Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. wrote a typically dreadful self-help type book to popularize her research on the effects of mindset on performance outcomes. The book is nevertheless worth reading. While the writing cringe inducing and repetitive, the basic idea is profound enough that any amount of thinking about it is rewarding.
Dweck divides the world into two types of people. There are those with a fixed mindset, who believe that ability is determined in advance, and those with a growth mindset, who believe that ability can be improved over time. So a fixed mindset person thinks that people are talented, smart, or athletic by some natural disposition. In which case, their artistic, intellectual, or athletic performance is always just a test of whether they possess this fixed disposition or not. All of life then becomes a pass/fail proposition that proves or disproves one's innate superiority or inferiority. By contrast, a growth mindset person thinks that people become talented, smart, or athletic by working really hard to cultivate those skills. In this case, performance does not reveal who people are, but simply where they are located on a continuum of possibilities. Life's tests then become a series of feedback opportunities and chances to learn what skills you already have and which you need to spend more time cultivating. In short, for the fixed mindset, everything revolves around judging and proving, whereas for the growth mindset, it's all about observing and learning.
Though this contrast is simple, I actually think it's hard to overstate the profound importance of cultivating a growth mindset. If there's something (in our control) more important to our happiness than staying open to the possibility of learning from every experience, please tell me what it is in the comments. For myself, I am more convinced every day that life is better when you maintain a beginner's mind. It's a stance that leads to openness, affirmation, honest examination, and to there being quite simply a lot more to life. So it's hard to exaggerate the importance of the effects of this idea.
Notwithstanding that, Dweck does her best. She writes four essentially identical chapters each crammed with nearly identical anecdotes about business, school, relationships, and parenting. From both an intellectual and stylistic angle, the problem stems from her monomaniacal attempt to prove the cure-all power of the growth mindset. Because while the growth mindset is a wonderful philosophy, it's pretty lousy as a scientific theory. Perhaps it's dangerous to venture too much critique of a popular book without being familiar with the original research on which it's based, but I have the impression that the science part here is pretty weak. Dweck seems to evaluate the independent variable of whether subjects have a fixed or growth mindset by asking them whether they do or not. Am I the only one who suspects that people might not really know what they believe, or might not believe anything particular or consistent at all? And though Dweck inserts a one paragraph caveat at some point, she basically seems to believe that people as a whole, are either fixed or growth mindsetters. Routine self-examination quickly reveals a confusing combination of these two beliefs about different aspects of experience at different times. It's tempting to say that there are no fixed mindset people, only fixed mindset beliefs about a particular trait at a particular time. But, obviously, that waters down the concept of "fixed".
Finally, while Dweck's subtitle is "how we can learn to fulfill our potential", she basically assumes that everyone's potential is wonderfully unlimited and equivalent, but that this fulfillment can be measured with the same tired metrics as always: money, fame, and IQ score. This is simultaneously unrealistic and counter-productive. People's potential for a given task varies naturally. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is innately better suited to basketball than I am. Naturally, that observation shouldn't take anything away from his efforts to become a great basketball player. Is it really so hard to believe that what hand you are dealt in life and how you play it are in fact both important? Does the observation that our given potential varies have to immediately sap us of all belief in the possibility of improvement and turn us into fatalists? And conversely, while it's certainly helpful to believe that change is possible if you want to see change, do we really have to constantly think that the sky's the limit? The book isn't really capable of dealing with these more sophisticated thoughts. But you never know about the sequel. Dweck might learn.
