Cat Hicks
Pull out a piece of paper and draw two lines on it. You're doing something you've seen a million times since grade school (it's a useful way to think about multivariate space!), using two different directions to divide the world into quadrants.
Like this:
Cat Hicks
Ok so we have our first spaces. On the far right, we'll call it "seek challenge." On the far left, we'll call it "avoid incompetence."
Like this:
Cat Hicks
Now an interesting thing about these two opposing goals is that psychologists have got names for this!
Generally speaking, when you're prioritizing seeking challenge, we like to call those "approach" strategies. And when you're trying to do something like avoid looking incompetent in front of other people, well, we're not very imaginative so we named this "avoidance strategies"
Cat Hicks
Now, we're going to label one of these elements. Let me tell you what it means first.
Let's imagine we are facing a moment when we need to try to accomplish something. Our minds can prioritize very different goals in that moment. We could focus on maximizing challenge and taking a risk (but with a potential reward!). Or we could swing to the other side and try to *avoid risk*, let's say, the risk of looking incompetent in a performance situation
Cat Hicks
Let me tell you what the next label means.
Try to remember a time in your life when you faced a new challenge, maybe a task in the workplace or learning a new thing. Maybe what felt most important to you were things like: increasing your own level of understanding, knowing you've achieved task competency, and intrinsic enjoyment. In fact, maybe you've engaged in caring about those goals so much it's a little bit beyond just a preference. We might even call it an "orientation" toward Mastery
Cat Hicks
But there are other goals! Maybe instead, you focused on performing against a normative standard, seeking out opportunities to demonstrate your competency to others, and getting to wield a certain kind of status.
We might call it an orientation toward Performance
Cat Hicks
So now we've got something like this....sorry for the pencil scratch, I'll get you a better image in a second
The really interesting part is that psychologists have found that depending on which of these four quadrants you fall into, we can predict a lot of things about the patterns we'll see in your long-term achievement
(take a minute to actually put yourself in a quadrant if you're really playing along...! where do you end up most?)
Cat Hicks
You might immediately be tempted to assign a valence to this. Surely "approach strategies" are the best!
Well, nothing is pure good and pure bad in psychology. These both play important roles for us! There are lots of reasonable situations in which we might want to avoid taking risks. But psychologists who study achievement -- and in particular, who persists in long-term achievement -- have been really interested in which strategies work best here.
We need another variable though
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