application. I would be very grateful if you could give me some feedback along those lines.”
Nobody scoffs at an honest plea for helpful feedback. Several days later, he called her
back and offered her admission. It had indeed been a close call and, after reconsidering her
application, the department decided they could take one more person that year. Plus, they liked
her initiative.
She had reached out for information that would allow her to learn from experience and
improve in the future. It turned out in this case that she didn’t have to improve her application.
She got to plunge right into learning in her new graduate program.
Plans That You’ll Carry Out and Ones That You Won’t
The key part of our applicant’s reaction was her call to the school to get more
information. It wasn’t easy. Every day people plan to do difficult things, but they don’t do them.
They think, “I’ll do it tomorrow,” and they swear to themselves that they’ll follow through the
next day. Research by Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues shows that vowing, even intense
vowing, is often useless. The next day comes and the next day goes.
What works is making a vivid, concrete plan: “Tomorrow during my break, I’ll get a cup
of tea, close the door to my office, and call the graduate school.” Or, in another case: “On
Wednesday morning, right after I get up and brush my teeth, I’ll sit at my desk and start writing
my report.” Or: “Tonight, right after the dinner dishes are done, I’ll sit down with my wife in the
living room and have that discussion. I’ll say to her, ‘Dear, I’d like to talk about something that I
think will make us happier.’ ”
Think of something you need to do, something you want to learn, or a problem you have
to confront. What is it? Now make a concrete plan. When will you follow through on your plan?
Where will you do it? How will you do it? Think about it in vivid detail.
These concrete plans—plans you can visualize—about when, where, and how you are
going to do something lead to really high levels of follow-through, which, of course, ups the
chances of success.
So the idea is not only to make a growth-mindset plan, but also to visualize, in a concrete
way, how you’re going to carry it out.
Feeling Bad, But Doing Good
Let’s go back a few paragraphs to when you were rejected by the graduate school.
Suppose your attempt to make yourself feel better had failed. You could still have taken the
growth-mindset step. You can feel miserable and still reach out for information that will help you
improve.
Sometimes after I have a setback, I go through the process of talking to myself about
what it means and how I plan to deal with it. Everything seems fine—until I sleep on it. In my
sleep, I have dream after dream of loss, failure, or rejection, depending on what happened. Once
when I’d experienced a loss, I went to sleep and had the following dreams: My hair fell out, my
teeth fell out, I had a baby and it died, and so on. Another time when I felt rejected, my dreams
generated countless rejection experiences—real and imagined. In each instance, the incident
triggered a theme, and my too-active imagination gathered up all the variations on the theme to
place before me. When I woke up, I felt as though I’d been through the wars.
It would be nice if this didn’t happen, but it’s irrelevant. It might be easier to mobilize for
action if I felt better, but it doesn’t matter. The plan is the plan. Remember the depressed
students with the growth mindset? The worse they felt, the more they did the constructive thing.
The less they felt like it, the more they made themselves do it.
The critical thing is to make a concrete, growth-oriented plan, and to stick to it.
wang
(Wang)
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