LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Khan Academy's test prep content creator on mistakes

Hi, I'm Dave Travis. I'm the test prep content manager at Khan Academy.

It's especially challenging when you make a mistake again and again and again. You know that you did it wrong. You know immediately when you did it that, "Oh, I did that thing again, and I need to fix that. I need to go back and fix it and iron it out and get it smooth."

There's a motto that I like a lot, which is very simple: "The more you do it, the better you get." I heard somewhere that you actually need to do a skill for 10,000 hours if you really want to get good, and that's true with martial arts, it's true with ceramics, it's true with writing, it's true with language, it's true with a musical instrument.

If you want to get good at something, it takes time, and you need to be patient with yourself. You need to trust yourself and trust that your brain can do these things. Just because you bump up against a frustration or a challenge, that's an opportunity to grow. It's an opportunity to develop a skill that you didn't have before.

I think, you know, one of the things that's exciting about learning a new skill is that the more you do it, not only the better you get, but the more fun you have doing it. It can be hard to have a fun time when you're learning the basics of, you know, grammar in French, or you're learning how to ski and you're falling over all the time.

But the more you actually do those things and improve your skills, it actually becomes more fun because you gain confidence. You gain an ability to look back at what you've accomplished and say, "You know what? Last week I was making all these mistakes, and now I actually get this. Now I can actually build upon this skill and do more than I was able to do last week."