school, getting 17 or 18 is already stupendous; in college, top students rarely ever go above 15, and some professors skew their grading to rarely give out marks above 10 in order to toughen up students. On the other hand, getting an A or a 100% in a US college class is not all that hard.
In French, we also often use the verb "to perfect" ("se parfaire") to mean "improve"; for instance, "I'm taking classes to perfect my English". I don't believe I've ever encountered that construction in English (if it is grammatically correct, then it is infinitely rarer)
My professor's main point being that in French culture, perfection is something we strive towards, but never achieve; whereas in anglo-saxon culture, it is something fully within reach.
I was never a straight A student; in middle and high school, my grades would rarely go above 14/20; in college, they were more around 12/20. I did finish my undergrad in a British institution, where my marks immediately skyrocketed and I graduated with the highest honors (ha). In grad school (US), I got a B or two, but they always were from some tough foreign professors.
By contrast, I dated an American girl for a while who had always been a straight A student in middle/high school (graduated valedictorian) and college (graduated on the dean's roll etc. etc.). Her blaring success stopped right as she graduated college though; she quickly fell in deep depression at that point due to the stark contrast with what she experienced and the professional world.
Addendum: Differences between the French (and European to some extent) and American culture have fascinated me for the past few years, as I grew up in a pluricultural environment in the later years, but very French in my early years (and as I slowly become a functioning adult, understanding what shaped my youth and education is interesting to me). To anyone interested in that question, I recommend the book "Bringing Up Bébé" by Pamela Druckerman, which is about a British/American couple discovering French parenting and contrasting it with their own. It is pop-cultury and light on actual research, but does contain interesting insights. Any recommendations on that same topic are very welcome :)
Statistically, most students in American colleges achieve low marks, fail a lot of classes, or drop out entirely. I suspect these students still encounter daunting obstacles in the real world.
The difference between schooling and the real world is not the heapings of praise, it is the lack of regimentation. In the white-collar workplace, there is not often a cohort of twenty men completing the exact same carefully-directed tasks as the recent graduate.
p.s. English "perfect" comes from Old French. Using it as a verb is valid but rarely seen in today's English. To me, the sentence "I am in a class to perfect my French" seems arrogant because it implies that my French is already very good.
I agree with you about praise versus regimentation. My parents never really praised or chided me and my sister. If we did something wrong, they treated it as a learning opportunity. If you washed the dishes badly, it was probably because you just need to learn how to wash dishes better. If you hit somebody, it was probably because you need to learn why hitting other kids isn’t necessarily the best way to resolve an argument.
So in a way I was raised to believe that praise and encouragement for their own sake are basically useless—real critique should give you a simple, concrete handhold by which to improve yourself. We also had a lot of freedom to make our own mistakes, though my parents were always there if we needed them.
And that isn’t at all how school works. I wasn’t very “successful” in school, because I was depressed by the dishonesty of getting good grades without any real effort. All the way through college, I wanted challenges, but there simply weren’t any to be had. So I had to find my own and motivate myself to learn and improve, or else I would have killed myself.
So, sure, I got some bad grades, failed a couple of classes, and dropped out of college. But it was just because I’m the kind of person who’s better off working on real challenges. The “real world” didn’t break me down—it saved my life.
>Statistically, most students in American colleges achieve low marks, fail a lot of classes, or drop out entirely. I suspect these students still encounter daunting obstacles in the real world.
Very good point. Perhaps my point then becomes more about how the top ~30% of students are treated, rather than all of them.
I could understand the French system where no-one gets a top grade in courses outside of engineering, mathematics, and the sciences where problems may be less well defined but if say I'm given 20 math problems on a test and I get all of them right why would that not give me 100%? Do the French just make their tests impossible to solve at some point or do they grade more finely on things such as approach, technique, etc (e.g. in comp sci where your program may be correct in terms of output put you may be downgraded depending on how well your code is written) ?
Well I think he made a bit of an exaggeration here. Up until the end of high school it's perfectly possible to get good grades in all courses.
However after high school, in the "classes préparatoires" it is perfectly normal for everyone (including the best pupils who aced their exams and all) to get extremely low grades (like 4/20) repeatedly because the notation system changes from there: instead of gaining points when giving the right answer, you lose points for every wrong one, and it's extremely easy to make 15 or 20 minor errors on a 4 hours math assignment or philosophy dissertation.
