Thread by @SteveEnglishbey

For much of my life, certainly as someone who has devoted much of my life either as an athlete, or as a teacher of athletes, I have tried to live by and advocate a number of fundamental precepts.

Here's some of these: Development is a function of hard work, an ability to overcome any and all obstacles that may serve to impede progress ["grit"]; an ability to defer the immediate gratification impulse which may retard long term goals and progress.

An ability to honestly look within so as to see the kinds of personal behaviors that may be actually causing a lack of advancement to a higher level of development.

That, as opposed to all too easy alternative to find ways to blame others for your lack of advancement.

The ability to realize that much of the external world around you contains MANY things you cannot really control. BUT. You CAN control how you react to and perceive those externalities.

And in the context of developing your true potential, you NEED to learn how to react to these negative externalities in ways that do not impede or stifle your goals, motivations, etc.

In other words, development is a function of not allowing externalities ---those things outside of yourself that you cannot control---to deter your mindset that PERSONAL MERITORIOUS behavior is THE key to development.

Thus, succinctly stated, developing your true potential is a function of INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR and INDIVIDUAL MERIT. Without regard to the class, group, gender, race etc., that one my be subsumed within.

And to further reduce this [to simplify], what I am arguing here is that underlying true development is very much predicated on a MERIT based philosophy/mindset.

I have been around quite a few yrs. and as such I have witnessed over quite a few yrs. an ongoing attack on the the broad notion of a merit based theory of development.

I have seen this in may ways and in many varieties over the last 30 yrs. Suffice it to say that twitter is not the place for a full exposition of this argument.

Instead, I will [for now] simply point to an article written by a long time NYT reporter who has written one of THE best articles I have seen on this question of merit.

I really urge people to read this article by Richard Bernstein. Certainly no Trump supporter or some kind of alt-right conservative --which makes his argument more persuasive for some I suspect.

Here's the article:

dailysignal.com/2021/06/15/alm…?

@threadreaderapp unroll