Todays post will be a short summary of the book Mindset by Carol Dweck. I came across this book the other week while browsing through amazon looking for something to read turing quarantine. 

The world renowned psychologist Carol Dweck  did decades of research on achievement. She was especially interested in how people cope with failure. One early experiment involved giving ten year old children puzzles. She started giving them fairly easy ones and then gave them harder and harder tests. Confronted with the problem a child cried out ”I love a challenge” another said ”I hoped this would be informative”. Carol as many others always thought you coped with failure or you didn’t. The idea of someone loving failure was totally unknown. The kids didn’t even seem to view it has failure, more like learning. There has for a long time before Dwecks book been the understanding that human qualities were set in stone, you were smart or you are not, failure meant you were not. But this kids viewed it differently, they believed in perseverance and trying, or simply put they believed you could be smarter. 

From this Dweck came up with the idea that there are two different mindset, fixed minset and growth mindset.

Believing that your qualities are set in stone is part of the fixed mindset. People with a fixed mindset seems to avoid challenge and give up more easily. They believe that either you have it or you don’t and a failure means you don’t have it. Ont the other side we have people with a growth mindset. They see their qualities as something that can evolve and grow, it’s not set in stone. They don’t see failure as proof that they are not enough, they see it as a way to learn and improve. What kind of mindset do you have? What of the two resonates with you? Most of us have a little bit of both in us, I for one can relate to one or the other depending on the situation. 

Let’s look at some examples from the world of sports. If we look at Michael Jordan, by many viewed as the best basketball player of all time. He wasn’t a natural, he was perhaps the hardest working athlete in the world. It’s well known that he got cut from his varsity team, wasn’t recruited by the college he wanted to play for and finally wasn’t drafted by the two NBA teams that could have taken him first. It’s easy tom imagine that he was always MICHAEL JORDAN greatest of all time, but one time he was just Michael Jordan. When cut from the varsity team he practiced every morning for three hours before school. He had a growth mindset, he knew he could improve and become the best. 

So finally, what can we do to engrave growth mindset into ourselves?

First it helps just knowing about the two mindsets. Second we need to praise more wisely. Our praise should encourage the hard work and the problem solving that lead to the result, not just praising the end state. Doing this will in the long run make you and the people around you lean in into the growth mindset. 

If any of this sounded interesting I highly recommend reading Dwecks book Mindset!

// Stay safe, Lukas