Mindset — Dr. Carol S. Dweck
“Am I smart enough?”, “Can I succeed in this world?”, “Can you train yourself to be a genius or are you born with it?” Pretty sure all these thoughts would have crossed your mind sometime or the other. As an ambitious person, I want to do all these crazy things in my lifetime but I always doubted if I was good enough and this always had held me back from trying out different things in my life. During quarantine, I started picking up on the habit of reading and read this book called Mindset by Dr Carol S. Dweck. This book totally changed my perspective on life and how to deal with the above questions, so I wanted to share my views about this book and hopefully it helps you change your perspective towards life.
The Author starts by giving an introduction of how people differ, how they mainly differ due to the mindsets they have and the two mindsets that are present in people, Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset. A brief view of how both the mindsets work and examples of how in a real-life situation people with each of these mindsets would react to. She explains that fixed mindset people think they are born with a given set of talents and qualities and they cannot change what they already have. They also are the type of people when encountered with adversity would blame external factors and not take accountability. However, people with the growth mindset take every situation as an opportunity to grow. They take complete accountability for their failure and analyze what to do to make sure they become better.
How would you explain success? Would you agree, you are successful when you prove to people you are smarter or better than them or when you have finally learnt something that you weren’t able to before without considering people’s opinion into the picture. This one question will make you realize what kind of a mindset you possess. If you chose the former statement as your thinking of success, then you probably have a fixed mindset and if you chose the latter you most likely have a growth mindset. The author talks in detail about how mindsets define their meaning of Failure and Effort. She explains clearly how people with a fixed mindset perceive effort to be humiliating and a thing smart people do not do. Contrary to this, people with a growth mindset perceive effort to be fruitful and understand the importance of effort and failure for the growth in their life. The author also talks about how both these mindsets think about an individual’s ability in general which is interesting to read about.
Going further into the book, the author talks in detail about how these mindsets would work in different aspects of life such as sports, business relationships and parenting.
Starting off with Sports, most of us believe that to be a great athlete we need to be born with an ability to succeed. There are few people who are born with these qualities, there is no denying that. This does not mean that if you do not have good athletic skills you should not think of pursuing sports as a profession. This is the thinking of a fixed mindset person. Remember all skills can be developed but a person needs to invest time in learning the desired skill. The author also goes in detail and explains if a person with an innate athletic quality has a fixed mindset he will not go on to perform with his highest potential, because a fixed mindset personality always prioritizes skill over effort due to which he does not ever think of improving skills and that is where the downfall begins. So irrespective of being a star or a person with amazing athletic skills. The Mindset of the person determines if he/she will achieve their highest potential.
Moving on to the world of Business, we get to see a picture of how leaders with fixed mindsets behave versus leaders with growth mindsets. Through real world examples we will clearly understand how leaders with fixed mindsets are not open to change, will not accept their faults and have a narrowed vision due to which when they are faced with challenges in leading the company, their first instinct is to devise a plan to project to the outside world that they are not facing any problems because they do not wantthe world to question their leadership skills and because of this they do not prioritize the actual problem and add more stress to their existing problems whereas the leaders with a growth mindset do not care about public opinion, they acknowledge their problems and put in all their effort to resolve the issue to keep the company going. The examples the author presented in this part have been thoroughly researched and some of the examples that have been presented here are of well-known companies like IBM, Xerox etc.
Until now, we have seen how the mindsets affect in different career fields. Now let’s see if mindsets are important in our personal relationships such as friendships and in romantic partners. The author talks how these mindsets would impact relationships especially when there is conflict. Fixed mindsets retort by not taking accountability for the fight and trying to shift the blame and they do not think about the solutions to make the situation better. Growth mindsets take complete accountability for the problems in their relationships and try to figure out a solution to overcome them. Fixed mindset people do not believe in putting effort into a relationship and We all can predict where this relationship is heading to. Growth mindsets believe that effort is required to sustain a long-lasting relationship and there is no competition between the two people. When it comes to a problem, it is them versus the problem and not versus each other.
Now, coming to the main question how has one of these mindsets been instilled with us. Are we born with it? Is it something we can change?
As we all know when we are children, we observe things around us, we behave based on the actions of our role models. Our role models are our parents and teachers. They are the most influential group of people and we take on their ideologies and beliefs. So, if our parents appreciated us more for our effort than our talent, we would grow up thinking that effort is the most important thing in the world. Our mindset primarily depends on the kind of values we are instilled within us. A simple example which can easily explain this is, if you aced your math test and you come to your parents and they appreciate your smartness instead of your effort in the test. Now, you believe that are you are very good at math, and most of the times you don’t think about improving yourself because that shows you are not smart. The next time you take a hard test, and you don’t do well in the test. You believe that you are not smart enough and end up hating math. So, if we all start appreciating the effort people put into a task instead of correlating it to their ability or skill. It changes their perspective in life and the next time a person fails, they think of putting in more effort to do better rather than sitting and complaining that they would not be able to do it.
Additionally, the author specifically says that this shift in mindset is not going to make a person the next Usain Bolt or the next Bill Gates. She simply states that having such a state of mind will help you in achieving your highest potential self. Also, while reading this we all would have had this thought that we have a mix of these mindsets. Maybe in their career one might be having a growth mindset and, in their relationship, a fixed mindset. In the end it is all about being self aware and see in which part of our lives we need to change.
To sum up, Carol S Dweck rounds up neatly about the two different mindsets we possess. She does not force anyone to adapt to the growth mindset, she clearly states that if a person is happy with a fixed mindset, it is perfectly all right. One needs to think about what works for himself. After reading this book, I discovered a different perspective towards life which I really love, and hence writing this review of this book hoping that you pick it up and see for yourself what it is all about.
