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Sat
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Feb '06
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by Frank Spychalski filed under Computer
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The psychology of learning divides people into perfection-oriented and performance-oriented groups:
The people in the category perfection-oriented have a natural intellectual curiosity. They are constantly searching for better ways of doing things, new methods, new tools. They search for perfection, but they take pleasure in the search itself, knowing perfectly well that perfection can not be accomplished. To the people in this category, failure is a normal part of the strive for perfection. In fact, failure gives a deeper understanding of why a particular path was unsuccessful, making it possible to avoid similar paths in the future.
vs.
The people in the category performance-oriented on the contrary, do not at all strive for perfection. Instead they have a need to achieve performance immediately. Such performance leaves no time for intellectual curiosity. Instead, techniques already known to them must be applied to solve problems. To these people, failure is a disaster whose sole feature is to harm instant performance.
I really like the article, but I think the overall conclusion is dead wrong.
It is my hope that this explanation of a common phenomenon makes it possible for students to reflect upon their own motivations, and that it ultimately makes all students perfection-oriented.
When it comes to programming, I’m 150% perfection-oriented and like toying around with every new technology. I try to learn at least on new language every year and I have spent whole days toying around with stuff completely unrelated to the project I was really working on, just because it sounded like a neat idea. If I were more performance-oriented, it would be easier to ignore this urge and just stick to the problem at hand. Being performance-oriented is not always a bad thing…
perhaps you should quote the overall conclusion here, for people like me who don’t click on links…
better?
Thanks Frank. At least it motivated me to read the full article…
I’m a performance-oriented person as far as programming (I intentionally don’t say “software development”) is concerned, and I agree with the author that it can be quite a disadvantage sometimes, but I have not yet figured out how to change — knowing and reflecting alone does not seem to help.
I guess the problem is that there’s no real incentive to learn new things – why, some tasks may take longer using well-known old methods, but what the hell, if I work faster I’m still not allowed to go home earlier. On the contrary: I would have to use my spare time to learn new things that may or may not be useful at work…
Right now, I’m lucky that my boss gives me the time to look into a lot of different things which might be useful. I hope the new one will be just as reasonable. It is bad enought that we have no human resources development worth the name.