CaptainQuantum
TMF Master
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- Sep 27, 2004
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I was just thinking about something that I heard motivational speaker Brian Tracy say on one of his tapes. He tells about 2 stories that were in the news at one time. In one, a straight-A student is about to start college, when he gets his SAT score. He mistakes the percentile score for his IQ, and so thinks that he has a below average IQ. When he starts college he is failing every class and his counselor talks to him about it. The student says basically "whats the use? I have a below average IQ" and tells him about his score. After the counselor explains that this number was a percentile and not his IQ, he goes back to getting straight-A's.
In another story, which was something called a "double blind experiment, a teacher was told that this year he was going to be given the "best and the brightest" students in the area and that it was expected that the teacher would have a phenomenal class this year. The students performed just like the teacher was told by his superiors that they would, actually I think this same experiment was done with numerous teachers not just one. At the end of the year the teachers were informed that this was an experiment. Both the teachers and the students were picked completely at random. It was nothing special about either the teachers or the students that caused them to be picked for this particular class.
Tracy then used both these cases as examples of how our beliefs "become true for us". But I guess my thinking has always been that something is either true or it is not. No matter what that student believed, he never had a below average IQ. No matter what the teachers were led to believe, they were not teaching the "best and brightest" but simply randomly picked students. Its either true or it isn't, in my thinking. There's no "but it became true for you", it is either true or it isn't. What do you all think?
In another story, which was something called a "double blind experiment, a teacher was told that this year he was going to be given the "best and the brightest" students in the area and that it was expected that the teacher would have a phenomenal class this year. The students performed just like the teacher was told by his superiors that they would, actually I think this same experiment was done with numerous teachers not just one. At the end of the year the teachers were informed that this was an experiment. Both the teachers and the students were picked completely at random. It was nothing special about either the teachers or the students that caused them to be picked for this particular class.
Tracy then used both these cases as examples of how our beliefs "become true for us". But I guess my thinking has always been that something is either true or it is not. No matter what that student believed, he never had a below average IQ. No matter what the teachers were led to believe, they were not teaching the "best and brightest" but simply randomly picked students. Its either true or it isn't, in my thinking. There's no "but it became true for you", it is either true or it isn't. What do you all think?
