Dr Carol S. Dweck “Mindset: Changing the way you think to fulfil your potential” (2006)

| September 12, 2024

Which statement do you believe to be true: that your personality, talents and abilities are something you’re born with, and they remain pretty much unchanged throughout your life; or that you can develop them, work on both your talents and weaknesses, and become better? Dr Dweck says that your answer to this question has a profound meaning for how you deal with obstacles and failure in your life! 

If you believe that you are the way you are, and that’s just the cards you were dealt – you have what dr Dweck calls Fixed Mindset. And that’s problematic, because you may have a tendency to always try to prove how smart you are, instead of identifying your shortcomings and working on them. You may hold a belief that if you have to work hard on something – that means you weren’t good at this to begin with. That if you don’t understand something – means you’re too stupid to understand it. That if you don’t succeed at something at first try – means it was just not for you.

If you, on the other hand, love a good challenge and enjoy constantly learning – also from your failures – you represent Growth Mindset. You recognise that you have to cultivate your talents, hone your skills, identify your weaknesses and work on them. And that can make a big difference, especially when you face setbacks and failures.

People with Fixed Mindset feel like they always have to prove themselves; like they’re always being measured and judged, and whatever the judgement is – that’s what they are (and likely always will be). And because of that they are very sensitive about making mistakes and failing at things. They would rather not attempt difficult tasks in fear that they will fail, and their shortcomings will be exposed. Their need to always succeed leads them to only doing things that come effortlessly to them.

For people with Growth Mindset it’s almost the opposite: they love a good challenge, because they know that when they perform a difficult task – that’s when they learn. They’re good at identifying their strengths and weaknesses. For them success is not about proving how smart you are and never failing, but rather about learning and improving. If they fail on a test – that’s a valuable feedback for them. It lets them know where they are on their path to mastering something – rather than a judgement of who they are.

A perfect example of the Fixed Mindset in action (and one that sounded too familiar to me) is what Dweck calls “Low-Effort Syndrome” in students transitioning to junior high school – the work gets a lot harder than it was before,  much more effort is required, suddenly it’s not so easy to be a straight-A student. For those with Fixed Mindset a very common response is… to stop trying. They fear that they might still fail, even if they put in a lot of effort, and that will expose them as not being smart enough. If they don’t put any effort – they think – they can’t be measured and judged.

Fixed Mindset can also be observed in the world of business. One way it can manifest itself is a “genius with a thousand helpers” model – leaders who don’t want a great team around them. Don’t want talented people around them, who could steal their spotlight, or who they would have to share the credit with. They want to feel better than the rest, so they have to surround themselves with mediocrity. They don’t allow dissent, they only want to hear praise. If they fail – they assign blame and look for excuses. They may have good intentions, but “at critical decision points, they opt for what would make them feel good and look good over what would serve the longer-term corporate goals”.

And it can get even worse! Since those people love to compare themselves with others who are worse off than they are, AND they are the ones in charge – they “have the power to make people worse off. And when they do, they feel better about themselves” – says dr Dweck. Doesn’t that sound familiar to many of us? The whole toxic bosses culture, workplaces where everyone feel miserable and no one is allowed their own opinion, dissent is punished etc. That may also be a result of insecurities stemming from the Fixed Minset.

Dr Dweck offers many great examples of both Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset in the world of business, but also many different areas of life: sports, parenting, school, relationships. You would be surprised how many of the mistakes we make in our lifes can somehow be linked to how you answer this very basic question: am I just the way I am and that’s final, or do I have the ability to develop? If you only believe in the former: you’re basically screwed. But there’s some good news: in reality most of us have a little bit of both of those mindsets, and we sometimes lean more towards one or the other. In other words: if you think you have the fixed mindset – that also isn’t fixed forever and you can (and should) work on it! It’s important to be aware of the pitfalls of Fixed Mindset and learn what triggers it.

The main idea of the book is: you can change your mindset. And as everything else in life: it will require a lot of work and effort. You can’t just flip the switch. You can just start the process, and maybe you will never even achieve a full success – but that’s not the point. Starting the process is the goal. Making a concrete plan to improve – and sticking to it! – is the goal. The learning, the development, the improvements – are the success.

The lesson from the book for me is: do difficult things. The things I hate doing, things I know I’m bad at, things that terrify me – I can continue avoiding them forever and never get better at anything, OR I can force myself to start, plow through the initial pain and awkwardness, and get better and better, a little bit at the time. Try things, identify what works and what doesn’t, try different approaches, seek advice from people who know better, don’t avoid people with more knowledge and talent.

