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Motivation Is a Bigger Advantage than Your IQ Score
Your IQ score may not be able to tell you much about how successful you will be, but these traits can.

The IQ test has been the most widely used tool for assessing intelligence and giftedness as well as predicting school and job performance. But is it really the best and most accurate way to gauge future achievement? Psychologists and educators have been looking in other directions to identify the qualities that give the biggest advantage in life.
The psychologist Howard Gardner was one of the first to point at the limitations of IQ tests. Back in 1983, he proposed in his seminal work Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences that intelligence has many modalities and IQ tests only measure two of them: the verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical. In addition to these, he introduced six more, amongst which the musical-rhythmic, interpersonal, naturalistic, and visual-spatial intelligence, later proposing other possible two - existential and moral intelligence.

Grit, a personality trait that encompasses the passion and motivation to pursue goals, is another candidate for better gauging future performance. It was popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth and her book Grit, in which she presents multiple studies of successful people showing that effort is twice as important as talent. She concludes that grit — the sustained application of effort towards a long-term goal — is the biggest predictor of life-long achievement. Not social intelligence, not good looks, and not IQ.
Tightly related to grit is the concept of “growth mindset” introduced by psychologist Carol Dweck in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. She explains that individuals have implicit beliefs about ability and where it comes from. Those who believe that ability, intelligence and talent are innate and cannot change over time have a “fixed mindset.” Those who believe that ability changes with learning, training, time and effort have a “growth mindset.”
At this point it should come as no surprise that children with a growth mindset perform better than those with a fixed mindset. Luckily, a mindset is something that can be changed, especially through tackling new challenges, overcoming failure and nurturing a love for learning.
Grit, effort, resilience, growth-mindset can all be grouped under an umbrella category labeled motivation. Researchers have actually questioned how much of an IQ score is representative of a person's level of motivation rather than intelligence.
A 2011 meta-analysis led by Angela Duckworth showed that monetary incentives can have a significant effect on IQ scores. Providing rewards of $10 and more to test takers resulted in additional 20 IQ points.
Psychologists Adele and Allen Gottfried have been studying motivation for years and have coined a term for those who exhibit exceptional effort and determination — “motivationally gifted.” Since the 1970s the Gottfrieds have been collecting data from 130 individuals participating in a four-decade long study of human development called The Fullerton Longitudinal Study (FLS). Amongst the many aspects the Gottfrieds studied was motivation and academic competence.
Yet again the results showed that kids who scored higher on measures of academic intrinsic motivation were more successful in school, university and their future careers. Moreover, these motivationally gifted individuals did not overlap with the intellectually gifted, those who scored more than 130 on IQ tests. “Teaching the desire to learn,” the Gottfrieds wrote in 2008, “may be as important as teaching academic skills.”
Ultimately, what the leading psychologist of our day are asking is - why are we so hung up on IQ scores? The reality is that we need new tools that can measure the different skills, mindsets and qualities that are instrumental to future achievement as well as new teaching methods that can develop them in our kids.
As the Gottfrieds say:
“Education is so skills oriented, so competency oriented, they just seem to forget about motivation. Everybody could potentially be motivationally gifted, given the right encouragement.”
Here are some tips from psychologist Dan Ariely on how to improve your motivation.