This is however, precisely done to "toughen up" students and make them master perfectly the courses in and out, and it works wonders (for those who can get through).
Unfortunately this state of mind is rapidly losing ground in France too, and people more and more consider they are some sorts of "customers" "buying" a form of "education service" from schools, and that therefore if the children doesn't fare well it's the professor's fault, or the school's, or the ministry, or everyone else's but theirs or their stupid brats'.
> ... because the notation system changes from there: instead of gaining points when giving the right answer,
> you lose points for every wrong one ...
This is not a general rule, where I was it was still "positive scoring" (get points for what you solve). But I agree with the rest: the notation gets much harsher and it's a way to toughen up previously top of the class students who were used to have a rather easy time before.
The regular oral tests ("colles") are also part of that...
I don't know about France, but in The Netherlands where we have a similar system in my opinion it is just quite hard to get all questions on a test right.
Even the smartest most hard working kids do not often get every single question right. Ofcourse if the math test is just solving 20 similar equations then the smart kids will easily solve them all and get a 10/10, but a math test is never solving 20 equations.
Do kids that get an A(+) in the states have the correct answer with the correct explanation (deriviation) for every question?
If so it could be they've just studied harder, culture can do funny things.
It is grammatically correct in English to say, "I'm taking classes to perfect my English." It is more common to say, "I'm taking classes to improve my English." To me, in English, saying that you are doing something to perfect a skill implies the belief of attaining near perfection. It's much stronger than saying that your goal is to improve. However, saying you are doing something to improve a skill sort of implies a lack of total commitment. It give the impression of an almost hobby aspect to the skill.
I've heard "trying to perfect my _____" in common usage (western United States) quite a bit, usually with respect to specific narrow goals. It often has to do with cooking (perfecting a recipe), athletics (perfecting a maneuver), or games (perfecting a sequence of moves). The common thread is that there's a very specific problem with an attainable or near-attainable optimum.
In contrast, "trying to improve my ________" seems to be used more with respect to general and broad goals. People speak of improving their marriage, improving their language proficiency, improving their work-related skills, and so on.
A fellow who I believe had been a dean at Virginia Tech wrote a book on his experiences. He said that the English "His work is quite sound, actually" might well be higher praise than the American "His work sets the standards to which we all aspire". So I don't think it's purely a linguistic thing.
It's also interesting that "his work is sound" is an absolute measure; regardless of anyone else's work, his work is internally consistent and one of quality. "His work is a standard we should aspire to" is a relative measure, that might be that of a Rhodes scholar or simply the best of a bad bunch.
In French, we also often use the verb "to perfect" ("se parfaire") to mean "improve"; for instance, "I'm taking classes to perfect my English". I don't believe I've ever encountered that construction in English (if it is grammatically correct, then it is infinitely rarer)
It is, but in English "to perfect" has connotations of finality. I.e., "he perfected his technique" meaning it couldn't get any possibly better than it is. It's rare because perfection is rare.
"To improve" means that there is room for growth, which from what you say is implied by the French use of se parfaire.
In American universities, if you routinely got 12 out of 20 as your final mark you would be put on academic probation and risk not being admitted next term. Also, I don't know what classes you are taking, but acing mathematical or hard science classes in an American university is certainly no cakewalk.
You might enjoy reading "Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience" by Raymonde Carroll. She was born French and married an American, which triggered her interest in this topic. And she has a professional eye to these things as both her and her husband are ethnologist ;) But this is not a scholar book. There's a chapter on children education.
And also one on friendship and how it differs on both side --- which if more widely known would have cut down on the hysteria during the second Iraq war (freedom fries and all this hoopla). But then, media like the hysteria.
I would just like to point out one issue with these discrepancies in grading.
In this exceedingly global economy, where one might want to apply for college or grad school in a foreign country, this type of "grading gap" can severely limit ones chances.
If the institution to which you are applying is not fully aware of your regional grading tradition, being "toughened up" with a hard earned B or C average, could block you from being accepted at your preferred Universities.
That's because "education" as we know it is bullshit.
Instead of finding a talent and teaching you to do something useful it teaches you to do nothing useful for ten years.
More so, it benchmarks your ability to do nothing useful and (in some systems) tries to decide whether to let you to finally learn to do something useful or not.
