THIS is what no one told you about becoming successful: what you attempt to do might be twice as important as what you accomplish. And that is not an aphorism I just concocted.You might be familiar with the 70-20-10 rule: it summarises the fact that 70 per cent of our learning and development takes place on the job or through real life experiences; 20 per cent through relationships such as mentoring and coaching, and a mere 10 per cent through classes or other traditional learning mediums.Note: This, by the way, is a pretty neat yardstick to assess the effectiveness of your development plan. Note it down somewhere!Take this quiz: Miscommunication in office? What you might not be aware of is the growing body of knowledge that suggests that real growth and learning occurs when we are at the edge of our comfort zone. Morgan McCall, who has been at the heart of this research, uses this charming allegory to illustrate the point in his book, High Flyers: The Next Generation Of Leaders: A frog fell into a deep rut in a dirt road not far from his pond. Wagons had passed along this road in the deep mud left by heavy rain, leaving a now hardened and cavernous -- to a frog -- rut that this particular frog was unable to hop out of.
After numerous tries and several creative efforts, the frog gave up and sat in the rut, exhausted. After a while the frog's friends and family became worried and began to search for it. Eventually they heard its weakened croaks and, peering over the lip of the rut, saw the frog huddled sadly at the bottom. All of their creativity and efforts to help proved futile, and eventually, being frogs, they abandoned the frog to its fate.The next day, the friends and family awakened to a hearty croaking, only to find their trapped companion jumping happily across the lily pads. "We thought that you were trapped in a rut and couldn't get out," they said with surprise. "I was, and I couldn't," replied the frog. "Until a wagon came along and I had to."Like the frog, we tend to learn best when we are ill-prepared for the challenge at hand, when figuring it out is the only alternative, and the consequences of not doing so affect us significantly.
Recently, for a training programme I was developing, I interviewed professionals to understand what had most spurred their learning and career success. One respondent, a senior knowledge worker, observed that she often didn't realise it, but most things she learnt came about because she had put herself out there for a task which was completely new to her. It was, she noted, 'almost like courting failure '.In an economy where the 'what' of knowledge changes almost quarterly and your most distinguishing competency is your ability to learn on the go, this is powerful information. Learning doesn't take place in the comfort of your armchair, in the safety of your cozy den.And success happens even less for those who keep themselves cloistered and protected. Growth is a direct byproduct of going out there and seeking tasks that seem out of your reach and ability, by just a little.
Identifying and going after the right challenges and assignments is just one part of the puzzle. The mind set you approach these with is equally important.While Morgan McCall and his associates have been working to unravel the lessons we can learn from our experiences (and often don't), another set of researchers headed by Carol S Dweck has discovered surprising relationships between how we think about our own intelligence and its consequences for our future success.Take two kids. Anik is a smart kid with a high IQ. He has always done well at school and is repeatedly told by his parents how smart he is. Anik believes he is intelligent, and that this intelligence is inherent, a characteristic he possesses.
Now when Anik faces tasks, he evaluates them to see how they reflect on his 'intelligence' and gradually begins to stay away from challenges which might reflect badly on his stellar record. Prakshit, on the other hand, might not have the outstanding IQ score that Anik does, but is constantly appreciated for his hard work and effort.Prakshit believes that his intelligence is malleable and he can learn anything he sets his mind to by working at it. Consequently, he goes after progressively tougher challenges.So which one is more likely to be more successful in the long run? You got it, the kid who is driven by the urge to learn and doesn’t worry about failure and how it might reflect on him or her. Dweck calls this the learning or mastery orientation, as opposed to the performance orientation (Po Bronson has a written a great article on this, How Not to Talk to Your Kids, and I strongly urge those of you who have children to read it).Isn’t this intuitive? After all, extraordinary success mandates out of the ordinary risk taking, and a certain disregard for "Oh, what will they say if I fall flat on my face!"This doesn't mean you should go around volunteering to climb Mount Everest. It does mean you should go after opportunities that stretch your capabilities, even if that means being a little scared that you have bitten off more than you can chew.Ultimately, the secret to growing in your job or whatever it is that you want to get better at, might have been best summarised by a quote attributed to the late American President Theodore Roosevelt: "Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, certainly I can! Then get busy and find out how to do it."
Original Source : moneycontrol.com
