Number of words: 134

Adam Guettel has been called the crown prince and savior musical theatre. He is the grandson of Richard Rodgers, the man who wrote the music to such classic as Oklaboma! And Carousel. Guettel’s mother gushes about her son’s genius. So does everyone else. “The is there and it’s major,” raved a review in The New York Times. The question is wheather this kind of praise encourages people.

What’s great about reaserch is that you can ask these kinds of questions and then go get the answers. So we conducted studies with hundreds of student, mostly early adolescents. We first gave each student a set of ten fairly difficult problems from a nonverbal IQ test. They mostly did pretty well on these, and when they finished we praised them.

Excerpted from‘Mindset’ by Carol S. Dweck