How one sentence of praise taught children to lie

A psychologist named Carol Dweck once ran a study with a group of fifth graders that MJ DeMarco returns to as proof of something most people get quietly wrong about talent. The children were given ten easy problems from a nonverbal IQ test. Afterward, each child received one of two kinds of praise: some were told, you must be smart, others were told, you must have worked really hard. That single sentence changed everything that came next.

Given the choice between another easy test or a harder, more interesting one, sixty-seven percent of the children praised for being smart chose the easy test again, while ninety-two percent of the children praised for effort chose the challenging one. When Dweck's team later gave both groups a deliberately impossible test, the intelligence-praised children gave up faster and grew visibly frustrated, while the effort-praised group stuck with it longer. And when everyone was finally given a final test as easy as the first one, the intelligence-praised group's scores dropped by twenty percent, while the effort-praised group's scores rose by thirty. In a detail DeMarco finds especially telling, some of the smart children later lied about their scores rather than admit they hadn't done as well.

DeMarco calls the trap underneath this the special scam: the belief that talent is either a gift you were given or a fixed limit you were born with, and that in either case, effort becomes optional. He points to Josh Waitzkin, a chess prodigy whose life was later dramatized in the film Finding Bobby Fischer, as a real example of how dangerous the label special can be, even to someone genuinely gifted. Waitzkin has said that the most important thing that ever happened to him was losing his first national chess championship, because the loss forced him to confront the fragile trap of being called a prodigy. He went on to become a world champion in martial arts he didn't even start studying until he was twenty-one.

DeMarco's alternative is what he calls the Kaizen Principle: small, daily improvement aimed at your own progress, judged against your past self rather than against strangers, with praise reserved for effort and process rather than for talent itself.

Start by paying attention to the praise you give yourself and the people around you, and shift it deliberately from talent language toward effort language, saying you worked hard on that instead of you're so smart. Pick one skill you've quietly written off as fixed, something you've told yourself you were simply never good at, and set a small daily practice for it rather than waiting to feel naturally talented. The next time you fail at something, ask what it teaches you before you ask what it says about you, since that single change in question changes how quickly you recover. And when you catch yourself measuring your progress against someone else's highlight reel, redirect the comparison back to where you were a month ago, because that's the only comparison that actually tells you anything useful.