The Effort Effect

Why do some people achieve their potential while equally talented others don’t? Can old dogs ever learn new tricks? It’s all about EFFORT.

According to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, we’ll reach new heights if we learn to embrace the occasional tumble. Dweck says we can learn to adopt a growth mind-set about any ability – from athleticism to leadership to emotional intelligence – at any age, in any life stage.

“Just being aware of the growth mind-set, and studying it and writing about it, I feel compelled to live it and to benefit from it,” says Dweck, who took up piano as an adult and learned to speak Italian in her 50s. “These are things that adults are not supposed to be good at learning.”

A message to a 50+ y.o. dysfunctionally youth-obsessesed culture:

• YOU have become Old and Irrelevant.
• YOU have lost touch with reality due to an utterly failed historical memory.
• WE are Adapting and Learning.
• WE are coming for YOU.

We are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams. World-losers and world-forsakers, Upon whom the pale moon gleams; Yet we are the movers and shakers, Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties We build up the world’s great cities, And out of a fabulous story We fashion an empire’s glory: One man with a dream, at pleasure, Shall go forth and conquer a crown; And three with a new song’s measure Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing, And Babel itself with our mirth; And o’erthrew them with prophesying To the old of the new world’s worth; For each age is a dream that is dying, Or one that is coming to birth.

by Arthur O’Shaughnessy [1844-1881]