Harry Potter vs. Tiffany Aching

The first part of this may be old news to you. There was a study done a while back on how kids respond to praise, in particular, how it affects later behavior. They took two groups of kids and gave them a fairly simple task to do. They succeeded, and were given positive feedback on how well they did. The difference was that one group was told they succeeded because they were smart. The other group was told it was because they worked hard. So you have a group of “smart” kids and a group of “hard-working” kids.

Then they gave the kids a much harder task. In this test, the “hard-working” kids did a lot better. The “smart” kids tended to give up when they found they weren’t able to do the task easily. The “hard-working” kids kept on trying, and made more progress in the end.

It’s a difference in attribution. The “hard-working” kids attributed success to effort. If you work harder, you’ll do better. If you’re not doing well, you need to work harder. The “smart” kids attribute success to being smart, to an inherent natural ability. You either have it or you don’t. If you don’t, no amount of work is going to make you good at it. Furthermore, failure demonstrates that you lack intelligence or talent. You’re better off not trying - claim that the task is boring or beneath you. It’s the old question of fate vs. free will, and again we see that, whatever the truth is, people behave better if they believe they have free will.

If you haven’t guessed, I was raised as a “smart” kid.

The thing is, of course, that anything worth doing is going to be a lot of work. Being smart or talented may make it easier, but if you expect it to be easy, you’re going to give up on a lot of things. A good example of this (which I don’t think I fully appreciated at the time) was a drawing class I took in college. You need talent to be an artist, right? I am not an artist. Nobody seeing the drawings I did prior to that class would have credited me with a lick of talent. I sucked.

But I spent about fifteen hours a week on it for a full semester; getting lessons, drawing, getting feedback, and drawing some more. And by the end of it, I didn’t entirely suck. I was no Rembrandt, but I had come a long way. I could do a half-decent portrait. The important thing was that I had learned that I could get better, that a lot of drawing is technique that you can be taught and skill that you can develop with practice. Maybe there’s still some spark of genius which distinguishes the truly brilliant artists, but you can become really good through care and hard work, and cleverness alone won’t get you there.

This is true of most things. I write software for a living. I’m actually pretty good at that. This is a business known for having more than its share of geniuses. And you know? I’d much rather work with someone who’s pretty smart and really hard-working than a genius who’s kinda lazy. In fact, past a certain point, cleverness works against you. Clever people write clever code - “If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.” They make interesting mountains out of boring little mole hills. Once they figure out the clever part, they lose interest in the details; and writing clear, reliable, well-documented code requires a lot of tedious attention to detail.

So for most endeavors, even creative ones, effort is more important than brilliance. In fact, effort is critical, while brilliance is not. Praising kids (and others) for being smart sends exactly the wrong message.

Sometime soon after all of this research came out, the last Harry Potter book was released. As it turned out, the book was really very good. As a social phenomenon, it was nothing short of amazing. Book stores stayed open past midnight and held parties. Old town Alexandria transformed the main drag into Diagon Alley. The chocolate shop there made a whole set of custom candies based on those in the books. There were little kids (and not-so-little kids) running around in costumes. And these weren’t just the weird kids - this was clearly something that cut across all ages and grade school social boundaries. It was very much a grass-roots effort; not just the publisher sponsoring some lame corporate fiesta. It was small business owners and fans coming together to do their own thing. And this is all for a book, not a blockbuster movie or video game. It was amazing and wonderful.

The book lived up to all this hype. Half of my friends grabbed a copy when it went on sale at midnight Friday, and did not eat, sleep, or blink until they’d finished it, many of them chewing through the more than 700 pages by Saturday night. I passed on the initial mania, but when I read it the following weekend, I did so in much the same manner. I really enjoyed it, and still think the whole series is great, and well worth the not-insubstantial effort.

OK? I like Harry Potter. Got it?

Because despite all that, it comes down on the wrong side of the talent vs. effort issue. Our hero is the Boy Who Lived. He’s the hero because of who his parents were and what they did; a quirk of history that he had no control over. He has an ability and a fate that are not of his own making. The challenges he faces take a bit of cleverness and a lot of courage. He has to put up with lot of hardship, physically, and even more so emotionally. But if there’s anything that takes diligence and planning, it usually falls to Hermione. That’s not what makes you the hero. This is not the Hermione Granger series. Though maybe if you’re reading it to your kids, you should pretend it is.

This is not unique to Harry Potter, either. It’s been a while since I read a lot of young adult fantasy, but it tends to be like that. In the Dark is Rising series, the hero is the seventh son of a seventh son. In the Narnia books, it’s mostly a matter of stumbling on the magical wardrobe.

A real exception to this is Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series: Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, and Wintersmith. Tiffany is a farm girl, not a princess, not even a secret princess. She becomes a witch, not by birth, but by working at it. She learns it like a trade. She’s smart, but more importantly, she’s curious, hard-working, and conscientious. In her world, being a witch is not a sexy and powerful job. It’s not about lording it over the muggles. It’s more like a combination of nurse and firefighter, like being a public servant, in the true old-fashioned sense of the term.

These are young adult books; they’re about growing up. They’re about finding your place in the world and taking responsibility for your little corner of it. They’re about learning to make the effort, and make the most of whatever talent you were born with. Early on, our young heroine is given this advice:

If you trust in yourself… and believe in your dreams… and follow your star… you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.