Aug 26 / Simcha

On Spanx and Letting Your Kids Fail

spanxEntrepreneur Sara Blakely transformed $5,000 in savings into a $500 million dollar-a-year company called Spanx, and in so doing revolutionized women’s undergarments in the process. She had never taken a business class in her life, and had never worked in the fashion or retail industries.

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Aug 10 / Simcha

Encouragement vs Praise

“Encourage the deed [or effort], not the doer.”  — Rudolf Dreikurs, psychiatrist/educator, (1897-1972)

Research by Carol Dweck, Ph.D. a professor at Columbia University (now at Stanford), reinforced the notion that too much praise is, in fact, not always good for children.  For over ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work — a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders — found that children praised for being smart or talented when they accomplished various tasks tended to choose easier tasks in the future.

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