About ten years ago, Mark Leary and his colleagues turned the idea of self-esteem on its head. His ideas explain a ton of human behavior that could no

Everything You Think You Know About Self-esteem Is Wrong

submited by

Style Pass

2024-11-21 16:00:05

About ten years ago, Mark Leary and his colleagues turned the idea of self-esteem on its head. His ideas explain a ton of human behavior that could not formerly be explained any other way.

When I was in school, they were just starting to figure out that there was a link between self-esteem (defined then as how one felt about one’s own personal worth), and positive achievement. They saw that those with higher self-esteem achieved more and seemed more positively motivated, while those with low self-esteem seemed more rebellious and achieved less.

What did they do with this knowledge? For about thirty or forty years, they gave everyone a trophy. They groomed the A-for-effort generation, and stopped keeping score at little league games. As long as children learned to value themselves from an early age – so conventional wisdom told our parents – they would be programmed to think highly of themselves as young adults and go on to achieve great things.

Essentially, the greatest minds of the most well-educated generation up to that time sought to make their offspring into ultra high achievers by – wait for it – removing all challenge and competition from their lives.