If you have the fixed mindset, you believe that your talents and abilities are set in stone–either you have them or you don’t. You must prove yourself over and over, trying to look smart and talented at all costs. This is the path of stagnation. In other words, you are who you are, your intelligence and talents are fixed, and your fate is to go through life avoiding challenge and failure.
If you have a growth mindset, however, you know that talents can be developed and that great abilities are built over time. You see yourself as fluid and a work in progress. Your fate is one of growth and opportunity. This is the path of opportunity–and success.
Which mindset do you possess? Dweck provides a checklist to assess yourself and shows how a particular mindset can affect all areas of your life.
Dweck demonstrates that mindset unfolds in childhood and adulthood and drives every aspect of our lives, from work to sports, from relationships to parenting. She reveals how creative geniuses in all fields–music, literature, science, sports, business–apply the growth mindset to achieve results. Perhaps even more important, she shows us how we can change our mindset at any stage of life to achieve true success and fulfillment. She looks across a broad range of applications and helps parents, teachers, coaches, and executives see how they can promote the growth mindset.
The good news, says Dweck, is that mindsets are not set: at any time, you can learn to use a growth mindset to achieve success and happiness. This is a serious, practical book. Dweck’s overall assertion that rigid thinking benefits no one, least of all yourself, and that a change of mind is always possible, is welcome.
Whether human qualities are things that can be cultivated or things that are carved in stone is an old issue. What these beliefs mean for you is a new one: What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait? Let’s first look in on the age-old, fiercely waged debate about human nature and then return to the question of what these beliefs mean for you.
WHY DO PEOPLE DIFFER?
Since the dawn of time, people have thought differently, acted differently, and fared differently from each other. It was guaranteed that someone would ask the question of why people differed—why some people are smarter or more moral—and whether there was something that made them permanently different. Experts lined up on both sides. Some claimed that there was a strong physical basis for these differences, making them unavoidable and unalterable. Through the ages, these alleged physical differences have included bumps on the skull (phrenology), the size and shape of the skull (craniology), and, today, genes.
Others pointed to the strong differences in people’s backgrounds, experiences, training, or ways of learning. It may surprise you to know that a big champion of this view was Alfred Binet, the inventor of the IQ test. Wasn’t the IQ test meant to summarize children’s unchangeable intelligence? In fact, no. Binet, a Frenchman working in Paris in the early twentieth century, designed this test to identify children who were not profiting from the Paris public schools, so that new educational programs could be designed to get them back on track. Without denying individual differences in children’s intellects, he believed that education and practice could bring about fundamental changes in intelligence. Here is a quote from one of his major books, Modern Ideas About Children, in which he summarizes his work with hundreds of children with learning difficulties:
A few modern philosophers . . . assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism. . . . With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.
Who’s right? Today most experts agree that it’s not either–or. It’s not nature or nurture, genes or environment. From conception on, there’s a constant give and take between the two. In fact, as Gilbert Gottlieb, an eminent neuroscientist, put it, not only do genes and environment cooperate as we develop, but genes require input from the environment to work properly.
At the same time, scientists are learning that people have more capacity for lifelong learning and brain development than they ever thought. Of course, each person has a unique genetic endowment. People may start with different temperaments and different aptitudes, but it is clear that experience, training, and personal effort take them the rest of the way. Robert Sternberg, the present-day guru of intelligence, writes that the major factor in whether people achieve expertise “is not some fixed prior ability, but purposeful engagement.” Or, as his forerunner Binet recognized, it’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest.
WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN FOR YOU? THE TWO MINDSETS
It’s one thing to have pundits spouting their opinions about scientific issues. It’s another thing to understand how these views apply to you.
Dweck writes in her introduction,
“For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value. How does this happen? How can a simple belief have the power to transform your psychology and, as a result, your life?
“Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character—well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.
