I’ve read this article in The New Yorker three times now. The fascinating (at least to me) premise is that self-control may be a more important factor in success than raw intelligence.
Basically, Stanford psychologist Walter Micshel set up an experiment in 1968 to study will power, putting kids in a room with a marshmallow and telling them that they could eat that one now or get two if they waiting until he returned ten minutes later. Those who stared at the marshmallow were unable to hold out, while those who distracted themselves (covering their eyes, singing a song, twirling their hair) left it alone. As adults, the latter group’s ability to resist tempting desires in service of working or achieving higher goals correlated with greater professional success and happiness.
The best part: Even though they’ve shown that self-control is genetically determined to an extent, mental tricks that strengthen patience and focus (on the right things) can be taught and practiced.
My underlines:
- “We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.” —Mischel
- Psychologists had spent decades searching for traits that exist independently of circumstance, but what if personality can’t be separated from context? (interactionism)
- “I marvelled at how they gradually learned how to delay and how that made so many other things possible.” —Mischel
- Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attenion.”
-Their desire wasn’t defeated - it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.” [So I guess shouldn’t visualize the glass of wine I’m going to reward myself with at the end of a writing assignment.] In adults, this skill is often referred to as metacognition, or thinking about thinking [I do plenty of that already!], and it’s what allows people to outsmart their shortcomings. [What if thinking too much is your shortcoming?]
- …people learn how to use their mind just as they learn how to use a computer: through trial and error.
- “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.” —Mischel
- …[self-control is] an ability to direct the spotlight of attention so that our decisions aren’t determined by the wrong thoughts.
- …we’re teaching ourselves how to think so that we can outsmart our desires.
I obviously need to go back to school.
(Slight tangent: Also very cool that two of the psychologists involved found their passion in unpredictable ways, after teaching high school math [Angela Lee Duckworth] and studying poetry and art [Mischel]. People who have managed to live many lifetimes in one fascinate me… but that’s another story.)
In 2006, the world produced 161 “exabytes” of digital information - 3 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written. Next year, the world will produce 988 exabytes of data.
The Week, via the Columbia Journalism Review
…no wonder I have lost all ability to focus on one thing at a time. As the full article says, “Pick your metaphor: we’re drowning, buried, snowed under.” It’s making me crazy!
And a comment that reposts the forward of a book I read in college (Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death), which posits that the future of Brave New World is more likely than 1984:
As [Huxley] saw it, people will come to…adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Postman wrote that in 1985, referring to the proliferation of television. Frightening how prescient it was so long before we all started Twittering. I need to turn off my computer and reread both books.
