Due to how much success we’ve experienced and the praise that often comes with it, many of us have the tendency to associate our self-worth with that success and praise. We confuse innate value with our skills or jobs or good looks. Instead of being “Luke who happens to write and has good test-taking skills,” in my mind, I become “Luke the writer and the test-taker.” The operative identity has switched from a person to a skill, from an unchanging essence that endows you with worth and value and purpose to an arbitrary set of skills you ironically have very little control over.
At school, this often exhibits itself as a paralyzing fear of low grades. We become the kings and queens of the “Type A” personality. We try to control that and many other aspects of our lives as if our very identities depended upon it. Part of us really does believe that if we were to lose that skill or attribute, we would somehow lose the very core of our essence. A failed test is not just an F, it’s a big “Failure” written all over the transcript of your life, a trauma we feel justified to revisit years after the actual impact of the low grade.
When we operate with this exhausting fear for failure, this constant need to perform, we live in what Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mindset.” In a fixed mindset, natural traits can’t be developed or grown. You have a given amount of brains or talent that defines how you are going to do in life. As a result, you constantly have to prove your worth. It’s not enough to become —you have to be, right now.
As Maria Popova writes, “striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled.” Our approach to our studies shifts from an emphasis on learning and growth towards mindless, exhausting sprints to avoid failure or low grades. What could be a fruitful four years of genuine growth descends into seemingly endless grunt work and to-do lists. We read because we’ll have to write a paper on it or take an exam on it. We try to see how many books we can get through before class instead of slowing down to see if a book can get through to us. A precept goes from being an engaging conversation to yet another area where we might say the wrong thing and look dumb. The activities we take part in are largely the same, but conflating ourselves with our grades and skills — adopting a fixed mentality — renders our time an entirely different experience.
Other students display a less stressful, but equally tragic, expression of the fixed mentality upon getting to Princeton: they choose to check out. They rationalize this by concluding that if you don’t try, then the failure to succeed won’t reflect poorly on you. If you don’t put forth effort you can say you would have succeeded, but that you’ve been investing your efforts elsewhere. More often than not this “elsewhere” amounts to little more than what Jack Bryan referred to mockingly as his “FIFA and napping skills” in his Opinion column. They don’t fail in their endeavors, but that’s because they never really had any ambitions at all. It’s a safety mechanism for the same identity crisis the “Type A” perfectionists experience.
I came into Princeton very confident about my writing skills, but freshman year I received a lot of unsatisfactory marks on my essays. Unfortunately, I didn’t absorb the criticism. Upon receiving an essay back from a professor, I would immediately flip to the back page looking for a letter grade. If I received anything below an A-minus I wouldn’t even read the comments. I assumed that if a professor had a problem with my work then it was due to some inherent bias or personal beef with my argument. It got so bad that I started writing all my papers the night before they were due so that I could always either blame the teacher or the fact that I had written the entire paper in one night.
I wasn’t really interested in learning or growing. What I really wanted was a pat on the back and affirmation that I was all I thought of myself — effortlessly brilliant. I missed out on a lot of valuable criticism, humbling, and eventual improvement because of it. Now I keep every essay I get back and look over the comments several times a month, making sure I’m making progress on my various weaknesses. What I should have done was to not worry about what sort of writer I was, but to look towards the writer I wanted to become.
Real learning can happen when we stop worrying how we are perceived, when we stop worrying so much about how we are performing right now, and when we begin to invest our effort into becoming the people we want to be after graduation. Then we can begin to view “failures” not as evidence of being damned to a life of unintelligence and mediocrity but as, Dweck writes, “a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities…”
Luke Gamble is an English major from Eagle, Idaho. He can be reached at ljgamble@princeton.edu.Read More
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