I suggest sidestep this and go straight into programming (writing, drawing, whatevering).
Call this Minimal Viable Education.
The problem is that most people today don't understand what an education is supposed to accomplish.
The vast majority of Americans believe that an education should ultimately end with a marketable skill, and as a result students are dissuaded from paths of study that do not end with a directly marketable skill (art school, liberal arts, music school). In a minimally viable education the pressure to not study these things goes away however there is no incentive to produce a student with marketable job skills. I think this is okay because school should have never been about job training.
An education should prepare you for job training and job training should teach you a marketable skill. This is not a new concept; guilds, apprenticeships, and trade schools have existed for centuries. What is necessary is to de-stigmatize these paths in the modern age and divorce the concept of education from that of job training.
The problem is too many people who think they know what "the problem" is.
But I do agree with you on the second and third paragraphs.
Like when somebody asks you "but what will I do with quadratic equations later in life?". No, you semi-evolved simian, you don't need to solve quadratic equations later in life, you need a brain that has jumped the hurdle of learning quadratic equations later in life.
"you need a brain that has jumped the hurdle of learning"
Thanks but no thanks.
I just don't feel that 16 years of doing useless things are a good investment.
You can learn to do something useful and still develop your precious brain. Learn to play an instrument! Write some code! Build something with your hands! Learn to write.
Because guess what, around us there are a lot of people who can't write. Even on hacker news people use "its" and "it's" interchangeably these days. If we'll descend to the regular facebook users - they can't write, they can't speak. They did however end their school with some grades, so they pretend to having learned quadratic equations. And your "education" pretends they did.
Why is that? Did quadratic education help them? Did it? If so, why they can't write and can't reason? Did it?
This is bullshit. You are here selling us a product that does not work. Moreover, I guess you built some of your self-esteem on it working. Too bad.
Everything I learned in school and can't remember today is useless.
There goes most of history, math (I do remember some math but most of the school math is pointless), language & literature (I like reading, I just never liked the selection), physical education and lots of other subjects.
It's not that they aren't interesting per se, it's that school ruins them for you. By reading wikipedia for half an hour I understand more than from a month of a subject in school.
I could have better use for the time spent on this.
Your second example is practice--think of it as training the ALU in your brain.
In the first example, learning those trig relations is useful later for doing calculus and other things. You may forget them over time, but to have never been exposed to them would be a loss.
The answer that "Well, I can just Wikipedia them later!" assumes that you know what to look for later. This turns you from being a thinking person into a glorified cache for the internet. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
What if I don't want to train any TLAs?
The problem with trig relations is that school math makes a whole lot of grindingly huge excercises out of them; and then grade you by your ability to do the mental clownade.
I'm so not into this.
If you like reading, is it worthless for the authors who will write the books that you will read to have studied history, language and literature?
Or in other words, do you use/consume stuff that are the product of what you can't remember from school? And if so, does that make [edit] the knowledge behind them less useless?
No.
I know my native language pretty fine. I never liked literature they reach in schools. I don't remember anything from the history course in school, it was boring. I mean, they just can't make it interesting. Because it's not their (textbook authors) priority. So it tends to bore to death.
Everything I know about history is either from books I read by myself or from wikipedia/internet.
Why study for 16 years to be "prepared for job training"?
I think that most people of reason will significantly reduce or outright drop this part of "education", if not pushed hard towards it by the old and inefficient system.
One of a key tenants of the parenting style my wife and I use (positive discipline) is that you encourage and do not praise. The difference is subtle, but it focuses on the action and not the person. For example, when one of our kids do well in school, we don't say "you're so smart!". Rather, we say "you worked hard for that, good job! keep it up!". When a child fails, we say "I understand you feel bad. What do you think you could have done better?"
The problem with many Americans, and wealthy people more generally, is that they're spoiled rotten to the extent that they are brainwashed into believing that how much monopoly money they take home and how much respect a bunch of other spoiled rotten people give them indicate success or failure in life.
Meanwhile people are starving and dying in wars all over the world. There's no such thing as success or failure in a wealthy country. It's all meaningless. There are just a bunch of people who are well taken care of and given an addictive, stressful game to play so they don't rock the boat.
there's no such thing as " failure in a wealthy country." sorry what planet are you on - there are plenty of people who fall though the gaps in the USA and the UK.
