Praise for effort, not smart

This article is quite insightful. Here is a quick excerpt.

“When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes."....They’d chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

"Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control, They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

[...t]hose who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

[...p]raised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and students’ “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.”

[...r]esearch on overpraised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes their primary concern—they are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. A raft of very alarming studies illustrate this.

To some degree I was a 'victim' of being overpraised: I was always told being the smartest kid in the school up to high school, by my parents and relatives. Fortunately my parents always pushed me to work hard at the same time. Yet I can still trace some of my behavioral patterns -- like putting up a good image, staying away from something I think I am not good at it -- back to it. But by and large, my philosophy on success leans toward effort and luck, not innate abilities.