Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Looking for anti-woke books on parenting, preferably secular. How does raise children to not be woke? How does one teach them the gospel of success through hard work and mastery through practice? How does one handle the hypergamy question? How to balance tolerance with an appropriate level of caution around "inner-city youth"?
media which increases the positive valence of western culture at a young age (Little House on the Prarie), decreases positive valence of other cultures (old YouTube documentaries on foreign savagery), or makes fun of wokes (no idea where you’d find this, maybe there are some old cartoons out there )
This is not real and this is also not a gospel. Why would you want them to internalize the unhappiness-generating myth that their personal effort leads to success, by which you mean income? There is no study that shows this. It’s a mix of genetic factors (personality, IQ, beauty, height), social factors outside one’s immediate control (where one is raised, early peer group), social factors in one’s immediate influence but unrelated to effort per se (networking), and luck. The notion that “hard work” is a toggleable feature in humans which has a role in their success may be a useful glue to keep poor people quiet and make the wealthy feel even prouder, but it is the least proven of all the possible factors of socioeconomic success. Terence Tao is a funny example of this mythmaking. He obviously loves math, he was raised to love it, he has the genetic features for it (including a likely +1 Racial Trait), and has a social life which revolves around math that administers all the right social reinforcements. He will tell you to work hard, but when you actually look at what that means, it involves only working when he wants to, and not working when he is tired or unmotivated. It’s, like, an hour of hard work followed by a nap and a pleasant stroll. And you look at his interviews and he has no stress while working and clearly loves it. But of course, when a person loves his work and its accompanying frustrations he often calls it “hard work”, even when the whole thing was pleasant and a preferable experience (even gamers and climbers do this). And it is the socially-ascribed way of taking about one’s productivity. Similarly you can look at Magnus Carlsen: little toggleable effort that he pressed to succeed, it’s in his DNA, and when truly stressful “hard work” actually became required to win competitions he gave up competing.
I don't think you need a study to show this. Try:
And see how you compare to people who put the work in.
Or take the time to speak to someone who's worked at a test prep center - contrary to what you might hear in the IQ reductionist space, test prep works (or at least that is what I have been told by someone in the biz). Similarly, look at professional classical musicians or Olympians: they don't succeed without practicing a lot.
Certainly there might be exceptions (savants, people with unnatural size and strength, etc.) but for most people your odds of success improve via hard work.
Isn't it correct that Carlsen's father was a chess fan who introduced him to the game at 5 and he's been competing since he was 8?
I definitely think that something like innate talent or genius matters, particularly around the tails, but if you can choose to be a person with an internal locus of control who believes in hard work you should prefer this as long as you can temper it with the understanding that there is not a linear connection between hard work and success.
Deliberate practice is the necessary condition for success across domains, but there’s no compelling evidence that activating “hard work” (in contrast to simply work) is a key determinant in performance. When you squint at what an elite performer means by hard work, you don’t often see a level of stress or endurance or extra care which a normal person would intuit is meant when they hear that they must “work hard” or “put more effort in”. They do not typically sustain a state of willful effort and instead there are just other factors involved. Even with SAT test prep, there are social and genetic factors which inform a person’s ability to sit down and study for long hours which seems totally uncorrelated to any manifestation of stress or vigilance or care which characterizes “harder work”. Those with the ability can sit in place for six hours with little stress; those without cannot, despite how hard they attempt it. (Usain Bolt eating 1000 chicken McNuggets in the week leading up to his Olympic Gold, where he turned around mid-win to smile always sticks out in my mind as an example of this).
Okay. I'm not really sure we have any real difference of opinion here, since by "hard work" I don't necessarily mean "psychologically difficult." For instance, in my example above, Carlsen probably likes chess, people who shoot in rifle tournaments typically like shooting rifles, etc. But the truth remains that for lots of things (like, to use another one of my examples, test prep) people often don't like doing it, but they will be better off if they do.
I mean, I don't really know why the bar here is "elite performer." The OP said he wanted his kids to learn about achieving success through hard work. He didn't say "I want my kids to learn that through hard work they could achieve anything they want."
Usain Bolt is at an extreme tail and we shouldn't teach our kids to emulate him (at least not specifically, unless they also show extremely rare promise as athletes). I want my kids to be able to sit down and do test prep (even if they don't want to) to get a better grade than the one they could already have gotten. I don't particularly care if they are a world-class marathon runner.
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The contention is that:
are not actually factors under your control. In short you cannot "choose to be a person with an internal locus of control who believes in hard work". You are or you aren't, depending on genetics and early life and other stuff that you can't toggle on and off.
Not entirely sure this is true, I've veered both ways.
The OP is specifically asking for advice on how to influence someone's early life, so (in theory) even if it's entirely correct that 100% of one's ability to do hard work is unchosen, OP could still succeed at giving his kids the ability to do hard work.
I think, intuitively, that it is common sense that you can choose to work hard, at least to a limited degree. I think most people have the experience of buckling down on an important or time-sensitive project, and easing up or even slacking off when things are less urgent (or when there's less external pressure), even if there's still work to be done. And so if you conceptualize "working hard" as choosing to buckle down relatively more and ease up relatively less, I think it's hard to argue that you can't "choose to work hard."
The question of whether or not choosing to do that consistently pays off commensurate to the effort is a much more interesting one and I think sort of depends on your goals. But it seems fairly clear that below a certain threshold of hard work (failing to study at all, to show up to work, etc.) you will suffer. And I think above a certain threshold of hard work, you will probably suffer too (if for no other reason than you need to sleep!)
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