Learning to be Helpless

Learning to be Helpless

"People can learn to be helpless, too, but not everyone reacts to setbacks this way. I wondered : why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are not more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer I soon discovered, lay in people’s beliefs about why they have failed" (Carol S. Dwek, Scientific American Mind- November 28,2007).

I believe this passage is one of the most important because it points out that people are able to learn how to be helpless. Also it points out that when we tell ourselves that we will fail, most likely, we will fail. So, in a way the author is telling us we have the ability to decide if we are intelligent or not.