Book
review: Mindset: The New Psychology of
Success
By
Dr. Carol S. Dweck, New York: Ballantine Books, 2006
277
pages
This
is one of those books that knocks a hole in your head and then fills it up with
startling knowledge.
Dweck
wrote this rather chatty book about a very serious subject: the mindset that influences
much of your life, and can literally play a critical role in your success or
failure at work, at school, among your friends and at home with your family.
Here’s
a simplistic summary of her findings based on years of teaching and research:
There
is a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A mindset is a frame of
mind that enables you to interpret what’s happening in the world around you,
and to determine how you will feel about it, and how you will act and react.
I’ll
take a stab at briefly defining the two mindsets in my own words.
Fixed mindset—you
interpret most everything that happens to you in terms of whether it validates
your static view of your own abilities and self-worth, in other words, you see
the events and people in your life as confirming that you are talented and
wonderful, or proving that you’re stupid and worthless. You can’t change, and
you’ve got to grab what you deserve.
Growth mindset—you
interpret most everything that happens to you in terms of feedback about your
motivation and your performance, in other words, you see the events and people
in your life as part of your continuous quest to learn and achieve your goals
and enjoy your relationships with others. You can change, and you can learn to
do better.
Of
course, it’s possible to have different mindsets in different circumstances,
and it’s possible to have some mix of the mindsets.
Dweck
says you can learn to have a more effective growth mindset, and you can teach
others, kids and adults, to embrace a more effective growth mindset.
We
can always learn, we can always build up our talents, we can always get
smarter, and we can help ourselves to have more enjoyable lives.
This
all makes sense to me.
I
don’t think I learned everything Dweck can teach me, so I’m going to read the
book again.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
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