Dr Carol Dweck is a Stanford University psychologist specialising in personality, social psychology and developmental psychology. Here’s her TED Talk about “Mindset”

Today I’m changing my “fixed mindset” to a much better “growth mindset” (to fulfil my potential)

| September 5, 2024

Does it ever happen to you, that you decide to change your life, so you go to youtube and watch a video about productivity, or investing money, or meditation, or boosting your creativity, or building muscle, or anything else like that, and you maybe even take notes, maybe even write down the titles of those “7 books that will change your life”, or you maybe even order the books, and make a little pile on your desk, and you maybe even start reading one of them and decide that you’re gonna have to wake up early in the morning to be ahead of everyone and seize those quiet morning hours to work on realising your dreams, but then you feel very tired, so you go to sleep? And when you wake up the next day, you have now turned 30, so you know that you have to speed up, or else you will never become a writer. So you order more books. When they arrive, you’ve now turned 35, and you’re still very sleepy, but you manage to watch another youtube video recommending you “Think and grow rich” by Napoleon Hill, so you promise yourself that you’ll read it, but at this point you already kind of know that it doesn’t matter, and you will not grow rich from reading it, I mean, come on. But you still have the urge to do it – does that ever happen to you?

Well, it happened to me, I feel that way very often. I refuse to accept that the life I have now is the best I can have, I have a dream of a much better, more fulfilling life, and a desire to make it a reality, but when it comes to acting – I just fake it. I fake action and delude myself. I watch youtube videos, read self-help books, listen to podcasts, I do all of it, but never take action. I never implement what they tell me to do. The watching, and the reading, and the listening – is as far as I ever go. Of course it doesn’t change anything, it’s just another form of procrastination – one which gives you an illusion of progress. After all – you could have been playing video games, but instead you’ve invested time in “self-development”.

Dr Carol Dweck in her book “Mindset” (a book from my pile!) helped me understand why I am like this. Apparently it’s quite common, so maybe you will recognise yourself in this description, too: kind of clever as a kid, receiving praise for being talented, then suddenly started to struggle in your teenage years, so you stopped trying. You loved being good at things, so when you stopped being good, you stopped participating. Dr Dweck describes it as “fear of trying and failing”, and I feel that it describes me perfectly. According to her, I have what she calls a “fixed mindset”: I don’t want to do challenging things, because I’m afraid that when I fail, I will be exposed as an idiot, whereas if I don’t try, I won’t be judged at all, and only I will know that I’m an idiot!

We always tend to gravitate towards things that give us pleasure, we often get addicted to them. I learned as a kid that it feels good when you get praised for your successes. And at the time those successes came to me without effort. So already as a kid I convinced myself, that I have a natural talent – I’m so bright that things come to me effortlessly, and everybody praises me for it, which feels great. Effort was for less talented kids. When in high school things got more difficult, I panicked and gave up. I stopped working and tried to hide behind a shitty attitude. I acted like I didn’t care, but in reality I just didn’t feel smart anymore. And that’s the “fixed mindset” – believing that your intelligence and skills are fixed, and that’s just the way you are. And I still have this mindset to this day.

I wanted to be a writer or a journalist, but that was difficult, so instead I packed my stuff, moved to another country, and got a job in a restaurant. That seemed a lot easier than actually sitting down and writing. That’s because sitting in front of your computer and staring at a blank page can really give you a headache. Washing dishes in a restaurant – you’ll get sweaty and tired, but no headaches! I felt comfortable again. So comfortable, that I got stuck for 15 years.

But I still have that urge to write. My restaurant job pays my bills, but doesn’t give me satisfaction. I never wanted to do it, never felt passionate about it. That’s just where I ended up. Dr Dweck says that you can change your mindset. Leave the shitty “fixed mindset” I had since childhood, and adapt the “growth mindset” – identify my weaknesses and focus on getting better! I now realise that I always thought about writing as of a way to prove how smart I am. And I failed, because I wasn’t that smart, and I couldn’t write. I should have thought about writing as a way to become better at writing!

So here I am. I don’t feel comfortable doing this, but I’m willing to try. “In the growth mindset it’s almost inconceivable to want something badly, to think you have a chance to achieve it, and then do nothing about it.” Yup, that sounds stupid, doesn’t it? So this is me with my new “growth mindset”. I will write a blog. I will be bad at this. No doubt. But I will keep writing. I’ll sit in front of my computer everyday, I’ll sit through the headache, I’ll have that shitty feeling of having a rock in my stomach (do you also have it? don’t google it, it will say you have gastric cancer, but you’re probably just anxious), but I will keep doing it. I will be tired after all day in the kitchen, but I will keep doing it. Sometimes it will be a pile of garbage, but I accept that. I’ll keep doing it, so that maybe a year from now I will be a little better than I am now. I will fail and learn from my failure, and then I’ll try again. Maybe someday someone will read it and think: “he stinks, I can do that too”! and be inspired?

You can call me Dave.