You’re probably very aware that these days
educational merit tends to be given great weight. It has become an accepted
truth that people can only be successful in life and business if they have a
university degree, and it must now be from a top educational establishment as
well, not from just any old college.
Frankly, there’s a great deal of snobbery
and misinformation around this issue. It is true that education is important; I
would never deny that, but we have lost our way a bit and we are also in danger
of neglecting those talented people who don’t have university educations and
still have something valuable to contribute to society.
Stanford University research
It’s somewhat ironic that the evidence I’m
going to use comes from one of the USA’s top universities; Stanford in Palo
Alto. A psychologist called Carol
Dweck, whose life mission is to study attitude, has recently produced a study
that reveals your attitude to life and other things is a much better indicator
of potential success than your IQ.
Fixed or flexible?
Carol discovered that most of us have one
of two mindsets that we operate from: we are either a fixed mindset person or
we have a growth mindset. Which one do you think is most likely to lead to
business success?
Let’s see: if you have a fixed mindset, you
“believe you are who you are and you cannot change.”
The issue with this is that when the person
is presented with any new ideas and work challenges, they tend to believe they
can’t handle the ‘new stuff’ and so feel overwhelmed. They get that “rabbit in
the headlights’ look!!
The ‘growth mindset’ person believes they
can “improve with effort.” This person can outperform a fixed mindset person
even if they have a lower IQ measurement.
Why? Well, because they believe they can learn and grow.
They embrace
change and treat new things as an exciting adventure. They are the person who
says: I’ve never used social media but I’m willing to learn and they go to
classes and spend hours researching techniques until they have created a whole
new skillset for themselves that they can now use to find work. They didn’t
need to go to Stanford, Harvard or any other university to do that.
Breaking through boundaries
You would think that people who know they
are smart have more confidence than the people that society has labelled
‘stupid’ simply because they don’t have qualifications on paper. And to a large
extent that’s true.
Indeed, many of these people are over-confident. However,
the Stanford research showed that many of these confident people only reaped
the benefits of this feeling as long as the going is easy for them. If they
can’t go beyond their comfort zone and break through the boundaries, they face
problems with progressing. Growth mindset people tend to welcome setback; they
see them as opportunities.
Embrace failure
Ultimately, Carol Dweck says that how you
deal with failure is a huge determinant in your success. The growth mindset
person looks at a ‘failure’ and says, “This didn’t work, how can I solve the
problem?” The fixed mindset person tends to label things ‘failures’ and not
look for ways to improve.
So, you see; your attitude can carry you
through challenges more effectively than your IQ. And that’s why you’ll discover that a lot of
entrepreneurs didn’t go to university; they were too busy launching their big
business idea!