I loved being a child. My childhood was full of people telling me that I was smart, that I was so perfect in my schoolwork, the one that others mothers pointed to as examples for their children to look up to and learn from, the one that children teased because I was the teacher’s pet (a role I enjoyed assuming because it had its benefits). I was the Headgirl, and I was always the one to whom the General Proficiency prize (for being good in every subject) was awarded to every year. While my down-to-earth parents had raised me grounded (kudos to them!), the people who knew me had destined me for greatness; she will do something in life, they said. I was the prima donna of my world, the one to whom all roles and privileges were entrusted because I was that smart and that good at everything.
Until I wasn’t. Until I approached eighth grade and hit a roadblock in my forever tussle with Math. My numerary nemesis: whenever I opened my book, it squared off against me, fangs bared, ready to fog my brain and cloud my thinking. Math was not intuitive for me, the way English was. Language flowed off my tongue; sentences formed themselves effortlessly at the tip of my pen. But Math? Every equation was a dense forest of trees where no light filtered through.
You are smart; you can do this, was the common refrain, both voiced and unvoiced. But how, I wanted to ask. Where do I start? All I could think of was that if I was so smart, why couldn’t I figure it out as easily as I did my other subjects? When I had to work at it, with little assurance of outcomes, I felt my brain shutting down. I envied that boy in my class who explored the subject with curiosity, with the failure rate of a scientist. I, on the other hand, needed to know exactly how to do it before I actually did it. I couldn’t get out of my own way. Rather, my image of myself, the one that others had painted for me in my childhood, wouldn’t let me even try to figure out Math concepts by myself. Because if I failed in the figuring out, that personal image would crumble on itself, like a house of cards.
I pushed through high school Math with the help of my teachers, hunkering down and powering through, achieving enough to get through exams and make it to Stanford, but I didn’t enjoy a moment I spent on the subject. College was both a liberation and a revelation. First, the liberation: on one hand, I didn’t have to do more than a basic Math class to fulfill my general education requirements. I was free of Math forever, or so I thought.
But then came the revelation: it wasn’t just Math that was an uphill trek. As subjects graduated to the college level versions of themselves, I realized I had to put in more work than I ever had before. Classes were at a fast clip, the reading was voluminous, and worst of all, I was now competing with thousands of versions of myself – high school valedictorians, cream of the crop. Even my command over English, my ally, my all-weather friend, wasn’t enough to wade through the morass of central thesis driven academic essay construction skills that Humanities classes required me to possess. I distinctly remember one illuminating visit to office hours with my TA (a Russian Literature PhD candidate from Moscow whose accent I had a hard time following) that cemented my understanding of college level expectations of thesis-driven arguments in academic work. It was a steep learning curve that I hadn’t expected; nothing in my Indian education had prepared me for it.
It was at Stanford that I faced the first (and only) ‘C’ I had ever received in my life. I had done well, or so I thought, but I hadn’t factored in the fact that college classes are often graded on a curve. It isn’t about how well you do; it’s about how well others do, and how you measure up to them. Obviously, I didn’t measure up adequately that semester. My parents were frothing at the mouth with worry: How can you get a C, beta? What happened? They were needlessly needling me; I was even more distraught than they could imagine. After all, my image of myself was at stake. It was time to buckle up. So I summoned all the battalions of my mind and recovered my grades and my college journey, graduating with a respectably good GPA, a double major, and an Honors certification, followed by a Masters. I was smart, after all; I had to prove it to myself once again.
My fiercely guarded perception of myself as smart (constantly fueled by the compliments of other people) was like a Jenga tower. It stood triumphant only as long as every piece of it, every action I took, supported that idea. I didn’t feel comfortable treading paths where excelling wasn’t a certainty or a very real possibility. Paths that led to outcomes in which I would look bad, in which I wouldn’t live up to the greatness that others had prescribed for me. Any stray loose block – any jibe or threat, real or imagined – and my carefully and precariously constructed Jenga tower would topple, before other’s eyes, and my own.
So here’s what I’ve learned through years of reflection, observation and experimentation, distilled for your benefit. The pursuit of perfection, the quest for greatness in everything I do that is ingrained in me from childhood, is paralyzing. It prevents me from taking a deep dive into a subject I don’t understand, from failing as much as I should if I’m truly pursuing learning intensely, for learning’s sake. It prevents me from getting tangled in the weeds without knowing how to free myself. It often prevents me from even getting started because nothing I can do in the physical world would be as good as I have imagined it in my head.
Stanford Professor Carol Dweck encapsulated this beautifully in her research and in her book Mindset. Most of us grew up with fixed mindsets: believing we were either innately intelligent or not, accepting failure as the limit of our abilities, thinking that there are things we are good at and things that best us, that we are not a match for. What we need to inculcate more of, to lead a meaningful and fulfilling life, is a growth mindset: believing that effort can change our outcomes, that there are no limits to what we can learn or be good at, and that intelligence is not bestowed by nature, but can be cultivated. Her succinct characterizations of growth mindset and fixed mindset helped me define what I had long seen shadows of in my life and determine how I wanted to raise my children.
That’s why I rarely tell my intelligent son that he is so smart. That’s why I shushed his grandmother when she observed him practicing his letter writing and said, Concentrate; it should be done perfectly, beta. I appreciated the care with which she was helping him finish his page of Bs, the same care she had demonstrated when I was younger. But I no longer think that it’s perfection that should be aspired to, or lauded. It’s the effort he puts in to complete his page that should be complimented, that he should learn to savour. Because it’s the pleasure of putting in effort, without working towards a fixed and limiting outcome, that will ignite the fire in his belly to learn, that will carry him on its shoulders through the arduous stretches of life’s treks, that will allow him to dip his toes into unknown quicksand without feeling like it will swallow him whole.
Instead, I remember to tell him, “I can see how much effort you’re putting into this. You must be so proud of how much you’ve learned.”
Most of the time, he nods and says, “Yes, Mamma, I am.”
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