We have read many success stories of all the talented and motivated people but are they the only ones who are talented and motivated to achieve what they wish to? When we observe our skills, talent, and intelligence as a fixed entity, failure and success appear to be the result if we efficiently possess this entity or not. Moreover, this makes us more fragile to quit when we face any challenges because of the belief that it’s not easy to overcome the first time and we do not possess the ability to when we try for the first time.

To simplify, the entity approach of learning refrains one from learning real things. If we wish to benefit from our unavoidable flaws and shortcomings in our path to success, we will need to develop an approach that is incremental to learning.

When we teach this incremental approach to our kids, they start recognizing the ability to understand any concepts or skills, as long as they put in all the hard work. The major distinction between the two processes of learning was revealed in research where kids were asked to solve math problems. All the kids solved the given problems correctly and moved on to the next round where they got much tougher problems that they could not solve.

However, kids with an incremental approach felt challenged on excited while the children with an entity approached were very discouraged.

Later in the final round, the kids got to solve easy problems yet again. All the kids with the incremental approach solved it whereas kids with the entity approach suffered from low self-esteem after the second round and were unable to complete the given problem which they could have solved easily in the second round.