This is the first non-computer book post that I have written on this website. I think it’s important enough to do so. Whatever you are trying to achieve, learning new technologies or software included, you need to have the best mindset possible. The mindset that works. Carol Dweck wrote a book called Mindset The New Psychology of Success. Amazon currently rates it 4.5 out of 5 stars with over 2200 customer reviews.

There is a very brief summary of the book by Alex Vermeer at this website. This post is based on that post.

Simple truths are the best and sometimes seem obvious after you read about them. Dweck and her colleagues’ research have found a very simple belief about ourselves that guides and permeates nearly every part of our lives. This belief limits our potential or enables our success. What is this belief?

Your view about yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. Much of who you are on a day-to-day basis comes from your mindset. Your mindset is the view you have of your qualities and characteristics – where they come from and whether they can change. These following two mindsets represent the extreme ends on either side of a spectrum. You can easily be somewhere in the middle and even lean one way with some areas of your life and the other way with other areas of your life. These areas of your life include everything, such as artistic talent, intelligence, personality, or creativity.

1. A fixed mindset comes from the belief that your qualities are carved in stone – who you are is who you are, period. Characteristics such as intelligence, personality, and creativity are fixed traits, rather than something that can be developed. These traits can be easily labelled. This makes you always want to prove yourself to others and focus on how others judge and label you. You might get into the world of perfectionism.
2. A growth mindset comes from the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through effort. Yes, people differ greatly – in aptitude, talents, interests, or temperaments – but everyone can change and grow through application and experience. The growth mindset acknowledges that your life is a “work in progress“, an ever-changing journey. You believe that skills can be cultivated through efforts and you will see every difficulty and challenge as an opportunity for learning, growing, and improving.

Behaviour

How does this simple mindset change your behaviour?

Having a fixed mindset creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over – criticism is seen as an attack on your character, and to be avoided. Having a growth mindset encourages learning and effort. The fixed mindset often results in little or no effort; Dweck mentions the many times she is outright startled by how much the people with a fixed mindset do not believe in effort. However, if you truly believe you can improve at something, you will be much more driven to learn and practice. Criticism is seen as valuable feedback and openly embraced. The hallmark of the growth mindset is the passion for sticking with it, especially when things are not going well. Those with the growth mindset don’t label themselves and throw up their hands in defeat. They confront challenges and keep working.

Intelligence

“Smart people succeed,” says the fixed mindset. Therefore, if you succeed, you must be a smart person. Therefore, pick the easier problem/challenge so success is more likely, and you validate your smartness. Pick a hard problem and you may fail, revealing your stupidity.

“People can get smarter,” says the growth mindset, “and do so by stretching themselves and taking on challenges.” Therefore, pick the hard problem – who cares if you fail! There really is no such thing as failure anyway. Trying and not succeeding is just part of the process of learning and growing, which is always a success!

As Carol Dweck says: “The fixed mindset stands in the way of development and change. The growth mindset is a starting point for change, but people need to decide for themselves where their efforts toward change would be most valuable.” It takes effort and you need to ask yourself what you are willing to give up to be successful. So the real question is what are you willing to sacrifice to reach your goals, not just what are your goals.

People with the fixed mindset are not simply lacking in confidence, though their confidence may be more fragile and more easily undermined by setbacks and effort. Also, having a growth mindset doesn’t mean you have to be working hard all the time. It just means you can develop whatever skills you want to put the time and effort into. It’s your decision.

Nigel Holmes Fixed Mindset Summary Diagram

The fixed mindset says intelligence is static and leads to a desire to look smart and therefore a tendency to avoid challenges, give up easily, see effort as fruitless or worse, ignore useful negative feedback, feel threatened by the success of others and as a result they may plateau early and achieve less than their full potential.

Nigel Holmes Growth Mindset Summary Diagram

The growth mindset believes intelligence can be developed which leads to a desire to learn and therefore a tendency to embrace challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, see efforts as the path to mastery, learn from criticism, find lessons and inspiration in the success of others and as a result they reach ever high levels of achievement and this gives them a greater sense of free will.

Origins of the Fixed Mindset

Dweck notes that everyone is born with a love of learning. If babies were crushed by failure they would never learn to walk or talk. They have to do it wrong many times before they get it right. Why, then, would someone ever develop a fixed mindset?

