Hamlet and the Power of Beliefs to Shape Reality

Hamlet and the Power of Beliefs to Shape Reality
by Maria Konnikova

Excerpts are taken from  the full article on ScientificAmerican. Click the link below to view the entire article...

... beliefs and construals can actually alter our reality. ... As an example, take intelligence, something that many people believe to be a genetically predetermined entity. ...
 
... If you are an incremental theorist, you believe that intelligence is fluid. If you work harder, learn more, apply yourself better, you will become smarter. If, on the other hand, you are an entity theorist, you believe that intelligence is fixed. Try as you might, you will remain as smart (or not) as you were before. ... how someone performs, especially in reacting to failure, largely depends on which of the two beliefs he espouses. An incremental theorist sees failure as a learning opportunity; an entity theorist, as a frustrating personal shortcoming that cannot be remedied. ...
 
...At the end, I keep coming back to Hamlet, ..., “Why then ’tis none for you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” To Hamlet, Denmark is a prison; to his companions, it is no more so than the world at large. How they see it affects how it is—not inherently good or bad, but good or bad as perceived through their own frame of mind...: our world is what we perceive it to be, and our place in it, how we imagine it.

​If we think of ourselves as able to learn, learn we will—and if we think we are doomed to fail, we doom ourselves ...  To view full article CLICK HERE

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Maria Konnikova is a writer living in New York City, where she works on an assortment of non-fiction and fiction. Her first book, MASTERMIND (Viking, 2013), was a New York Times bestseller. She previously wrote the popular psychology blog Artful Choice on Big Think. Her writing has appeared in publications that include The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, Salon, and The New Republic, among many others. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she studied psychology, creative writing, and government, and received her PhD in Psychology from Columbia University. Most mornings, Maria can be found in a yoga studio. Most afternoons, she can be found writing, reading, or conducting definitive explorations into the workings of the human mind. 

Follow Maria on Twitter @mkonnikova 
Website: www.MariaKonnikova.com ​

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