Unless you think the homeless guy I see sleeping behind the pret a manger in holbourn is some kind of success story
> Except in video games. In video games greatness is inevitable.
The underlying assumption here is incorrect, that is, that greatness involves saving the world in some epic way. I, however, see greatness in one who sacrifices himself for another, no matter how small the task. From the stay-at-home mom who spends most of her time caring for a small child to Captain Kirk's father who sacrificed himself for the whole ship (newest ST movie), there is greatness to be found in all of them, and one is not necessarily greater than the other, for they both involve elevating the other's interests above your own.
His assumption is that the only greatness worth achieving is in the video game world, the kind where some hero goes off to save the world.
My assertion is that the best kind of greatness is the one where a man sacrifices in some way for another, leading to the other's betterment/rescue/etc.
So, in this sense, one could save the world very selfishly and that would be a diminished greatness compared to a son who takes a leave of absence from work to care for his dying father.
no, he is saying that video games give him the simple pleasure of watching stats go up as he performs repetitive tasks. He derives pleasure from simple, yet ultimately hollow achievements because that is the type of praise he was raised on.
Yes this is what I'm alluding to. No offense meant at the parent comment, whose worldview I respect...I'm just saying that what you disagree with the OP on is not a mistaken assumption, but a different frame of reference...
A good, fee-paying, school for girls in the UK runs "failure week" to let girls know that risk is good; failure will happen; and that you need to be able to work through it.
Praise effort and work, not just good outcomes, is something that has been mentioned on HN a few times before. What I think would be good (although I welcome correction from anyone with better knowledge of education) is letting bright students help teach slower students. This isn't just for the less able students. Teaching other people strengthens your own skills. You don't have bright bored students causing trouble. You have a teacher more able to help students that need it. Maybe it already happens? I dunno. I went to a school that had pretty heavy streaming.
This is how America ruins it's best children. I know the story so well, I only had to read the title, though I did skim the article to be sure.
Children need to be given goals and challenged, not constantly told they are good enough. Children need to be shown a path to improvement, not reassurance on their accomplishments.
There's a reason Americans fascinated by movies about hard loving teachers who are proud but never satisfied with their students, like in the Karate Kid or Dead Poets' Society (dating myself there.) Unfortunately we can't bring ourselves to actually challenge our children and sacrifice their short term glee for long term fulfillment.
While in jr. high and high school I helped my father with his business. I saw all the same 'U R SPESHUL' crap dumped on kids and laughed it off. In the working world you have to 'pass' or you may not have cash for dinner. Failures are very common in the real world. You may not make the big sale you were expecting. The company you work for may go out of business. All kinds of things go wrong, raising your children to be resilient is more important then shooting for success. This also means you have to allow your kids to suffer the consequences of their failures too. You don't want them to get hurt, but if you save them from themselves every time, you've taught them that mommy/daddy will bail them out whenever they need it.
They provide the illusion of power or change in your life, but nothing really change outside of your game. Nothing improve other than your stats.
So instead of just playing game, I also make them. With making video games, I learn all sort of thing applicable to programming and real life. The game I am working on will enlighten players with a simulation of infantry combat. (suppressive fire, maneuvering, covers, spacing, etc)
Surprisingly, not everybody seeks change and accomplishment with every moment. An escape can be nice. Also, "Nothing improve other than your stats" ... maybe you are thinking only of WoW-type games that reward time spent playing more than anything else.
No, not at all. A game is an environment in which you actually do things and generate some sort of result, however artificial. Everything you listed is inherently passive--you just observe it happen in front of you, no action from you is really necessary.
Cant agree more! I have always hated video games but this game called Braid caught my attention. Being highly addicted to this puzzler, i finished it in a week and i remember what i felt. I felt like a genius, like i did which no one could, but my brother, he finished before me. Video games can make you feel like someone but as soon as you get beaten in your game, the dirty old feeling will be back.
>I want to become the adult I believed I could be. I want video games to become something that helps me change instead of giving me a place to hide
This is a growing and misguided sentiment. Being absorbed in and obsessed with video games is the problem, not the content of the games! If you want to grow up you need to collide with the real world. No game is going to become the driver of adulthood. The answer here is to subtract games from your life and go live in the world. Unfortunately there is an "art game" movement indulging in delusions that the right kind of game can rise above the level of crass entertainment and "nourish" the player. This is garbage. You can imbibe the most clever and interest art in the world, but only living in the real world can teach you about the real world. Even education is dangerously "gamified". The difference there is that the world is rigged with many favors for educated people, so you don't have much choice.