When you were young, the fixed mindset did offer some benefits. It told you who you were or who you wanted to be (a smart, talented child) and it told you how to be that (perform well). In this way, it provided a formula for self-esteem and a path to love and respect from others. This is crucial for children, where the fixed mindset may offer a simple and straightforward route to being valued and loved. Over time, however, this mindset may become the ‘default’ state. The problem is not that they desired being valued and loved, but that they found a way to ‘achieve’ this by focusing on performance and success, not growth and learning.

Education

Education has a big influence on mindsets. If a teacher or parent promotes a growth mindset over a fixed mindset – such as by encouraging learning and improvement rather than praising talent and discouraging failure – this will have a lasting influence on how the kids view themselves. People with a growth mindset know that it takes time and effort for potential to flower.

Learning conditions and environment have a huge impact on future abilities, skills, and attitude. Praising children for being “gifted” or “talented” does not work. Praising them for their effort does. When a child does well in a task or school grade, it is better to praise them for the effort the made and to encourage more effort to get even better. The simple framing of your praise may be having much more impact on their personal development than you realize!

Changing Our Mindsets

Can we change our mindsets? You can shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. In fact, just by being aware of them you can start to think and react in new ways. Not everyone can achieve everything. It isn’t merely a little effort that could turn you into Einstein or Beethoven. But, an essential fact is that a person’s true potential is unknown and unknowable. As Dweck says, it is “impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.”

It takes practice to actually operate from a growth mindset, rather than just conceptually understanding that it’s a good idea to do so. A lot of this practice can happen on the level of re-framing verbal expression, where you can shift your language from fixed to growth mindset. This in turn will shift your thoughts.

The growth mindset says things like the following:

• I’m not sure I can do it now, but I think I can learn to with time and effort.
• Most successful people had failures along the way.
• If I don’t try, I automatically fail. Where’s the dignity in that?
• Basketball wasn’t easy for Michael Jordan and science wasn’t easy for Thomas Edison. They had a passion and put in tons of effort.
• If I don’t take responsibility, I can’t fix it. Let me listen — however painful it is – and learn whatever I can.
• I can do that if I work at it.
• I belong here. I don’t believe in stereotypes and labels.
• Other people’s opinions don’t define me.
• I am a developing person who is interested in my development.

Her book is recommended by Bill Gates and others as seen on the website BookAuthority. On Amazon.com it got a rating of 4.5 out of 5.

YouTube

Here is a video by Angela Lee Duckworth called Grit: the power of passion and perseverance | Angela Lee Duckworth. It is she talks about the difference between success and failure. She mentions Carol Dweck. This is also an example of a very good presentation.

Here’s a TED talk about passion. Stop searching for your passion | Terri Trespicio | TEDxKC.

Thriving

People with the growth mindset thrive on challenge. They love it. What about those with a fixed mindset? They thrive when things are safely within their grasp – when it’s easy. If things get too difficult (when they are not feeling smart or talented) they lose interest. They don’t want to do anything. The fixed mindset wants to be perfect right now, but the growth mindset wants to confront challenges, try hard and make progress over time.

Talent

I feel the need to talk about talent and mention a few things that Carol Dweck talked about. The word talent is used a lot, particularly in the field of sports. People talk about athletes being “naturals” or being gifted. It’s a factor, but let’s guard against slipping into a fixed mindset. What does that look like? The fixed mindset believes that “natural talent does not need effort and should never ask for help. Effort is for those other guys that don’t have any talent. Asking for help and advise is an admission of weakness.” The truth is that mindset is more important than talent. There are many examples of people who were not “naturals” but made to the highest level anyway. Michael Jordan, Muggsy Bogues, Doug Flutie, Larry Bird, Babe Ruth, Wilma Rudolph, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Ben Hogan and Muhammad Ali.

Protect Our Children from Failure

As Dweck says on page 181 of her Mindset book, there is a message in society about how to boost children’s self-esteem, and the main part is protect them from failure. Have you seen this? In the short term we’ve protected them from feeling disappointment. The real truth is that perhaps the child didn’t deserve to win or get an A grade on the test. They weren’t good enough. We need to provide a way out. Effort is the way out. If the child has a passion and desire to succeed in the given area, they can work at it. Practice. As Brene Brown says in Atlas of the Heart on page 51, “There are too many people in the world today who decide to live disappointed rather than risk feeling disappointed.” Don’t lower your expectations to a low level. Instead, embrace vulnerability, courage, optimism and humility.