“Some of us are trained in this mindset from an early age. Even as a child, I was focused on being smart, but the fixed mindset was really stamped in by Mrs. Wilson, my sixth-grade teacher. Unlike Alfred Binet, she believed that people’s IQ scores told the whole story of who they were. We were seated around the room in IQ order, and only the highest-IQ students could be trusted to carry the flag, clap the erasers, or take a note to the principal. Aside from the daily stomachaches she provoked with her judgmental stance, she was creating a mindset in which everyone in the class had one consuming goal—look smart, don’t look dumb. Who cared about or enjoyed learning when our whole being was at stake every time she gave us a test or called on us in class?
“I’ve seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves—in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships. Every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character. Every situation is evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser?
But doesn’t our society value intelligence, personality, and character? Isn’t it normal to want these traits? Yes, but . . .
There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. 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.
Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.
Did you know that Darwin and Tolstoy were considered ordinary children? That Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time, was completely uncoordinated and graceless as a child? That the photographer Cindy Sherman, who has been on virtually every list of the most important artists of the twentieth century, failed her first photography course? That Geraldine Page, one of our greatest actresses, was advised to give it up for lack of talent?
You can see how the belief that cherished qualities can be developed creates a passion for learning. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow?”
The good news? According to Dweck who quotes George Eliot, “It’s never to late to be what you might have been.”
About the Author (according to the back jacket)
Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading researchers in the fields of personality, social psychology, and developmental psychology. She has been the William B. Ransford Professor of Psychology at Columbia University and is now the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her scholarly book Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development was named Book of the Year by the World Education Fellowship. Her work has been featured in such publications as The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, and she has appeared on The Today Show and 20/20. She lives with her husband in Palo Alto, California.
[This entire review is an amalgam of other reviews -- I wrote it from a fixed mindset!]
What helps a great deal is the guidance of Pema Chodron, author of Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living and The Wisdom of No Escape: A Path to Loving Kindness. Chodron is a Tibetan Buddhist Abbess at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia and her titles’ say exactly what she means. Though she’s a rigorously-trained Buddhist practitioner and teacher, she offers the rest of us (non-Buddhists, presumedly) a very basic philosophy that claims, “the emotions you resist persist.”
But the good news is that there’s a practice one can begin that fosters working “with” what arises without shellacking it. The Tibetan Buddhist method is called Lojong (“taking and sending”). How you cultivate this practice amidst the storms (in you and all around you) goes like this: “breathe in” the fear and release through exhaling “not fighting fear.”
“Breathe in” allows or “takes in” the fact that we are all feeling fear; and, through exhaling we “send out” to all (including your perceived enemies and yourself) a wish that may go something like this: “May we all find a peace and water the roots of peace in our hearts and minds.”
Again, the aim is peace and this is won by NOT fighting. Not fighting my feelings, not denying the emptiness or hopelessness of the perceived state of the world nor denying the “vibes”of what feels like MY current experience in this cultural context. It helps me to know that what I’m experiencing feels real but, this pinched reality of greed, ignorance, and aggression, like all reality in the cycle of living and dying, will not last.
I’m sure some of my readers may think this is gobbly gook and others may believe this cultural moment is “God’s way of humbling us.” Maybe that’s how it is for her/him. I find life includes me but is not all about me; it’s not happening TO me but FOR us to be with in a skillful, non-ego-grasping (or controlling) way.
That skillful way might include an attitude that arises quite naturally when I’m with a friend in hospice.
On such a shared vulnerable occasion, I would not pretend “it’s all groovy,” “let’s focus on the positive,” nor would I say, “you’re totally screwed, my friend!” Rather, I might just BE with my friend, hold his hand, wish her well and, if I had to speak at all, perhaps I would say, “I’m here with you, wide awake and aware, not denying anything that comes up in me or in you [acceptance]. Let’s work with IT [action] until there’s no IT to work with.”
This Four A’s approach need not be the way but may simply be a way to practice living with what some people call mindful compassion–a way that excludes nothing and is touched by everything without getting overwhelmed.
NOTE: Don’t hesitate to checkout my book, Loving Life As It Is. It’s full of meditation techniques to work with whatever arises in your life (bringing calm to your particular storms).
