Recently I read two awesome books on growth mindset. The first was Mathematical Mindset by Jo Boaler which led me to read Growth Mindset by Carol Dweck. These influential books discuss the power of mindset. Mindset is the collection of beliefs that shape how you make sense of the world and yourself, influencing how you think, feel, and behave in any given situation.[1]
Mindset is powerful because it can totally affect your outcomes in any endeavor. When we are young, many people adopt what is called a fixed mindset, which is a belief that people have an innate and unchangeable amount of intelligence and abilities.[2] When people with a fixed mindset approach a task, they mentally calculate whether they can do a task easily, and if they determine it is a risk to their identity and reputation as a smart or talented person, they decide that it is not worth trying.
Many incredibly talented people have a fixed mindset approach to life. They are so smart and naturally skilled that things tend to come easily for them most of the time. Think of the kind of prodigy that was good at basketball without trying, a person just physically built to play with innate skill. Think of the math genius that barely had to study. For many of us this was an ideal. To get through life like a “genius” without having to struggle and expend effort. Geniuses do not struggle. Practice is a formality, a confirmation of their greatness.
But things have a way of getting difficult in any field we might try to take on and when things inevitably reach a point of great adversity, naturally talented people with a fixed mindset suffer and often quit entirely. The psychological burden of being marked “not a genius” caused by failures and struggle for someone with a fixed mindset can be immensely damaging. This is when people decide that they are just not meant for sports, math, music, or art. Every time a task involving a skill they are not a genius at comes up, people with a fixed mindset decide not to even try. Math is not for them. They do not have the talent.
Society has a way of putting natural geniuses on a pedestal. As kids many of us were praised for “being smart” and for having natural abilities. For many people, their identity is entirely tied up in being the genius. Any hint that they might not be the best, the most special, is a major psychological threat, which means they never do anything they cannot 100% for certain do well. For some others, not having ever been a genius has been a tremendous burden because it has meant that most difficult tasks were beyond them. For the non-geniuses with a fixed mindset, most things are not even worth trying.
This is where growth mindset comes in. Growth mindset is simple, it is the belief that your abilities and intelligence are not fixed. That you can get smarter with effort. In Jo Boaler’s book Mathematical Mindset, she describes how students can dramatically alter their mathematical abilities and results simply by changing their mental attitude to math. It goes into detail on the different math cultures of the countries with the best achievement results in math and how they differ from the genius obsessed culture that is more prevalent in the US. She describes how children can go from being extreme under achievers in math to high level performance in the subject and how everyone can improve their math skill at any age and with a lot of effort gain great mathematical ability. Even students with learning disabilities or other mental health issues.
Carol Dweck’s book goes over the use of growth mindset in many different fields from sport to art and even to social situations. For example, approaching a complex social environment like a party is quite different with a growth mindset than with a fixed mindset. In the fixed mindset, you do not want to make any mistakes or betray any hint that you might not be a hyper intelligent, hyper competent person. Whereas the growth mindset allows errors, they do not define you. In fact, they are learning opportunities that can only make you stronger. The growth mindset person can take risks because his identity as a genius is not at stake, which is crucial in leadership and entrepreneurship.
Life is not fair. Talent is real. Some people really do have more skill than others. But over the long arc of a career, the kind of perseverance brought about by growth mindset can win out. It makes sense. A real champion would persevere against adversity and not just coast on their abilities. The greatest high performers leverage their natural skill with the belief that effort will make them even stronger. But with enough effort, non-geniuses can defeat geniuses in many cases.
Growth mindset is already having a significant impact on my performance and life. I have a few simple rules posted to the top of my screen now that I look at every day:
I can get smarter.
Learning is my goal.
Effort makes me stronger.
I have a passion for challenges.
Feedback and failure are learning opportunities.
I focus on the process, not the outcome.
Effort is the path to mastery.
There is no math gene. (Or art gene, or sports gene).[3]
You do not have to be fast to be good at math.[4]
Footnotes:
[3] Talent is real, but it's not the only determining factor or in most cases even the primary determining factor.
[4] Jo Boaler goes to great length to emphasize that one of the biggest obstacles to math achievement in Americans is an obsession with speed and regurgitation of fixed solutions to problems. But in real life, many difficult problems do not have an easy and quick solution, and it is the problem solving, deliberate and slow thought process that will result in a solution. So you want to focus on working hard at solving difficult problems. Not on "solving them as fast as possible or rage quitting."
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