10x Core Concepts: 2. Growth Mindset versus Fixed Mindset
Reward the process, not the outcome. Praise hard work, not talent.
You can do anything if you keep working hard enough through small steps.
Immerse into the new topic, practice active recall and spaced repetition.
[Previous article: 10x Core Concepts: 1. Growth versus Development]
A growth mindset is probably the most important ingredient in the ability “to learn how to learn” and thus propel personal development and withstand failure. This probably means it is key to decreasing current social inequalities.
Our biggest obstacle is the lack of imagination. Growth mindset is the power of “not yet” against the “tyranny of now”. Developed by the psychologist Carol Dweck, growth mindset creates a “victorious circle”- and a positive feedback loop of curiosity, hard work and growing confidence in personal abilities.
The opposite to it is a fixed mindset when children and adults don’t even try to solve challenges that lie in from of them. Maybe they believe they will never understand math. So they cheat at exams instead of working hard. This creates a “vicious circle” of envy, corruption of standards and a feelings of failure.
A person with a growth mindset understands that they are not there yet, but if they try and invest for example 2 hours to understand the problem and 20 hours to solve the problem they can do it.
People who want to encourage growth mindset should praise the process and not the results. They should not praise children that they are super talented in something, rather they should praise their current level of effort, or tell them they need to work harder next time.
Overcome the pain and fear of learning new things with a growth mindset
Change your mindset from the fearful and fixed mindset that never tries because things seem hard, into a growth mindset that is fine with not knowing things yet, but is willing to invest a minute, 12 minutes and then 25 minutes, 2 hours and 20 hours in effective and focused learning and slowly gaining a new skill.
It might be painful and frustrating. But also exercising is painful and frustrating. But we feel good afterwards and are proud of ourselves. And we gain strength and speed — something that used to take us 2 hours or even two days at first, we can suddenly do in 20 minutes.
The author of the concept and researcher in motivation, a psychologist Carol Dweck says embrace the “Power of Yet” and escape the “Tyranny of Now”.
The growth mindset is crucial in “learning to learn skills” and in fighting the corruption in public sphere, or in private and professional life.
And specifically it can reduce cheating in schools. Because process (how one gets there) becomes more important than goal itself (what results one achieves). And we can learn from failure, if we fail quickly, if we fail often, and not too drastically.
Because people with growth mindset are comfortable with “not yet”, there are fine with admitting failure and don’t focus only on signaling their competence. They are not interested in knowledge and people only for instrumental reasons (as means to achieve goals), but also for their intrinsic (internal) value. They want to learn or play according to the rules with a fair play as a goal in itself.
Sometimes it is painful to learn new skills because we underestimate the initial difficulty and slowness of picking up a new skill. But then we also underestimate the increasing pace of progress we make. Something that took us week, we can now do in one day and then in two hours. This is called exponential growth and we will discuss it in a separate chapter — Exponential Growth versus Linear growth.
Reconciling Growth Mindset with Fixed Mindset
But are a growth mindset and a fixed mindset totally opposed to each other? Can they be complementary in some ways?
It is important to note that fixed mindset is connected to our identity, to who we are and how we do things. We don’t want to constantly change and reinvent ourselves and we don’t want to lose the core substance of who we are. As children we maybe liked to hang out with people who seemed cool and at the same time hated math or science.
Maybe we are adults now and like social sciences, philosophy and literature and consider people who preach natural sciences as shallow and narrow-minded. We might think they approach on our turf and see the world only through their models and data.
Or we might protest learning English as it is so different from our mother tongue and people who speak it seem to think and act a bit differently when they think in English.
We might feel that the world is losing its diversity when globalization makes all people speak the same and buy the same products. And maybe we find diversity, not only beautiful, but also important for progress and innovation.
People from the cities might look down at people in rural areas as stuck in their old ways and with a culture hostile to change. People in rural areas might look down at city folks as the ones who are selling their soul and culture for profit and have only shallow relationships in an ever faster era.
But we might see a similarity with the previous chapter on Growth versus Development. We tried to reconcile the seemingly irresolvable conflict between growth and development by finding the right moment when to switch from quantity into quality.
