Conscientiousness leads to success

I liked the writeup for the book How Children Succeed on Amazon. Some of the other information around "conscientiousness" in the wikipedia and yahoo articles contradicts some of my experience. For instance, the supervisor I had was a very neat writer, polite to those in authority, but rather dull mentally and lazy. Lazy is not part of conscientiousness, but some external factors such as "well dressed" too often don't align with true conscientiousness.

Personally, I believe conscientiousness is very important for real success.

I think discipline is important, as well as other executive functions like "a good plan".

Novelty or creativity too are helpful. Sometimes that spritely dresser lacks real creativity and the flexibility of thought that allows one to follow a line of reasoning out to logical conclusions.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People talks about the success literature of over 100 years ago had character as the bedrock of success. In more recent times, "the cult of personality", "looking good", "don't air your dirty laundry", and "by any means necessary" have trumped character, much to the detriment of society and organizations.

What's the difference between conscientiousness and intrinsic motivation?

I think I like the word "grit" better.

Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual’s passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective. This perseverance of effort promotes the overcoming of obstacles or challenges that lie within a gritty individual’s path to accomplishment and serves as a driving force in achievement realization. (Definition from Wikipedia)

http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_key_to_success_grit

"Only" seems such a strong word. Working conscientiously is of little help if you're doing the wrong thing.

Of course, the sentence "The only major personality trait that consistently leads to success is conscientiousness" is probably technically correct, because most successful behaviours don't qualify as "personality traits" -- they're learned strategies and habits.

The danger behind such statements is that a lot of people, including many teachers, will oversimplify to "only conscientiousness matters", which isn't the original argument at all, and is completely untrue. It results in student blaming -- "you aren't working hard enough" -- instead of focusing on the efficiency of the learning tasks/learning path.

Now I'm not saying that's your point at all, but it's a caveat that needs to be added...

Another important thing to note about intrinsic motivation is that it isn't always an individual thing -- in fact, I would say that it's wrong if it is.

The human brain evolved specifically to learn, and to keep learning. Learning is the purest and most powerful forms of mental stimulation available, so is therefore inherently fun, and intrinsically motivating. What is not fun is not learning.

Motivation at its basest level is the awareness of a future reward that results in enjoyable feelings. If we enjoy the learning experience, we are motivated to continue.

This is logical, yet it is diametrically opposed to the current orthodoxy in teaching:
Orthodoxy: if they are motivated, they will learn; if they are not, they won't.
Logic: if they are learning they will be motivated; if they are not, they won't.

An unmotivated student is therefore a sign that the materials used are presenting an obstacle to learning, preventing learning, therefore preventing the enjoyment that motivates the student to continue.

I would argue that it's not the process "of learning" that you don't enjoy, it's the process of education, because sadly there's a fair amount of education that is devoid of learning. Learning is the integration of new information into meaningful structures, and when you try to learn in the absence of suitable structure, the brain can't do it, and becomes frustrated. It is difficult, slow and unenjoyable.

The three most important experiences in my education were being in my dad's high school class, the Michel Thomas Spanish course, and studying English language with the Open University.

My dad taught based on the principles of Ausubel, the three principal ideas being:

• to stimulate analogous known information as a framework for understanding novel information. He called this a "comparative organiser", and it can be interpreted in modern learning psychology in terms of schemata -- his idea is essentially that activating the existing schema in the learner's mind makes it easier for the learner to connect the information with the schema
• start with a simple overview of the point to learn, then get progressively more complex -- progressive differentiation
• always reintegrate new knowledge with old after a reasonable period, in particular knowledge that may be confused -- integrative reconciliation.

These may seem trivial points, but they're not generally adhered to. Who tells a story about a seemingly unrelated topic before launching into their lesson? Most go straight to the target point. Look at the introduction to a chapter in a learning book, and more often than not, it won't be comprehensible until after you've finished the chapter, because in order to be "correct", the author includes far too much detail. And finally, particularly in language, courses often overcompartmentalise different components of the material, never really working them together. Sure, you may have the odd exercise on "chose between ser and estar in the following sentences", but it's very common for a course book to have you following the mechanical steps of a producing a particular language feature without ever really having to choose which language feature to use.

The Michel Thomas Spanish course adhered fairly well to Ausubel's principles. By telling us that "waiting for" is actually "awaiting", he was using a comparative organiser. I had noticed this myself in high school French, and I was one of the few in the class who never said "attendre pour", so obviously it's an effective technique -- why don't all teachers do it? He introduced "ser" with no mention of the ser/estar distinction, but that wasn't a problem, because he never gave the student the opportunity to be confused, and stuck instead with situations that were pretty unambiguously "ser". He only introduced the complexity as it was required -- progressive differentiation.

Moreover, when he did introduce "estar", as I recall it, he didn't launch immediately into focusing on the difference, instead moving to unambiguous "estar" situations before returning to deal with the two -- integrative reconciliation.

But leaving that to one side, MT was just a pleasure to do, and as near effortless as I have ever encountered. A large part of the effectiveness of it was simply in the variety of language produced. And I mean "produced", because unlike other courses, I never felt like I was parroting a phrase with a simple substitution. Every sentence I produced was the result of structured learning rather than simple memorisation.

Finally (chronologically), the Open University English language course. This was a distance course (en_us: correspondence course) and the vast bulk of the material was in the form of books. Part of the material was on the composition and structure of information, and it was written by world-renowned experts in the field. It should be unsurprising that reading through the material felt almost like drinking pure information by the gallon. Every trick, tip and technique for the effective transference of information was applied, leading to something that really was a joy to learn. A resource may have all the information you need, but if it can't transfer that information to you, then you've got to go through a frustrating process of decoding the information before you can start to learn it.

Is the Pope a Catholic? (Nice English idiom for our foreign readers.... )

Agree. "Is the Pope Catholic?" is a variant, also nice for our foreign readers...