When you value something deeply, don’t shy away from talking about it. Instead, embrace telling people why it’s important to you. Assume that for the message to stick, it should be heard ten different times and said in ten different ways. The more you can enlist others to help spread your message, the more likely it is to have an impact.

These days, I’m wary of seemingly simple incentive rules that promise amazing results. They are rarely simple, and often leave collateral damage. Usually, a better option is to have a frank discussion about what we should value and why. Why should we care about exploring more designs early on? Why should we aim to speed up engineering velocity? Once people understand and buy into those values, they can make the best decisions on how to apply them.

Across the study, we can extract a more general pattern: When lost in the fog, simply take what looks like the next best step. Not a big step, but a small step. Then reassess, step again, reassess, step again, reassess, step again. Keep moving in steps. And one day, the fog will begin to lift and the cumulative effect of all those steps will become clear.

The lives in our study show the great utility of moving in small steps when otherwise befuddled and uncertain. You don’t need to have the answers for what to do with the rest of your life. You just need to begin simplex stepping. You might get a long way down the road before you even know where you are going.

As Mark Lepper and his colleagues put it:

Exactly those things that one would do to present information to students most efficiently about the existence and sources of their errors and misconceptions are, at least for unconfident remedial [reputation-threatened] students, precisely the same things that seem likely to further undermine these students’ sense of competence and control.

The expert tutors understood that students’ first need was for someone to believe in their potential to learn, despite their reputation. The best tutors understood that students wouldn’t learn much without this. They understood the importance of being “wise.

• To the extent possible, it’s good for this help to be made available to everyone in the setting— as at Georgia State and UC Berkley Chemistry. Offering help to just some groups— as we’ve learned from decades of trying this through various forms of remediation— can wind up stigmatizing those groups and worsening the stereotype threat and churn they experience.