Why are the kids performing?
Posted on February 21st, 2009 in Vision
A peculiar idea caught me and I’m getting puzzled at this:
The story
There are 2 students in my story, say Alex and Cole. Alex is in class 6 and is a young boy, whereas Cole is a grown up girl, studying at Harvard Business School. Alex is coming 1st in class since last 6 yrs and so is Cole.
My confusion: What makes these students perform?
Few of my friends told that there can be lot of factors behind them. Focus, Passion, Dedication and Motivation, Capabilities and Internal resources, Power to assimilate and Produce,etc.
As my thinking lens has limits in I need readers to help me broaden my vision and share their perspectives. So I’m opening a 2-way dialogue now. I’d appreciate your comments.
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This post has 3 comments
February 21st, 2009
Most of the personality traits that you mention are definitely important in the performance, however I think the environment plays a role as important.
It is the classic Nature vs Nurture problem that puzzles psychologists. Which one is more important, our genetics or our circumstances?
In the recent book ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell, he argues that opportunities may knock the doors of many, only a few are prepared to seize the most value of them.
Many environmental factors such as educational nourishing, art or sport skills, demographics and even your country of origin! (Factors such as proneness to question authority, willingness for hard work or tolerance to provocation are typically different in different cultures)
I would suggest not to leave out environmental factors from your interesting analysis.
Good luck!
February 21st, 2009
Damn man, I was about to suggest you the same thing, read ‘Outliers’, its an amazing book.
It explains some very weird observations. He found out the reasoning that the reason why inner city black kids perform lower than inner city white kids is because the black kids were spending more time unlearning their stuff, than white kids.
The latter were studying a lot of stuff even when they were not at school, and that was making the white kids perform better than black kids.
I ordered that book on the day it was released, and ended up reading it in 12 hours, couldn’t keep it down it was so gripping.
February 22nd, 2009
@Renegade:
Could you solve the problem with respect to the changing image?
Could you also identify the role of other factors than environmental factors?
Everything cannot go right in environment for 6 yrs..There should be something more..I’ll come to an interesting point in next post where I may explore other patterns than mentioned above