What's Stopping You?: Why Smart People Don't Always Reach Their Potential, and How You Can

Mastery or Ego Orientation

Phil Evans’s excellent recounting of the history of experiments studying the emotional drivers for our behaviour was published in the mid 1970s. Yet the research he detailed is backed up in the 1980s by Carol Dweck and Ellen Leggett. Their goal-setting experiments concluded that children were either “mastery- oriented” or “ego-oriented” with the mastery-oriented kids (High-AMs in other words) believing not only that they could surmount obstacles and reach a solution but relished the opportunity of doing so.

For mastery-oriented kids, learning or skill improvement was their focus, meaning they would persist in the face of setbacks, while ego-oriented kids (i.e. High-FFs) were more inclined towards not losing face, so ...