Mindset: The New Psychology of Success — Book Review

Rating: 4/5

TL;DR: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success is a book on achieving your full potential by adopting a growth mindset.

One of the central messages of Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, revolves around the image you have of yourself and how it has a profound effect on the way you lead your life.

Research conducted by Dweck and her colleagues concluded a basic reality about humans that is incorporated in their lives and plays a vital role in guiding it. This reality has the power to sabotage our success or help us climb those much-dreamed rungs of the ladder that lead to our success.

It helps you mark the line between mediocrity and excellence. It significantly impacts our opinions of self-awareness, self-esteem, creativity, imagination, our problem solving instincts, our attitude toward failures, our intensities of depression and our penchant to stereotype amongst others.

What is this reality? And how deeply is it embedded in our lives to influence everything so much?

The Mindset about Fixed and Growth

How you come across to people on a daily basis is an idea given to you by your mindset. Your mindset gives you an image about your characteristics and qualities, how they became a part of you and how they can change.

There are two mindsets representing the stark differences of a spectrum. A fixed mindset is a result of belief that your qualities are engraved on a stone: who you are is who you are, period. Characteristics like personality, creativity and intelligence are fixed traits that cannot be developed further.

A growth mindset is a result of belief your qualities are not permanent and you can grow beyond them. People have different talents, aptitudes, temperaments, and interests. They can change and develop themselves through experience and application. It is likely that in life, you end up in a place which feels like you are in the midst of somewhere so you adopt a certain belief for one thing and another belief for another thing.

Dweck writes about this in a simplistic manner. Your mindset wavers from one region to another. You might have different views for artistic talent, personality, intelligence or creativity and whatever those views are, they will act as a source of guidance for your mindset in that particular area.

How Does Mindset Change Your Behavior?

A growth mindset opens you up to learning and new ideas

When you have a fixed mindset, there rises in your mind the urgency to prove your mettle time and again. You see criticism as an assault on your character and you start avoiding it.

On the other hand, a growth mindset opens you up to learning and new ideas. When you start to believe you can get better at something is when you find the real drive to learn, unlearn and relearn. You take criticism as a positive step towards your goals and embrace it willingly. The thing about the growth mindset is you stick to it no matter how far-fetched success might seem.

Here are two examples to help you figure out these two mindsets. Once you are done reading through this short sketch of a situation, revert to yourself and ask how you would have responded to such a situation:

There is one class you really like and its important to attend. You go to it. The teacher returns the midterm exam papers. You discover you have scored a C+. Disappointment takes over you. On your way back home that evening, you discover you got a parking ticket. You are extremely frustrated and call up your friend to talk about it but not quite get the response that you wanted. What would be your response? What thoughts would come to your mind?

If thoughts related to being a failure, frustration, and de-motivation are going through your mind, you have a fixed mindset. However, if your thoughts are directed more towards realizing your mistakes and toward improving yourself, like ‘next time I’ll work harder for the exam’ and ‘maybe I shouldn’t have parked my car there’, you have a growth mindset.

You don’t need to get upset over having either kind of mindset. People with a growth mindset are likely to not feel left out by the labels or don’t allow the view of being defeated. What people with growth mindset do is they keep working and confronting challenges. They stand straight in the face of challenges. It is this mindset that permits a person to alter track of their defeat toward success.

The fixed mindset, usually, ends up in hardly any effort. Dweck has emphasized enough times throughout the book about her startling surprise at the minimum belief people with fixed mindsets have in efforts.

You might wonder about the holistic simplicity of the idea about mindsets and how something as simple as this can impact you so significantly.

Minimum BELIEF, Maximum INFLUENCE

Wondering how one belief can be singlehandedly responsible for the love of challenge, effort, and resilience to setbacks and greater success?

According to the fixed mindset, ‘smart people succeed’. Therefore, success naturally makes you a smart person. So, you pick the easier problem so success can come to you quickly and you can validate your smartness. Picking up a difficult problem may mar your chances of success and increase your risk of failure, eventually revealing your weaknesses.

