Excerpts from Dweck

Everyone hopes to never have their smarts questioned by others, but even more frightening is to have your smarts questioned by yourself.  So while many pretend to go from day to day with learning goals, they instead try to play it safe with only performance goals.  This is especially evident with many of the people I knew in high school.  They were more concerned about their GPA (performance goals) and getting into a good college that way than trying to challenge themselves with harder classes (learning goals) and consider that many colleges are now looking at the types and difficulty of classes that just GPA's when accepting new students.

And while I think that most parents want us as the younger generation to challenge ourselves as much as we possibly can (learning goals), they also want us to succeed in life.  They are much of the reason we as the next generation put so much pressure on ourselves to do well in life, to be the best that we can in everything we do.  And some of us believe that the only way to succeed is to take the easy way out and play it safe (performance goals).

It is evident in the excerpts that learning goals are really the only way to succeed in life, and yet everyone is held up on performance goals, held up on not looking stupid or "shown up".  So how can we as the next generation change this for the generation after us, and the generation after them?  Shouldn't we try and change society so that the pressures that we are facing with the "doing whatever necessary to get to the top" motto we live with now is gone by the time the next generation should be thinking about it?  Shouldn't we as the current generation be trying to make life easier and less complicated for our sons and daughters when the time comes?  Shouldn't we?