Star Power
Slate has a piece about praise, in response the Wall Street Journal column and the New York magazine article. The discussion goes further into what happens when people are stereotyped, prejudged or categorized before being in a position to perform (such as checking the race or sex box on a standardized test, then taking the test).
This is totally why I flub guitar hero if someone says something nice like, “Wow, I didn’t know you were this good.”
I can be rocking out, frilly parts and all, then miss a simple slide because there’s a little part of my brain that’s going, “oh crap/thrill/joy/pride/relaxed effort/but i don’t want to mess up now/am i really good? DOH!”
I don’t think I’m putting in less effort when I’m told I’m doing well, but maybe I am. That’s frustrating. What happens in that moment, aside from being embarrassed by messing up and feeling like my esteem went down?
Mockery, spite, disbelief, and discouragement have been the best incentives to any form of personal achievement, and are the venom upon which I’ve been nursed. It’s even the top reason why I became a front-end programmer. Crazy, but completely true. I’d like to think that my impulses aren’t so cartoonishly affected by reverse-psychology anymore. Duck season. Wabbit season!
One night in college, I was throwing darts with some pretty competitive guys who played for money in a regular Sunday night “luck of the draw” game. After months of watching from the sidelines I felt comfortable enough to actually play doubles cricket (oh, i was a very different person then) and one very assholish guy heckled me with snide remarks that got increasingly worse until he was just mocking me loudly whenever I even went near the board.
Finally, I was up. Me and my partner were in an extremely close battle with the other team, fighting over bullseye, not just to close out bull but to make points. The jerk sat on a barstool within my line of sight sipping his beer, in between me and the dart board. I don’t even remember what he said anymore, but I do remember responding with a cock-sure attitude that, at the time, seemed to come out of nowhere.
I stopped and pointed my body, and my dart, at his face.
“You! Shut up!”
Turning back to the board, I nailed the double-bull, winning the game with the throw in one of those magic moments. Clearly, aiming is 90% Jedi mind trick, and 10% practice. Good dart. Oh yeah.
Thank you, jerk at the bar, for bringing out the Hellman’s.
Course, say something nice and you’ll jinx me. I resisted doing things I loved (and was told I was good at) for years out of fear of sucking. I kept doing things (photography) because I’d been associated with them so solidly I didn’t notice that I wasn’t that good (not that I didn’t practice, love it, and teach others who were much better, lucky for them).
I delight in doing things I have no business being good at, because I feel a sense of privacy and ownership when I’m discouraged. It seems that there’s a flip-side to praise, the thrill of being an underdog, of flying in the face of conventional wisdom, advice, or judgment in general. I have only myself to blame, and explains why then, as now, I still feel I do better in general when I don’t ask for input (with rare exception).
So how can we take what we know about this social phenomenon and not let ourselves be undermined by whatever performance anxiety we feel? Why can certain kinds of well-intended encouragement pop our big red balloon? How much does it relate to fear of disappointing others, and how much we want to rub our success in the face of jerky naysayers, especially if the jerky naysayer is a significant other or parent, as is often the case. It’s those very close to us who don’t want us to change, but really do want us to reaffirm what they think we are, and how that relates to themselves.
Usually I feel so much more comfortable when I’m working if I speak to no one, or if I speak about it in detail only to friends who aren’t close friends but “niche” friends (compatriots who share one or two important things in common but don’t know you intimately). Ironically, this is also the type of person who I can play guitar hero with in cooperative mode, and not mess up.
Sometimes I need to feel “gotten” so badly, and it’s not so much praise I need, as a feeling of understanding, not so much encouragement, as the feeling of a thing’s potential, plausibility, that if I can see something, I can make someone else see it, but not before I myself have it clear. Praise too soon, or not yet earned has the effect of trying to describe a dream. The thing itself fades away before any disambiguation is achieved, the attempt makes you sound and feel lame, stammering. It fails to impress even in the effort, and the effort (perhaps most unfortunately) feels worthless. Jinx. Poof. And effort, the most important part of the equation, gets undermined.
Don’t get me wrong, I love rocking out on guitar hero and stuff, it’s just that I know my X8 streak will end the second someone calls attention to it. It’s not their fault, and it’s not unappreciated. I think that it’s just, regarding this thing, I’m in the mediocre middle that the Slate article mentions. I’m not the super great expert player, who plays cool and calm, guitar stance and all. I know I have star power, but it’s not a substitution for the true skill of the great ones.
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