The growth mindset elucidates that ‘people can get smarter’ and this can be done by expanding yourself and taking challenges head on. Thus, go for the difficult problem, as it doesn’t matter if you fail.

Your mindset is the perception you have of yourself. This mentality becomes a part of you from a young age. Dweck, in one of her studies, revealed they offered a choice to four-year olds of either doing an easy jigsaw puzzle or taking the difficult one. What surprised them was that even at such a young age, children with a fixed mindset opted for the easy option as they believed in smart people not making mistakes.

On the interesting side, the growth-oriented children embraced the difficult puzzle happily and considered the easy one boring and uninteresting.

Does a certain kind of mindset have an influence on the important decisions of your life?

Of course, they do. Dweck has given some great examples of university students and how the decisions they have taken based on their mindsets have shaped the upcoming phase of their lives.

Who would give up the option of improving the overall success in their lives?

Everything is taught in English at the University of Hong Kong. Whilst some students are not as fluent than others in speaking and written English, it can significantly impact every student’s success rate. The students who arrived at the university were asked if they would be interested in taking up an English language course for free if the university provided it. Not surprisingly, the students with fixed mindset showed little to no interest in taking up the course whereas those with growth mindset were totally interested.

This example is a perfect depiction of how fixed mindset people tend to become non-learners. Dweck writes that one thing which stands in the way of development and change is a fixed mindset. If there is a starting point, it is the growth mindset but people need to figure it out where they stand and where do they want to stand.

It’s not like people with fixed mindset are low on confidence, though it may be possible their confidence might be more delicate and easily put off by setbacks and failures. Additionally, a growth mindset does not mean you have to work endlessly. It just depicts you have the right motivation to take on whichever skills you need in any certain situation.

An image by Nigel Holmes at the end of the book successfully summarizes the major ideas covered in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, and how it has certain implications on your life. It reflects on the stark differences between the two mindsets and how the growth mindset is something everyone should work towards.

The key idea worth remembering is the basis for all these behaviors are the simple beliefs you hold dear in daily life about your abilities, strengths, skills as a person and your attitude toward change and learning.

Throughout our lives, we go through numerous situations where our particular mindset determines our reactions and responses.

These reactions and responses can be towards anything, from positive and negative labeling, stereotyping, to opinions of others and their character. Your mindset plays a significant role in the way you respond in your relationships with your family, friends, co-workers, peers, teachers and every person you come across in your life, whether related or unrelated.

A growth mindset is your step to initiating the change you have been intending for so long.

A fixed mindset will halt you from initiating that change and sticking to your old tried and tested formulas may not ultimately lead you to success.

If you are going through depression, frustrations, uneasiness, and unsatisfaction in any aspect related to your life, this book is a must-read for you. It will help you determine your own frame of mind and the way it influences the situations you are in currently. It will provide you with workable strategies on how to get yourself out of a situation where you are not comfortable.

The entire idea of this book deals with how intelligence is independent, changeable, adaptive and un-fixed. The one barrier which halts it from being what it is and can be is our ‘mindset’. Our actions are guided by our thoughts and beliefs.

If we believe in our failures, the inability to do something, and consider ourselves incompetent, that is exactly what we will turn into. However, if we have a more optimistic approach and believe we can pull off everything and that failure will allow more space for growth and learning, then we will be in the exact position we may have imagined ourselves to be in: our dream job or profession.

Whilst this may sound like an everyday idea, that is where the ingenuity and creativity of Dweck comes in. She carefully combines the elements of research and biographies to make her reader grasp the fathomable idea of changing and developing into a person closer to their success.

This book is an elaboration of the stark and persistent differences between the mindsets and how they have carried on across sex, age, culture, socioeconomic status and ability level.

People with a growth mindset are comparatively happier, satisfied, healthier and more likely to succeed. The good news for those with fixed mindsets is that switching to growth mindset is just a book away.

Interested in learning more about Mindset?

• Watch the Carol Dweck: The power of believing that you can improve TED talk
• Read Fixed mindset vs Growth mindset by Derek Sivers

Grab a copy of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success on Amazon.

* All links are affiliate links

Originally published at Jose Casanova’s Thoughts.