Motivation Matters More Than Ever
Ideas of the Year 2013
AMANDA RIPLEYJUN 19 2013, 10:05 PM ET
It used to be enough to go to college, pick up a few skills,
and ease onto a career track. But now that information is updated hourly and is
available to anyone, anywhere, everyone must keep learning. And one thing we
know about learning is that you can’t do it if you aren’t motivated.
But if you are motivated, how the opportunities abound! You
can learn JavaScript on Codeacademy .com for free. After that, you can bid on
the 256 JavaScript projects posted on Freelancer.com. Once you’ve paid your
rent, you can fund a short film on Kickstarter, which now distributes more
money annually than the National Endowment for the Arts.
As the barriers to entry are getting lower, though, the bar
for performance is ratcheting up. If you finish that JavaScript project late,
future employers will read about it in your reviews. At a new public research
university opening in Florida, professors won’t get tenure—they’ll get
renewable contracts based on performance. Work is getting easier to audition
for but harder to keep.
Motivation is a battery pack of skills, from passion to
perseverance to self-control. Statistically speaking, boys and low-income kids
have less of it. But a little-known fact about motivation is that it can be
taught. It’s not harder to teach than reading, and it’s probably more
important.
Stanford’s Carol Dweck has found that teaching kids that
their brains are muscles and get stronger with use significantly boosts
perseverance. Meanwhile, training children not only to set a goal, but to
devise a plan for overcoming specific, inevitable obstacles to that goal,
increases self-control, according to research by the University of
Pennsylvania’s Angela Lee Duckworth. These lessons should be the new ABCs:
taught from a very young age, repeated often, and made impossible to forget.
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