book review: Mindset

Rewriting this post (which, alas, blogspot has forced me to do, grumble grumble grumble) has given me an extra opportunity to practice something I learned from Carol Dweck, Ph.D., in her book, Mindset.

The premise of the book is simple but extraordinarily valuable. Dweck argues that there are two ways to approach the world -- two mindsets, if you will -- that people fall into. One is a fixed mindset, where traits and skills are permanently frozen and any value an individual has in life comes from the application of those traits and skills. It is easy for a person with a fixed mindset to define herself -- "I am smart," "I am funny," "I am valuable because I succeed at ____________." (And I certainly don't know anyone like that...) (ahem) The danger of the fixed mindset is that anything that causes friction between your beliefs about who you are and the reality of a situation (e.g., a bad grade on a test, a lack of laughter at a comedy show) becomes a defining moment. "I am no longer smart or funny. I am a failure."

The second approach is a growth mindset, where identity is more fluid and learning takes on a more important role. In the growth mindset, failure is just an opportunity to re-evaluate the situation. Bad grade on a test? Just means you have to go back to the book to try to comprehend what you missed on the test. No laughter? Hmmm, maybe the show needs to be reworked a little bit. Failure in the growth mindset is "a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from." (p.33)

Which brings me back to the beginning of this post. I wrote it beautifully (if I do say so myself) and posted it, only to encounter a major error and the eating (by blogspot) of my post. Now, from a fixed mindset, I could have said to myself that I was a loser, a failure, what, you can't even post a blog the right way? In the growth mindset, though, I can focus on saving the drafts and making sure that what appears to be saving is actually saving.

There are arenas in my life where I definitely live in a fixed mindset -- acting, "smarts," my body, money -- and arenas in which I live in a growth mindset -- coaching, fiction, working out. And I want to transition more of the fixed areas (which are comfortable simply because when I am not taking risks, I get to feel superior) into growth areas (where superiority and inferiority aren't even issues).

Where are you in a fixed mindset? Where are you in a growth one?