I think another important piece of advice would be to stop telling kids how brilliant they are, and that if they work hard they’ll be successful. That is the worst kind of indoctrinating and will plague us for the rest of our lives.
It leads us to want to always appear brilliant in public, and to only try at things we’ll succeed at. It makes us fear failure because we’ll end up looking dumb or not as smart as the people who did succeed. It encourages a type of competition amongst our peers, and not just academically.
Parents always praise their children for how smart and intelligent they are, and while it may seem like an innocent, benign thing, it prevents us from wanting to develop more. It makes us believe that we are “naturally smart” (which is BS that doesn’t exist) and that there is only one way to be intelligent.
And then we see those who are smarter than us as threats instead of educators, which is the most detrimental part.