I'm normally opposed to using this concept on HN, but the real world sucks when you're a teen.
It's pointless, small, chances that you don't have access to the good parts but there are quite a few bad parts to stumble upon.
I don't see why teen won't want to avoid real world.
When you get out of school into college, that's the time to emerge.
I posted this as a reply to the article itself, but I feel I should post it here as well, in case it just gets buried there.
To me, the OP's post is clearly a cry for help, guidance, a "wtf do I do next?"
Been there.. You know what you need to do? Treat life itself like a video game. Win. Stop what you're doing right now. Think really hard about what winning would be for YOU. Write that down on a piece of paper. Done? Good.. now figure out how to get there.
I, too, had a great affection, possibly obsession, with video games at a similar point in my life. I had these grand ideas for video games that I'd like to play, but didn't exist yet. So, I started figuring out what it would take to make them. Now, roughly 6 years later, I'm not in game development, but I am building complex web applications and doing a lot of very interesting things. And, you know what? I'm happy.
You have the drive. Make happiness happen. Don't wait for it to come to you.
OK, I love the tide of unbridled machismo -- here's a little secret: No one is special, but one of the precious gifts we get from our parents or guardians is unconditional love. And given the harsh reality of our situation: that we live in a world which is indifferent to our survival, that it will only briefly remember any of our accomplishments, that we are more likely to go on forever struggling with our own mediocrity, we are deserving of that love and it is invaluable. It is something that (as far as we know), our species creates that is unique. And if it chokes us a little bit and if it stunts our growth, then that is acceptable bargain for the brief memories of peace and happiness that it will create for us, which we can carry with us on our long journey to the grave.
I believe the problem is in the way we make "special", or "intelligent", or any one of countless others, an actual part of a person's identity. I'd like to get away from describing the individual and instead concentrate on their specific achievements. It may not make us feel very good about ourselves, but it's a great deal more precise, and it focuses on reality rather than cherry-picked descriptors to encapsulate a "character".
Every time I read an 'about' section of a personal site and see something along the lines of "I'm a blogger, a technology geek, a cyclist, a photographer, and a serial dabbler" I wrinkle my nose a little because it seems like they're writing the person they want to be, rather than focusing on what they have to show for it.
Where I grew up, no accomplishment was good enough. It took a while before the amnesia of age set in, and I began to forget the pervasive pointlessness of effort that I was supposed to have absorbed. But one lesson coming out of this experience I did not forget. I was determined never to start a family. I succeeded.
Take home story? For me it's don't tell people (children) they're special when they're not. Love and cherish sure, praise hard work (as mentioned here) definitely, but random "you're great!!" nope. Oh, and maybe work harder and don't play computer games ;)
I think that his problem is that he has always sought external validation. He wanted the world to affirm his greatness. This isn't likely to happen. The occupational world is interested only in treating one as a fungible resource. The world doesn't really care about many individuals, and they probably won't make an effort to validate them unless they do something remarkable.
Instead of trying to asses his merit through artificial criteria or measurements, he should strive for internal validation. He should find what makes him feel good, and pursue it. This is distinct from what brings him pleasure. Pursuing only pleasure had, in his case, turned out poorly. Moreover, I think that strict hedonism isn't congruous with the human condition: everyone needs aspirations and accomplishments.
On the education system: yeah, it's a mess. The chief problem is its inefficiency. I recall statistic stating that 70% of knowledge learned in school is lost throughout one's lifetime, and that only 3% is actively applied in one's day-to-day life or occupation. I'm not sure about the veracity of this, but I think that, regardless of the actual numbers, it's a fairly intuitive conclusion that the education system is a travesty.
This is derived from the increasing specificity as one ascends our various educational institutions. The foundational information: basic arithmetic, introductory english skills, ect. are applicable to almost all careers and lifestyles. Then, as science and history are thrown in and math becomes more complex, the content begins to lose its applicability. Then, at the secondary level, the information becomes so esoteric as to practically useless to everyone. Calculus is used in an incredibly small number of occupations, and could safely be relegated to the collegiate level. And yet, it is arguable the centerpiece of the education system.
