[Book 19] Mindset by Carol Dweck

Mindset explains that successful people share the belief that they have the power to significantly grow their existing abilities. People with a “growth mindset” are attracted to challenges because the opportunity to learn and grow far outweighs the inevitable failure that precedes eventual success. Carol cautions us to avoid “fixed mindset” tendencies, which manifest as focusing on trying to prove ourselves and shying away from situations that expose our development opportunities. This book helped me realize that I thrive the most when I seek challenges and lean into the ensuing discomfort that arises from developing a new skill, such a writing a blog.

You should read this book if you…

• seek to improve your approach to learning
• want to increase your awareness of what’s limiting your ability to grow
• want to help instill a love of learning in your kids

Additional Information

Year Published: 2006
Book Ranking (from 1-10): 10 – Superb – Changed the way I live my life
Ease of Read (from 1-5): 2 – Quick read

Key Highlights

1. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others. 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
2. In other words, she separates the ones who get their thrill from what’s easy— what they’ve already mastered— from those who get their thrill from what’s hard
3. Performance cannot be based on one assessment. You cannot determine the slope of a line given only one point, as there is no line to begin with
4. Even in the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience. But it doesn’t define you. It’s a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from
5. Success is about being your best self, not about being better than others; failure is an opportunity, not a condemnation; effort is the key to success
6. The lightbulb has become the symbol of that single moment when the brilliant solution strikes, but there was no single moment of invention. In fact, the lightbulb was not one invention, but a whole network of time- consuming inventions each requiring one or more chemists, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and glassblowers
7. “I believe ability can get you to the top,” says coach John Wooden, “but it takes character to keep you there…. It’s so easy to… begin thinking you can just ‘turn it on’ automatically, without proper preparation. It takes real character to keep working as hard or even harder once you’re there. When you read about an athlete or team that wins over and over and over, remind yourself, ‘More than ability, they have character.’”
8. When students fail tests or athletes lose games, it tells them that they’ve dropped the ball. But the power that CEOs wield allows them to create a world that caters night and day to their need for validation. It allows them to surround themselves only with the good news of their perfection and the company’s success, no matter what the warning signs may be. This, as you may recall, is CEO disease and a peril of the fixed mindset
9. Sometimes we’re not even sure it’s an ability. When we see people with outstanding interpersonal skills, we don’t really think of them as gifted. We think of them as cool people or charming people. When we see a great marriage relationship, we don’t say these people are brilliant relationship makers. We say they’re fine people. Or they have chemistry. Meaning what? Meaning that as a society, we don’t understand relationship skills. Yet everything is at stake in people’s relationships. Maybe that’s why Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence struck such a responsive chord. It said: There are social- emotional skills and I can tell you what they are
10. A no- effort relationship is a doomed relationship, not a great relationship. It takes work to communicate accurately and it takes work to expose and resolve conflicting hopes and beliefs. It doesn’t mean there is no “they lived happily ever after,” but it’s more like “they worked happily ever after.”
11. When we say to children, “Wow, you did that so quickly!” or “Look, you didn’t make any mistakes!” what message are we sending? We are telling them that what we prize are speed and perfection. Speed and perfection are the enemy of difficult learning: “If you think I’m smart when I’m fast and perfect, I’d better not take on anything challenging.” So what should we say when children complete a task— say, math problems— quickly and perfectly? Should we deny them the praise they have earned? Yes. When this happens, I say, “Whoops. I guess that was too easy. I apologize for wasting your time. Let’s do something you can really learn from!”
12. The first important thing to remember here is that the process includes more than just effort. Certainly, we want children to appreciate the fruits of hard work. But we also want them to understand the importance of trying new strategies when the one they’re using isn’t working. (We don’t want them to just try harder with the same ineffective strategy.) And we want them to ask for help or input from others when it’s needed. This is the process we want them to appreciate: hard work, trying new strategies, and seeking input from others