Hey folks
As you can probably guess by the title this post will be about Heidi Grant Halvorson's book 'Succeed'. (Or so I thought until it turned out my own experiences could become a prime example of why Grant Halvorson makes such a good point in her book). Succeed is one of the quickest and most useful reads (at least in the first third) I've read in the past few weeks (and if you're following my blog you'll know I've been reading a lot. This read at least 1 hour a day thing is working out well for me).
It's my fourth finished book in 2019. (Yes I'm just showing off with this statement.)
Anyway. I never thought I'd relate to someone who uses their children in examples as much as Grant Halvorson does. Seriously. There is something about them in almost every chapter post the one-third mark of the book. This doesn't so much offend me (no matter what that first line might sound like) as it actually intrigues me because this author (as opposed to other self-help book writers) brings almost as many day-to-day examples from her own life than just random laboratory situations into the book. That is enjoyable and reads a bit like a memoir rather than strictly aloof science.
I digress with the examples though. We want to get to the meat of the story.
Let's start with the most important message of the book: It is better to be someone who wants to learn and improve rather than someone who just wants to be good. Why? Because being good leaves you in a huge depression if at some point it gets so hard you're no longer incredibly good or find your work easy.
Case in point: WriteBot.
WriteBot has a history of finding things very easy and not challenging enough. WriteBot does... a little less than its best and still passes every test and project and problem with flying colours. Until it doesn't. And if it doesn't it gets depressed and can't work for months. Story of my life. You'd think a mechanical entity that lives only to write would do great at writing... and yet often there are problems not pre-configured in WriteBot's algorithms. These make WriteBot insanely unhappy when they cannot be solved as near-instantly as all other problems.
A lot of these effects (depression or feeling unmotivated or like a failure) come from what Grant Halvorson calls 'be-good' goals - which are essentially there to allow you to show off. In fact this 'be-good' mindset is a concept she talks about a lot - you have a certain skillset and you're good and you strive to show everyone how good you are. This works when you're trying to hit deadlines maybe or when you want quick results. Any results in these cases is often better than none. Not so in other areas of life/work.
Grant Halvorson then goes on to reinforce (for me) what I've learned after I realized being-good (her label for the kind of thinking described above) just didn't work. The only way to continue after you're somewhat successful and want to reach that HUNDRED MILE ALL IMPORTANT GOAL is to change your mindset to a learning mindset. This, Grant Halvorson calls getting-better mindset, as opposed to the be-good show off mindset mentioned above.
The rest of the book basically builds on those two concepts. There are optimists who often rush rush rush through tasks and do them well but maybe not excellent (be-good mindset). They won't put much thought into what they are doing because they believe they will succeed either way. And on the other side of the spectrum you have pessimists. The ones who think of everything that could go wrong and work much more conservatively. Those are often the people who take their time and try to get-better at things.
Of course it's not that simple. There are other factors to take into consideration as well but this post is simply an overview of the most important point in the book.
That being said... I do recommend you read it. It's short. It's written in an easy-to-understand way (while still being backed by scientific data of Grant Halvorson's and her colleagues' experiments) and the first third in which she explains why be-good can sometimes have disadvantages to getting-better goals is really worth it. The last two thirds are somewhat vague and perhaps a bit rushed for the pages they are given but all in all the book has given me some good information with which to work on my own goal setting skills. I hope it might do the same for you!
Have a good night/day!
WriteBot.
PS: tomorrow I'ma make Kimchi. I'm hyped.
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