book review: mindset by carol dweck
15 Nov 2021
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck
What are the main ideas?
- in the fixed mindset, skills and intelligence are inherent and unchangeable. in general, this means you are constantly working to defend your status (smart, athletic, musically genius, etc.) and anything that challenges or disconfirms that “truth” is painful, sometimes to the point of catastrophy.
- in the growth mindset, ability and intelligence are malleable and always have the possibility of improvement. in general, this means challenges and failures are opportunities for learning and improvement.
- short-term successful people often have fixed mindsets. they falter as soon as anything challenges their understanding of their ability. long-term successful people often have growth mindsets. they are able to turn seemingly impossible situations around because they aren’t there to prove themselves; they are there to learn and grow (and that is often a contagious stance).
- in a growth mindset, effort is joyous, a requirement for learning and process. in a fixed mindset, effort is a signal of inadequacy and inferiority. if it doesn’t come easy, you aren’t good (and often that means you should just quit).
- our society praises people as savants and geniuses, but often, behind the popular narrative of someone burn with inherent ability is the truth of someone who worked harder than those around them to accomplish what they have.
- the fixed vs growth mindset manifests in sports, business, romantic relationships as well as coaching, parenting, and teaching.
- in sports, it can make athletes who were top of their game in one context, crash in burn in contexts where they have to work harder than before.
- in business, it can look like leaders desiring to preserve their own reputation and vision of themselves so much that they destroy their companies. they either surround themselves with hype folks who can’t or won’t name hard business realities or they ignore that information to the point of destruction.
- in relationship, it can turn any sign of misalignment into giving up on the relationship entirely (because of the believe that people who are meant together shouldn’t have to do any work if they’re really right for each other).
- in coaching, parenting, and teaching, fixed mindset can look like not believing in the people you are supporting. that can limit their actual performance because they understand, through you, that they don’t have anywhere to go (or if they do, the only place to go is down). a growth mindset in this context can help any student or child take their abilities and improve them by learning to love learning and effort.
- it is difficult to change mindsets. and the process of changing anything, including your mindset, is a nontrivial one and can come with pitfalls, backslides, and backlash (from yourself and others). that said, some of the best advice to changing mindsets is to (1) practice noticing the difference between the two and then (2) visualize yourself taking a step, putting in some effort to support your learning.
If I implemented one idea from this book right now, which one would it be?
notice in any situation of anxiety if i’m holding a fixed or growth mindset, both about myself and about the other person(s). if a fixed mindset is present, notice and name it, then explore what a growth stance could look like.
also, when it comes time to implement any change in my life, stop and visualize the actual act of implementing that change: visualize when, where, and how the change will happen.
How would I describe the book to a friend?
the core insights of the book are gold. big gratitude to jason spicer for the recommendation. the book takes a LOT of time building examples through story; some of it felt useful, much of it felt gratuitous. but the core tenets of each major section are explained well and clearly. i am already recommending this book to people in my life so as long as you can either plow through the examples or have the discipline to skip them once they’re not useful, it’s a good one. the implications on relationships (explicitly romantic relationships and implicitly friendships and other types of relationships), business and leadership contexts, parenting, and coaching are vast. i sense that people don’t recommend this book much because so much of the thinking has been integrated into everything but reading this material at its source has been illuminating.
reminder: book review structure
words / writing / post-processing
720w / 20min / 5min