How New York's largest hospital system is predicting COVID-19 spikes
Northwell Health is using insights from website traffic to forecast COVID-19 hospitalizations two weeks in the future.
- The machine-learning algorithm works by analyzing the online behavior of visitors to the Northwell Health website and comparing that data to future COVID-19 hospitalizations.
- The tool, which uses anonymized data, has so far predicted hospitalizations with an accuracy rate of 80 percent.
- Machine-learning tools are helping health-care professionals worldwide better constrain and treat COVID-19.
The value of forecasting
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Credit: Northwell Health
<p>One unique benefit of forecasting COVID-19 hospitalizations is that it allows health systems to better prepare, manage and allocate resources. For example, if the tool forecasted a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations in two weeks, Northwell Health could begin:</p><ul><li>Making space for an influx of patients</li><li>Moving personal protective equipment to where it's most needed</li><li>Strategically allocating staff during the predicted surge</li><li>Increasing the number of tests offered to asymptomatic patients</li></ul><p>The health-care field is increasingly using machine learning. It's already helping doctors develop <a href="https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2020/06/09/dc19-1870" target="_blank">personalized care plans for diabetes patients</a>, improving cancer screening techniques, and enabling mental health professionals to better predict which patients are at <a href="https://healthitanalytics.com/news/ehr-data-fuels-accurate-predictive-analytics-for-suicide-risk" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">elevated risk of suicide</a>, to name a few applications.</p><p>Health systems around the world have already begun exploring how <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7315944/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">machine learning can help battle the pandemic</a>, including better COVID-19 screening, diagnosis, contact tracing, and drug and vaccine development.</p><p>Cruzen said these kinds of tools represent a shift in how health systems can tackle a wide variety of problems.</p><p>"Health care has always used the past to predict the future, but not in this mathematical way," Cruzen said. "I think [Northwell Health's new predictive tool] really is a great first example of how we should be attacking a lot of things as we go forward."</p>Making machine-learning tools openly accessible
<p>Northwell Health has made its predictive tool <a href="https://github.com/northwell-health/covid-web-data-predictor" target="_blank">available for free</a> to any health system that wishes to utilize it.</p><p>"COVID is everybody's problem, and I think developing tools that can be used to help others is sort of why people go into health care," Dr. Cruzen said. "It was really consistent with our mission."</p><p>Open collaboration is something the world's governments and health systems should be striving for during the pandemic, said Michael Dowling, Northwell Health's president and CEO.</p><p>"Whenever you develop anything and somebody else gets it, they improve it and they continue to make it better," Dowling said. "As a country, we lack data. I believe very, very strongly that we should have been and should be now working with other countries, including China, including the European Union, including England and others to figure out how to develop a health surveillance system so you can anticipate way in advance when these things are going to occur."</p><p>In all, Northwell Health has treated more than 112,000 COVID patients. During the pandemic, Dowling said he's seen an outpouring of goodwill, collaboration, and sacrifice from the community and the tens of thousands of staff who work across Northwell.</p><p>"COVID has changed our perspective on everything—and not just those of us in health care, because it has disrupted everybody's life," Dowling said. "It has demonstrated the value of community, how we help one another."</p>3,000-pound Triceratops skull unearthed in South Dakota
"You dream about these kinds of moments when you're a kid," said lead paleontologist David Schmidt.
Excavation of a triceratops skull in South Dakota.
- The triceratops skull was first discovered in 2019, but was excavated over the summer of 2020.
- It was discovered in the South Dakota Badlands, an area where the Triceratops roamed some 66 million years ago.
- Studying dinosaurs helps scientists better understand the evolution of all life on Earth.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
<p style="margin-left: 20px;">"We had to be really careful," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "We couldn't disturb anything at all, because at that point, it was under law enforcement investigation. They were telling us, 'Don't even make footprints,' and I was thinking, 'How are we supposed to do that?'"</p><p>Another difficulty was the mammoth size of the skull: about 7 feet long and more than 3,000 pounds. (For context, the largest triceratops skull ever unearthed was about <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724634.2010.483632" target="_blank">8.2 feet long</a>.) The skull of Schmidt's dinosaur was likely a <em>Triceratops prorsus, </em>one of two species of triceratops that roamed what's now North America about 66 million years ago.</p>Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
<p>The triceratops was an herbivore, but it was also a favorite meal of the T<em>yrannosaurus rex</em>. That probably explains why the Dakotas contain many scattered triceratops bone fragments, and, less commonly, complete bones and skulls. In summer 2019, for example, a separate team on a dig in North Dakota made <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/science/triceratops-skull-65-million-years-old.html" target="_blank">headlines</a> after unearthing a complete triceratops skull that measured five feet in length.</p><p>Michael Kjelland, a biology professor who participated in that excavation, said digging up the dinosaur was like completing a "multi-piece, 3-D jigsaw puzzle" that required "engineering that rivaled SpaceX," he jokingly told the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/science/triceratops-skull-65-million-years-old.html" target="_blank">New York Times</a>.</p>Morrison Formation in Colorado
James St. John via Flickr
Triceratops illustration
Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons |
World's oldest work of art found in a hidden Indonesian valley
Archaeologists discover a cave painting of a wild pig that is now the world's oldest dated work of representational art.
Pig painting at Leang Tedongnge in Indonesia, made at 45,500 years ago.
- Archaeologists find a cave painting of a wild pig that is at least 45,500 years old.
- The painting is the earliest known work of representational art.
- The discovery was made in a remote valley on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Oldest Cave Art Found in Sulawesi
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a9734e306f0914bfdcbe79a1e317a7f0"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b-wAYtBxn7E?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>What can Avicenna teach us about the mind-body problem?
The Persian polymath and philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age teaches us about self-awareness.
The incredible physics behind quantum computing
Can computers do calculations in multiple universes? Scientists are working on it. Step into the world of quantum computing.
