Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

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.

The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga's novel was already sitting on the shelf.  Which made it a convenient choice given that I was looking for something breezy to offset Pale Fire.  It's the thoroughly entertaining story of an Indian servant who escapes the "chicken coop" of poverty by breaking all the rules and offing his master.  Along the way it gives Adiga plenty of room to reflect on what perpetuates the dramatic corruption and inequality of India.  While I enjoyed the story and generally enjoyed the writing as well, I think the fact that it won the Man Booker prize has more to do with politics than art.  Perhaps that's true of all prizes though?  Adiga's most interesting literary device is setting the story in the form of a letter from the protagonist to Wen Jiaboa.  So technically, I guess it's an epistolary novel.  But of course this also allows him to slip in a question that the West considers truly subversive: what's so great about democracy?  And from that ironic distance, he's able to give us a classic suspense story in the sense of Hitchcock: the audience already knows what's going to happen, but they are as clueless as the characters about exactly when and how the ax will fall.  While it was enjoyable, you're not missing much by just watching the Netflix adaptation.

Zen Flesh Zen Bones

Since I so thoroughly enjoyed The Gateless Gate, I thought I'd investigate Zen literature a bit more.  This collection actually contains four different texts packages together.  

The first is a collection of 101 Zen stories that were originally published in the 13th century as the Collection of Stone and Sand.  While these are all entertaining and enlightening to some degree, the majority of them don't live up to the (extremely high) standards of thought-provoking-ness set by The Gateless Gate.  There are, however, a number of gems in here like Nan-In's cup of tea and Toyo's sound of one hand. 

The second is another translation of The Gateless Gate.  I prefer the version I read earlier because the Yamada Koun translation also provides a second layer of commentary specifically meant to take these koans more accessible to Westerners.  

The third is a reprint of the 10 Bulls or 10 Ox Herding Pictures that are meant to describe the stages of enlightenment.  The drawings reprinted here are those of Tokuriki Tomikichiro, with the verses from Kuòān Shīyuǎn, and commentary from who knows where.  I find this the most appealing of all the maps of enlightenment I've encountered so far, mainly for its simplicity and the sense of everyday mystery in those last few drawings.  Also, I have a solid intuitive sense that I'm working on stage 5 right now: Taming the Bull.

The final bit is a translation of a 7th century BCE Hindu scripture that bears a passing resemblance to the style of the later Zen writings.  However, this text is so old, so terse, and so severed from its context and tradition that it reads much like the fragments we have from the Presocratics.  It's not that you can't see the resemblance, it's just that you're given so little information that it's unclear whether you're drawing most of this connection from the context.   If you want to know more about this remarkably old bit of scripture, you can go down the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra wikipedia rabbit hole.  I mean, who even knew there was such a thing as Kashimir Shaivism?  That is, beyond the roughly 1.3b people for whom this question is not rhetorical.

Of Human Bondage

I picked up Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage because it was already on the shelf and because it was supposed to be a classic.  While it's not a bad novel, I just don't see how it's remarkable enough to warrant that description.  Maugham tells the story of the first 30 years of the sensitive young club-footed boy Philip Carey.  While Philip has a basically good heart, he's not really portrayed as that likeable a character, which is surprising since we are told in the author's preface that he is autobiographically inspired.  He's so overly sensitive, so filled with shame and rage, so fixated on class distinctions, so ... British, that he's just a hard kid to love.  Naturally, there's some drama in Philip's life.  He's an orphan.  He's differently-abled.  He falls in love with a whore.  He runs out of money.  All of these events and Philip's reactions to it are portrayed in fluid and mercifully spare prose that unfolds only gradually, growing up with its main character, as it were.  But in the end, it feels like the novel makes a 600 page mountain out of what is, at bottom, a molehill.  Growing up seems really dramatic while it happens, but in a sense it's one of the most boring and commonplace stories humans have to tell.  And despite all the drama, Philip Carey's childhood leads to the most pedestrian and bourgeois of destinations -- a small town doctor with a wife and kids.  

Heart of Darkness

Since I was thinking of watching Apocalypse Now again, I decided that I'd go back and re-read Conrad's classic.  While I more or less enjoyed it, I can't say I thought it was truly amazing literature.  This time it seemed to me over-written and a little repetitious.  In a sense, there's not much left to the imagination here.  Conrad hammers on the inscrutable and mysterious heart of darkness till everything becomes a symbol of ... "the horror, the horror".  The plot of the novel does a better job of showing you this horror than Conrad does of describing it, and if I were his editor, I would have been tempted to cut out quite a lot of his flights of pseudo-philosophical narration.  Perhaps, since it was published as a serial magazine story, Conrad didn't want to trust too much of its interpretation to the subtlety of the reader?  Or perhaps he considered this overloaded style the only way to break through the thick shell of colonialism's moral hypocrisy -- by speaking to it in its own language?

Nevertheless, there are some memorable scenes.  I particularly love the opening scene of sunset on the Thames that sets the story in its context.  And Marlowe's reaction to the death of his helmsman is perfect.  Save for the parallel mourning women though, the actual encounter with Kurtz is pretty forgettable.  It's as if he exists only in Marlowe's fevered imagination, the symbol of something that has to remain forever hidden I suppose.

Never Let Me Go

 After enjoying Klara and the Sun so much, I picked up another Kazuo Ishiguro novel that was supposed to be vaguely sci-fi.  While I probably enjoyed Klara more, this one was also well worth reading.  It's unfortunately difficult to discuss without spoiling the plot.  In fact, I can't even really mention the core conceit of the novel that leads people to call it sci-fi without giving away too much.  Even more so than Klara, it's best read knowing as little as possible.  Naturally, this restriction also makes it difficult to say much of anything in a review.  On some level the book is about the triviality of life, the unbearable lightness of being, the irrelevant preciousness of nostalgia.  It also reminded me a little bit of The Sheltering Sky for its purposefully slow start and the way its existentialist questions sneak up on you.

Underland, The Travels of Marco Polo

Last year I read almost 50 books.  I haven't kept up that same pace so far this year, but let's say that I can average 50 a year from now on.  Since I expect to live another 32 years, that leaves about 1,600 books to go.  It may sound like a lot, but with over 200 already on my Amazon wish list, I don't have time to fuck around.  So this year I decided that if I discover a book is a dud early on, I'm just going to drop it without finishing.  This idea sounds obvious, I know, but to start a book and not finish it has always offended my mania for doing a complete job, so I've done it only very rarely.  No longer.  YOLO.  And more to the point YO read a finite number of books.  You better make them count.

I didn't get very far with Robert McFarlane's Underland: A Deep Time Journey.  Portentously written, it just seemed to ramble on with truisms about how humans like to hide things underground.  Then he got lost in a cave.  This reader at least never made it out.

I also started The Travels of Marco Polo.  This promised to be more interesting at first, since the hero of pool tag is a more interesting character than I realized.  He was not simply some random Italian merchant who posted his vacation on Insta.  Marco Polo first went to Mongolian when he was just 17, and he spent the next 17 years as one of Kublai Khan's court functionaries.  Shortly after he returned to Venice he ended up in a jail in Genoa where he dictated the book.  So the author is at least as much Mongolian as he is Italian, which changes my image of him substantially.  He is not your typical tourist.  Unfortunately, he is your typical boring writer.  The Travels reads like the exact opposite of a tall tale.  As he moves from city to city, he describes the trip and the people in prosaic terms that focus mostly on what they grow and manufacture.  After about the fifth city you get the picture.  He makes the fantastic voyage feel about as exciting as reading an outdated 10K.