If you have the fixed mindset and believe you lost the genetic lottery, you also have little incentive to work hard. Why bother putting in a lot of effort to learn a difficult concept if you’ve convinced yourself that you’re lousy at it and nothing is going to alter that basic equation?
When I was visiting with community college students in Arizona, one young man said to me, “I’m one of the people who’s not good at math.” It kills me when I hear that kind of thing. I think about how different things might have been if he had been told consistently “you’re very capable of learning this stuff.”
In contrast, people with the growth mindset believe that basic qualities, including intelligence, can be strengthened like muscles. It’s not that they believe that anyone can become the next Albert Einstein or Michael Jordan if they just work hard enough on their physics homework or fadeaway jumpers.
Instead, in Dweck’s words “they believe 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.” As a result, they have every incentive to take on tough challenges and seek out opportunities to improve.
One of the reasons I loved Mindset is because it’s solutions-oriented. In the book’s final chapter, Dweck describes the workshop she and her colleagues have developed to shift students from a fixed to a growth mindset. These workshops demonstrate that “just learning about the growth mindset can cause a big shift in the way people think about themselves and their lives.”
My only criticism of the book is that Dweck slightly oversimplifies for her general audience. Contrary to the impression that Dweck creates here (but probably not in her academic papers), most of us are not purely fixed-mindset people or growth-mindset people. We’re both.