There the answer was to take a good measure and a balanced approach, we might call it a fractal approach — stop growing in one area and switch to another area. Stop growing in quantity and start growing in quality. Maybe, if you are a company owner and feel that your customer service is getting worse, stop hiring new employees for a time, and invest into the proper and thorough training of your current employees. But we saw that again we need a quantity of a focused time to achieve that quality of customer service.
Here growth mindset helps us to brace the richness of opportunities in the indefinite future. But we need to have a fixed plan and a fixed block of uninterrupted time to actually develop into a specific and definite future direction. We need a fixed future point that we are moving into. We need to set a vivid picture of our future self and what do we want to achieve with some specific deadline.
So you actually have to block off a certain time and have a fixed period where you do only this one task with full focus. You have to block off other distractions and interests to just focus on learning that one particular skill.
You can use for example the Pomodoro technique — google for an online pomodoro app and set up a timer for 25 minutes of uninterrupted focus on just one task. Then take a 5-minute break and continue another with another pomodoro, another 25 minutes. After four pomodoros, or 2 hours take a longer break, 14 minutes. This is much more productive and effective than multitasking and constant switching between emails, phone, social media and discussions.
Moving with a growth mindset towards a fixed and definite future
Previously we discussed that if we grow too much or too quickly in one area we might become fragile and fail. We need a balanced growth and development in many areas.
The same can be said about the relationship between a growth mindset, that sees endless new possibilities and things to learn everywhere, and a fixed mindset that keeps our core identity and who we are fixed.
Maybe as a child you set a goal to become a famous writer. Now this is your very fixed and definite future. You want to become a famous writer. But over the years you can use a growth mindset and constantly adjust your strategy to get to your desired goal.
Maybe at first you thought that you need to be a full-time writer and earn a living by writing books. But then you learn that many famous writers had a rather dull day jobs, some of them were accountants and bank clerks. For example Franz Kafka was an insurance officer.
So maybe this job security eased their stress and pressure to succeed in writing and allowed them to be more creative. Maybe your growth mindset guides you to completely new territories — instead of poetry you end up writing non-fiction about some breakthroughs in computer science.
But if you don’t have a fixed future point — a fixed and definite future goal you will hardly make a radically better or different product and an innovation that can make a positive difference in the world. You might end up going with the flow, constantly experimenting, competing and randomly soaking in new information.
So again we see a similar pattern — the need for a balance between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. And that both seem to have again something like fractal properties — like the cauliflower that seems to consist of yet smaller cauliflowers and they seem to consist of yet smaller cauliflavers…
You have to nurture a growth mindset to creatively solve challenges that come into your way and learn new skills, but you also have to have a fixed mindset —especially about creating a definite future vision where you build and bootstrap your future fixed identity — the person you want to become.
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Notes on Growth Mindset versus Fixed Mindset
I need to stress that I have only a cursory understanding and knowledge about the research by Carol Dweck who coined this metaphor. But I have a strong intuition that this metaphor can be very useful and is connected to the concept of growth versus development that I described in the previous chapter.
I think that this is the same problem, but now more focused on the process and on timeline, and various future possibilities that constantly arise.
If we want to produce a radically better solution, maybe at least 10x improvement in speed, quality and price, we cannot rely on incremental progress. We need to fix our mind on something that might sound foolish and expensive and unrealistic at first. But thanks to exponential growth the originally exotic solution might totally crush the existing competition or consensus.
Memetic competition, second order effects and reflexivity
At least this is the insight of Peter Thiel that he described in his book Zero To One. He praises the monopolistic power of radically better technology and puts technology into opposition with globalization. Technology helps us to go “from zero to one”, globalization is a memetic competition “from zero to n” (many).
Memetic competition means people competing and catching up with their neighbors and childhood friends by e.g. also buying SUVs or bitcoins — because they see their friends or foes doing it.
Memetic competition, or FOMO (fear of missing out) is similar to the concept of reflexivity (there seems to be bipolar periods in the markets — cheerful rallies are followed by sad selloffs). But there is again a certain fractal property to this move — like a 3D printer head doing the same moves, but printing an ever larger object.
So the memetic competition creates second order effects that Ricardo didn’t understand when he thought about comparative economic advantages. What do second order effects mean? The first order effect is that by offshoring production to China, US companies can increase profits and decrease labor force and American consumers get to buy cheaper products. But the second order effects are that Chinese workers get richer and start also buying SUVs and thus make competition for resources bigger and increase global price of commodities like petrol fuel, also for the US drivers.
