Mindset

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

by Carol Dweck

"The fixed mindset makes you concerned with how you’ll be judged; the growth mindset makes you concerned with improving. The message is: You can change your mindset"

I started reading this book after listening to a Tim Ferriss podcast where Tony Robbins mentions it is one of his favorite books. I had already heard about the book before -- Carol Dweck is a Stanford psychology professor and one of my friends from college told me about her research. I had also heard her Harvard Business Review interview where she talked about The Right Mindset for Success (link). Out of all the 22 books I read in 2014, this is the book that I enjoyed the most, and the one that I highly recommend everyone to read.

Carol Dweck explains what this book is about in the first page of the introduction section:

In this book, you’ll learn how a simple belief about yourself—a belief we discovered in our research— guides a large part of your life. In fact, it permeates every part of your life. Much of what you think of as your personality actually grows out of this “mindset.”

She categorizes people in one of two mindsets: the fixed mindset, and the growth mindset. This is how Dweck describes the fixed mindset:

Believing that your qualities are carved in stone— the fixed mindset— creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character— well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them.

She then describes the growth mindset in this way:

There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way— in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments— everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

This book explores how having a fixed or a growth mindset can have deep repercussions in every aspect of your life: from your personal life, to your professional life. It also expands on different groups of people - athletes, parents, negotiators, businessmen, teachers, etc... - and how they can experience enormous success or devastating failures depending on their mindset.

Here are some of the key lessons I learned from reading this book:

• When we (temporarily) put people in a fixed mindset, with its focus on permanent traits, they quickly fear challenge and devalue effort.
• The fixed mindset makes you concerned with how you’ll be judged; the growth mindset makes you concerned with improving.
• As a society we value natural, effortless accomplishment over achievement through effort. We endow our heroes with superhuman abilities that led them inevitably toward their greatness.
• Telling children they’re smart , in the end, made them feel dumber and act dumber, but claim they were smarter. I don’t think this is what we’re aiming for when we put positive labels—“ gifted,” “talented,”“brilliant”—on people. We don’t mean to rob them of their zest for challenge and their recipes for success. But that’s the danger.
• When you’re given a positive label, you’re afraid of losing it, and when you’re hit with a negative label, you’re afraid of deserving it.
• A growth mindset helps people to see prejudice for what it is— someone else’s view of them —and to confront it with their confidence and abilities intact.
• Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance.

Here is a chapter-by-chapter summary of the lessons I learned from the book - link