The same could be said about lab science.
English, on the other hand, is a pivotal educational domain that is pertinent to one's success throughout school, but focuses on the wrong things. The various structures and constructs of english are emphasized, while the application is marginalized. If anything, the former belies the true nature of language: to communicate effectively. And yet, so little actual communication is done throughout schools as to be laughable. I recall never being given more than 1-2 essays per semester throughout middle and early high school. It's illogical to impress the specifics of the english language on students without compelling them to use those specifics. This is why I love my current english course: it focuses almost exclusively on argumentative analysis and writing.
The issue is not that these academic domains are unto themselves valueless or that they should not be taught. On the contrary, I find most of my courses to be incredibly edifying, and that even superfluous information has innate value. However, the function of the education system is not to instill knowledge for knowledge's sake, but to produce capable individuals prepared for the real world.
What's wrong with those numbers? 30% lifetime efficiency is not bad, it is within an order of magnitude of perfect, and it doesn't iterate and get worse for the wear. And not everything you learn needs to relate to employment. There is also civic and social life.
The function of the education system is not to promote one's social life, but to aid in their career, so career applicability is the best measure. I'd also wager that trade programs and apprenticeships yield a far higher retention rate and are more pertinent to one's career.
There is a difference between feeling "special" and being loved and I think that most Americanized (mine are not American but are def Americanized) is that they think they making us feel special equates to having us feel love.
This is not true.
You can have your cake and eat it too. You can demand effort and at the same time make the other person feel loved at the same time. This does not mean that they will always feel that way...or that you will be really good at doing that from day one, but I am pretty certain that you can do it. It is very expensive however, as in it will take a lot of time and effort.
My previous gf definitely felt loved by her parents and she was there in the architecture until 5 am night after night working like a dog, striving for perfection.
If she did not achieve, she would look forward to improving herself.
My parents on the other hand, specifically my dad, tried to tell us we were the most handsome, smartest, funniest of the bunch. This was of course not true, and even though I was the smartest for a long time throughout my childhood, it came to bite me in the ass because I never learned anything that didn't come easily to me (thankfully a whole bunch of things did come easily, but still I missed out on so much more.)
My mom is not as Americanized, but she had this tendency to tell us that we had to be the best, but didn't know how to communicate and tell us about all the hard work and how it is imperative that you be the worst before you become the best. You need to fail to get going.
1 year of Wellbutrin later, mediocre grades in high school and college, and now in my introduction to the workforce it is still hard to overcome a lot of the habits that this conditioning had on me.
I know I have to stick with it, I know I have to suck, I know I have to keep going, but it is hard to do so no matter how aware of the problem I am.
Fortunately, I am pretty happy with my life right now, which used to not be the case, and I am way more accepting of the fact that yes, I will suck. I'm a little worried as to how I will feel a few years from now, but really I don't care all that much. I no longer want to be a Zuckerberg, or a Steve Jobs, rather I just want to be happy and make people feel loved while making enough at the point where happiness becomes asymptotic.
I also want to be really good at something, but I think I've overcome my needs to be the best, or more precisely, the most recognized. This is doable. My work still sucks. It's going to be a lot of work to be excellent, but fortunately, forgetting about the recognition is great.
I wish myself luck. I forgive myself for having been so stupid when I was young. I forgive my parents for having been bad coaches and I try to correct them when they still tell me I'm special and the best (which is becoming a lot harder for them to do...haha). And that's it. The slate is clean! Let's get moving!
I'm really disappointed to see someone addicted to video games and unable to prioritize being used as this proselytizing platform in the comments here.
Exactly the opposite of my experience. My father never praised us. Ever. My mother rarely did. We were routinely punished for anything less than perfection: homework, grades, even washing the dishes (Do them again! Not clean enough!)
And yet they must have been doing something else so subtly that none of us ever noticed. Everything about the way they treated us led each of us to believe that we could accomplish anything, as long as we worked hard enough and didn't expect anything given to us. We were special but not entitled.
I sometimes felt angry about how we were treated until one day I realized that they made a great parental sacrifice, exchanging their own popularity for our potential.
There both gone now and I think about them every day. Even more so after posts like this one. Thank you, OP.