3 Self Defeating Attitudes Smart Kids Learn In School

School is where we spend the early years of our lives and learn crucial initial lessons.

When certain behaviours or mindsets bring you success, they are naturally reinforced into your neural pathways. Those ideas will become part of you, of who you are.

This is especially true if you learned those lessons at a young age, and they continued being valid for a period as long as 12 years.

Those kids who objectively excel by getting good grades – have probably internalized those concepts more than anyone.

Perhaps you were one of them. I was.

Either way, it’s likely you have internalized some attitudes from the current school system.

But life isn’t school.

While useful for achieving success in an academic environment, some lessons you got in school can be limiting and counterproductive for the rest of your life.

They’re worth examining.

NOTE: I was struggling to find a word to call adult who used to be the “smart kids” in school, and have deeply internalized school ideas and attitudes. I couldn’t find a word, so I called them “Schoolheads”. I don’t love it, but that’s what it is.

They overestimate understanding

Schoolheads love the idea of understanding the world, and who can blame them?

Back in the day, once you understood something well enough, you knew you could write the essay or pass the test. In school – understanding meant success.

Schoolheads apply the same mentality to the rest of their life – if they have a problem or challenge, they need to understand it first. So they research it, get some perspective around it, and eventually build a mental model around it.

Interestingly – many times – this is where they stop.

Once they feel they understand the problem, their interest drops. This can be quite absurd at times.

For example, it would be the overweight person who reads about weight loss, understands he was eating too many processed foods and had to have less calories in his diet, and then… Proceeds to do NOTHING.

See, understanding is rewarding in and of itself.

Schoolheads learned to live in the mental world of ideas and concepts. To them, wrapping your head around the problem is the biggest step. It’s also the most fun.

Taking action seems either like a hassle, a small detail, or even just irrelevant – because now they KNOW what they have to do.

They truly believe that having a strong mental model is 90% of the solution. But in life, execution is everything.

They overestimate understanding and underestimate action.

 

They Always Need to Prepare More

If the most important goal in school is to get good grades, the most important moments are exams.

Students are told, for example, that a math exam will happen the following Thursday.

They’re told what they will be tested on, and are expected to prepare. Their performance will be rated based on their answers.

Schoolheads take that attitude into life. To them, every challenge is an exam.

This implies a few things.

To perform well at an exam, you better be prepared for any question you might be asked.

Schoolheads learned the importance of preparation. They want to cover all the bases by having a plan of action for whatever situation arises.

In all fairness, this kind of reasoning works well for logical planning. If you’re a programmer, architect or engineer, you should keep planning until you cover every option. A good plan will determine the success of a project.

But outside of the cosy world of logic, certainty becomes an impossibility.

When you add the notoriously unpredictable human element, when emotional and social conditions will determine your results, plans are not nearly as useful.

And so, how Schoolheads deal with challenges can be downright comical at times.

I’ve seen guys prepare for months to approach a woman and say “hi”.

In order to feel ready, they had to be certain they knew all the ways in which an interaction could unfold.

And of course, they could never be certain enough.

Furthermore, the more they prepared, the more burdened they became by various mental concepts, eventualities and potential problems. Human interactions can seem utterly terrifying when thought of this way.

The same is true for business. I’ve seen guys prepare for years to start a business by reading books, going to seminars and “working on themselves” – But they could never get enough of a sense of certainty to move ahead.

Bottom line – while it’s smart go into a new situation with a plan, trying to prepare for all eventualities is a losing battle.

There’s another subtle yet important difference between exams and life challenges. Exam dates are known. You use your time to learn all you can, show up and do your best.

However, in life, you have to decide WHEN to move outside of your comfort zone. And if you’re a Schoolhead – you might just keep preparing, waiting for an impossible sense of certainty, before you allow yourself to “be tested”.

Failure Confuses and Demoralizes Them

Schoolheads didn’t fail much academically. When they did – they used their minds to understood more, prepared better for the next exam – and improved their situation. They were not used to failing when they really try hard. I know I wasn’t.

School just doesn’t prepare people well for failure.

There is very little taught about emotional intelligence in schools. You’re never taught to “feel the fear and do it anyway”.

Instead, schoolheads experience upsetting emotional reactions as something that clouds the mind – their source of certainty.

Schoolheads deal with scary situations by just preparing forever, always seeing new ways in which they’re not yet ready to take the plunge.

Add to that the fact that many of them adopt the belief that they are “smart”. This usually causes them to have higher expectations of themselves. It also – at times – “things should come easy or it’s not for me”. They’ve had 12 years of things going their way, why shouldn’t the rest of life be the same?

You can see how that is a recipe for disaster.

First off, they delay taking action forever. When they do feel prepared, they go into it expecting easy, amazing results on day one.

Instead, this is what often happens…

When a schoolhead does take action and fails (as we all do) he or she goes into self-analysis mode.

Never mind that their brain was paralyzed by fear and that they held themselves to an incredibly high standard. Those are the things that never get analyzed.

Instead, self-analysis usually becomes analysis paralysis – pervasive recurring thought cycles that lead to nothing. This so-called “analysis” is nothing more than their judgmental mind beating them up about how stupid they were to not take the right action at the right time.

Analysis-paralysis can be so mentally and emotionally taxing that it saps them of motivation and hope for success.

And so, the “smart kids” in school grow up to be the adults that are paralyzed by risk-taking in an uncertain, upsetting world.

Conclusion

The 3 self-defeating attitudes above are common to a lot of people.

The solution is to learn a simple attitude. Let’s use the example of language learning – an area many people want to work on, and somehow always avoid taking action in.

(1) Act in the face of upsetting, uncomfortable emotions – People avoiding trying to talk their target language. Instead, talk with your teacher in nothing but the target language in the first lesson! You will face uncomfortable emotions – but it’s in a safe, controlled situation.

(2) Take small, consistent actions towards your goals – you don’t have to talk in the target language for too long. Choose something that would be uncomfortable but you can definitely handle. How about 10 minutes? Too long? How about 60 seconds? Do that over the course of a few lessons. Your confidence will change dramatically.

(3) Have realistic expectations of your performance – if this is a new language to you, you’re going to suck. You’ll mumble. You’ll blank. You wouldn’t understand what you’re being asked. How about if you expect to say one correct sentence? One correct word? Should be achievable.

And… (4) Celebrate little victories. Go buy yourself a burrito.

That’s all there is to it. Of course, reading it and understanding it is not the same as experiencing it and taking action on it.

But please, don’t limit yourself to what the school system made of you.

Life is so much more than school.