Train Yourself to Succeed-These 3 Things Matter Most
Written By Bill Murphy Jr. – Executive editor of operations, Some Spider, and founder, ProGhostwriters.com
Henry Ford once famously said: “Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.”
It’s a pithy quote (Ford was a quote machine), but now, just over 70 years after his death, a new research project funded by the National Science Foundation points to a wealth of evidence that backs him up. The NSF-funded project involved 12 psychologists and other PhDs from universities and think tanks around the country, who reviewed reports on a total of 61 other experimental studies on college students and success. Across the board, the report found, there were three main factors that foretold greater achievement across disciplines and regardless of factors like the students’ test scores or socioeconomic status.
The factors included:
1. Developing a sense of belonging.
This first factor has to do with the degree to which students believe they “belong in college, fit in well, and are socially integrated,” according to a summary that quoted one of the study’s co-authors, Fred Oswald, a professor of psychology at Rice University. Of the 61 studies involved, more than 50 found that simply feeling like they belonged in school had a positive impact on students’ grades.
2. Enabling a “growth mindset.”
Regular readers of this column will know that we’re all about the growth mindset. Embracing the belief that intelligence is not a fixed attribute–that it can be strengthened through use, like a muscle–had a firm impact on students’ success. Of the 61 studies, 75 percent found that embracing a growth mindset improved students’ GPAs.
3. Having articulable personal goals and values.
Finally, 83 percent of the studies–by my math, that makes either 50 or 51–found that students who embraced “personal goals and values that they perceived to be directly linked to the achievement of a future, desired end” were more likely to succeed. Again, this was measured mostly by comparing the students’ GPAs.