Growth mindset helps people to be positive about the future and try out learning more things and learn how to learn, how to fail, how to fail again and fail better. This positive attitude and partial successes motivate others and create a race to the top — people competing and focusing on process of self-improvement and a fair play- not just on achieving results. This partial successes and new skills compound and can lead to exponential growth. The rub or the flipside is that also failures and disappointments can compound and create an increasingly depressing results. This bipolar power laws — people wining or failing exponentially seem to be a deep root of inequality. Growth mindset can refocus people from envy and jealousy and resentment and act as a negative feedback loop — stopping people from ever falling and failing deeper.
Growth mindset as a metaphor for bootstrapping the desired future
Growth mindset seems to me like a very useful metaphor to describe the concept of bootstrapping that is paradoxical — as it creates something from nothing through self-transference. The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy writes extensively about bootstrapping the desired future (e.g. landing on Mars in 2040) or avoiding the undesired future (e.g. reducing climate change and avoiding the flooding of major cities by 2100).
The future in this case is fixed by a definite timeline and vision — for example by a moonshot — some brave goal like a woman landing on Mars in 2040. The time from 2040 until 2018 then becomes a projected time — time projected from the future and this fixed moonshot helps in coordintation of actions of masses of people that compete and cooperate the selected goal. We again see that growth mindset is the paradoxical belief that we can reach the unreachable star and the fixed mindset see our future identity as fixed and definite —for example a picture of a woman astronaut, originally coming from Kajire village in Kenya, and now setting her foot on a red dust of Mars on 1 May 2040.
Growth mindset as means of “growing the pie” and fighting populism and extremism
As I wrote in the beginning our biggest obstacle is the lack of imagination. We are historically used to linear growth and are not good enough at predicting exponential growth or exponential decline.
Populists and extremists focus in my opinion too much on unfair “division of the current existing pie” and underestimate both the possibility of rapid progress if things go well, and a rapid decline if things deteriorate.
The physical pie has some clear limits of growth. But the virtual pie in our shared imagination can grow indefinitely. This is both curse and a blessing. The saying goes that our needs are finite, but our desires infinite. It would help to channel those desires into creating innovative and radically better and sustainable technologies. And not into memetic competition and resentment.
So again we need a good balance between focusing on the fixed identities and grievances of today and a growth mindset that can see people living up to their potential and that can see the importance of fair play and the importance of focusing on process and not a result.
We can see that growth mindset is paradoxical — for example a village girl student from a school in Kenya believing that she is a future astronaut. Now, this paradox of focusing on the process of future becoming and not focusing on a current result of being someone or rather being-not-yet someone, is very similar to the Weberian paradox of Puritan ethics. J-P Dupuy sees this paradox as a key ingredient of capitalism — people coordinate their activities around anticipated future, and thus bootstrap this future through a projected time — time that is being projected from a fixed and definite future goal point.
Dupuy explains that Puritan paradox is the belief that one might be predestined to become chosen, but needs to deliberately work hard as if one is chosen.
He further explains that technically the Puritan paradox is equivalent to Newcomb’s Paradox:
There is a predictor, a player, and two boxes designated A and B. The player is given a choice between taking only box B, or taking both boxes A and B. The player knows the following:[4]
Box A is clear, and always contains a visible $1,000.
Box B is opaque, and its content has already been set by the predictor:
If the predictor has predicted the player will take both boxes A and B, then box B contains nothing.
If the predictor has predicted that the player will take only box B, then box B contains $1,000,000.
So the question is if one shall choose only box B or both boxes. Most lay people when interviewed say that one shall take only the box B. Experts in economics say mostly that the dominant rational choice is to take both boxes — at least one ends up with the 1000 dollars and in case the predictor e.g. wasn’t 100% accurate one might end with also the opaque box full of money.
Now the metaphor of Growth mindset and Fixed mindset developed by Carol Dweck is clearly useful in solving this paradox — focus on process and not on result. Act as if you belonged to the group of “chosen people” who practice a strategy of being constant and focused on winning in the long-run.
Next article: 10x Core Concepts: 3. Fragility — Robustness — Antifragility
