Today, people argue a person’s intellect is based on nature or nurture, genes or environment. In fact, whether the person thrives or not depends on the mindset. If you believe that some people are born with great abilities and some people are dumb, you have a fixed mindset that limits your achievement. Instead, if you are eager to experience new challenges and believe you can improve your intellect through your effort, you have the growth mindset that helps you to grow. You will comprehend these mindsets in detail and how to apply this idea to business, coaching, parenting, and relationships. You can observe yourself while reading the book, whether you have the fixed mindset or the growth mindset.
Effort
People with a fixed mindset believe that their qualities are carved in stone: Natural talent should not need effort. An effort is for the others, the less endowed. Natural talent doesn’t ask for help. Success is about proving you are smart or talented. You have a certain amount of intelligence and you can’t really do much to change it.
The growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others. An effort is what makes you smart or talented. Success is about learning. You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.
Why waste your time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?
The brain gets stronger when you learn. The more that you challenge your mind to learn, the more your brain cells grow. People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenges, they thrive on them. The bigger the challenge, the more they stretch. They look for people who will challenge them to grow. The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset.
If you only go through life doing stuff that easy, shame on you.
Conversely, fixed-minded people want to be the only big fish in the room. They only seek out the tried and true experiences and are afraid of new and bigger challenges. The lower others are, the better they feel.
Many growth-minded people didn’t even plan to go to the top. The top is where the fixed-mindset people hunger to be, but it’s where many growth-minded people arrive as a byproduct of enthusiasm for what they do. People with a growth mindset don’t seek achievements as validation or something that will make them better than others.
An effort is crucial but it’s certainly not the only thing. People have different resources and opportunities. Rich, educated, or connected people have more opportunities.
Failure
In the fixed mindset, you see what happened as a direct measure of your worth. One test or evaluation can measure you forever. It could measure how smart you were and how smart you would be when you grow up. A failure can be a permanent, haunting trauma. Trying and still failing is the worst fear. Instead of repairing the failures, you may look for people who are even worse than you are.
People with a fixed mindset concern about how they’ll be judged and hide their deficiencies. For them, it’s crucial to be perfect right now. Another person’s success is their failure. They think “They must not be as smart as I am”.
In the growth mindset, failure is about not growing. Instead of letting the bad experience define you, you should take control of it and use it to become better. Is someone in your life trying to tell you something you are refusing to hear? Step into the growth mindset and listen again.
Heart
For Michael Jordan, success stems from the mind. “The mental toughness and the heart are a lot stronger than physical advantages. I’ve always believed that”. But people don’t. They look at Michael Jordan and they see the physical perfection that led to his greatness.
When things are hard, you can’t let them affect your focus. The characters don’t think they are special, born with the right to win. They work hard, learn how to keep their focus under pressure, and stretch beyond their ordinary abilities when they have to.
”After every game or practice, if you walk off the field knowing that you gave everything you had, you’ll always be a winner”
Nurturing children
Parents think they can handle children by praising their brains and talent. It doesn’t work and in fact, has the opposite effect. It makes children doubt themselves as soon as anything goes wrong. The best thing parents can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise.
Every word and action from parent to child sends a message. When we say to children, “Wow, you did that so quickly!” or “Look, you didn’t make any mistakes!”, we are telling them that what we prize are speed and perfection.
The process of a growth mindset involves more than just effort. Children need to understand the importance of trying new strategies when the one they are using is not working and we want them to ask for help from others when it’s needed.
Change
All of us have elements of both - we are a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. Understanding that everyone has a fixed mindset persona can give us more compassion for people.
Mindsets are just beliefs. They are just something in your mind and you can change your mind. By understanding the concepts of growth and fixed mindsets, you will observe yourself and you should embrace your fixed mindset. Then, become aware of your fixed mindset triggers. When does your fixed mindset “persona” come home to roost? Next, Give your fixed-mindset persona a name. It can be a character from a book or a name you don’t like. Lastly, educate it in the new growth mindset ways that can support you.
You should remember that change needs to be maintained. Once a problem improves, people tend to stop doing what caused it to improve. Growth takes plenty of time and effort to achieve and maintain.
Becoming is better than being
