Today’s book is one of the most talked-about promoted books in the last five years, Mindset The Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. She is a Stanford professor with decades of research in the psychology field and thousands of hours of studies. Also, thousands of students she’s seen of all different ages.
Her decades of research on achievement and success led her to discover what great parents, teachers, CEOs, and athletes already know that our mindset is the basis of accomplishment. Her focus is on why do some people keep pushing forward? Why do others give up?
5 Psychological Lessons From Mindset Book
Success depends on mindset. Without a mindset, nobody can go long or achieve something permanent. There are different types of mindsets that help us in different sectors. Let’s get going on the five best ideas and notes from Carol Dweck’s “Mindset” book.
1. Fixed mindset
Carol Dweck says a fixed mindset comes from believing that your qualities are carved in stone. Who you are is who you are, period. Characteristics such as intelligence, personality, and creativity are fixed traits rather than something that can be developed.
- A fixed mindset says things are the way they are, and they’re unchangeable.
- This mindset creates by childhood environment: behavior and brainpower.
What happens if a whole community’s vibe is a fixed mindset, that these kids are at a disadvantage? They can’t learn. They have all these obstacles in their way that we’re trying to get around.
People with a fixed mindset, beliefs, and intelligence can’t be changed. This leads to a desire to look smart, so they avoid challenges. They don’t want to look bad if they fail, which holds them back in the face of obstacles. They get defensive or give up easily. Also, they say it is pointless and believe that people are only great things because they were born with unique talents. People with a fixed mindset achieve much less than they’re capable of.
2. Growth mindset
Carol Dweck says a growth mindset comes from believing that primary qualities can cultivate through efforts. People differ significantly and aptitude, talents, interests, or temperaments. But everyone can change and grow through application and experience.
Let’s go back to that story. Carol Dweck was working with those kids with some of the lowest test scores, especially in math and science. She taught the teachers. She taught everyone how to coach kids to go from a new mindset. She went from a now mindset and coached everyone to encourage the kids to go from a not yet.
That one differentiation of what it might not be now but not yet is so much different. So the teachers started working with the kids, pushing them, and saying, hey, who cares if you can’t do it now? It’s all about the not yet.
- A growth mindset develops from experience, learning, and work-action.
- Let’s keep encouraging, keep like we taught the baby how to walk with encouragement and practice.
With that one simple mindset shift, it makes all the difference. People with a growth mindset believe intelligence can be developed. It leads to a desire to learn. So instead of avoiding challenges, they embrace them. They persist in facing obstacles and see them as a path to mastery.
Lastly, they feel inspired by and learn from the success of others. A growth mindset allows athletes to maintain their success in the long term. Carol found that athletes with a growth mindset found success in doing their best in learning and improving, found setbacks, motivating, and took charge of the processes that bring success.
3. Progress mindset
It’s less about getting things right and more about the progress that if we feel like we’re making progress towards something, our brain sees it as success.
- A progress mindset depends on willpower and motivation.
- This mindset constantly updates through success and failure feelings.
Everyone knows this deep down. You go to the gym. You can’t lift two plates right off the bat. You’ve got to work up towards that. It would be ridiculous to go into the gym straight off the bat.
So you’ve got to increase it slowly. And over time, you get stronger and better. You can get the same result if you’re dedicated and make enough progress.
There are five major areas: health, sports, money, relationships, and business, where this fixed and growth mindset kicks in. Just focus on the growth and don’t get discouraged because that’s a concept of the fixed mindset. And if you have that growth mindset, you’ll get there over time if you value progress.
4. Mindset in business
Jim Collins and his team conducted a five-year research project to determine how companies go from good to great. They found that great companies had leaders with a growth mindset in the late 1980s. IBM was in trouble. Their culture was filled with people trying to be better than each other. They had a culture of smugness and defending personal status that inhibited learning and growth.
- In business, a growth mindset increases product quality, management skills, creativity, and skills.
Over the next nine years, IBM increased in value by eight hundred percent. Ultimately, Caro argues that successful businesses need to train leaders, managers, and employees to have a growth mindset.
This can be done by cultivating a growth mindset and presenting skills as learnable, conveying that the organization values learning and perseverance, not talent-giving feedback. That promotes learning and future success and presents managers as learning resources.
5. Mindset in relationships
There are two common ways of dealing with pain and heartbreak in a relationship. The first is to label yourself as unlovable and seek revenge. It is how fixed mindset people deal with it. They let these experiences scar them and prevent them from forming new relationships with people with a growth mindset.
It’s about understanding, forgiving, and moving on. Although these negative experiences, like anyone, deeply hurt them, they want to learn from them.
- A growth-minded approach to a relationship is helping partners to reach their own goals and fulfill their potential.
- In a relationship, it’s possible to believe your qualities, your partner’s qualities, and the association’s qualities are fixed.
- The growth mindset says that these qualities can be developed to figure out ways of thinking about a relationship.
The truth is that all relationships require work and effort. The romanticized idea of a perfect problem for a relationship that automatically works is unrealistic.
The second way of thinking about relationships is that problems indicate character flaws. People often blame their relationship problems on their partner and assign the blame to a character flaw. They think their partner is angry when the problem is not the person but the situation.
How to change the mindset?
The first way is to access Carol’s resources. The brainology computer program is designed to help students develop a growth mindset through classroom activities and online instruction. Other resources include a live workshop, webinars, keynote presentations, etc.
The second way to change your mindset is merely knowing about the growth mindset. Imagine the impact we can make by sharing this article with someone. It could be friends, family, partners, students, or co-workers.
From an expense standpoint, talk about the identity of someone who can’t do something you’re not going to want to try. You’re not going to want to stick out, that you’re not going to want to grow through that. It doesn’t matter if progress is how we feel rewarded if we automatically go into it with the mindset that we can’t.
Get on your team. You coach yourself. The way you do this is by keeping a journal. It is the best way. The number one thing you can do to develop that sort of objective viewpoint on yourself.
How to think correctly? (The mindset of a billionaire)
The largest gap between successful and unsuccessful people is the thinking gap. It’s not about being smart. Also, it’s about IQ. Successful people think differently than unsuccessful people. Why thinking leads to right living, stupid thinking leads to wrong with. If you want to have a fulfilled life, you have to fill your mind correctly. Right now, you need to focus on today.
Many leaders don’t understand that truth today matters, and we overestimate what we could do tomorrow. We exaggerate what we did yesterday but underestimate what we can do now. So the question for all of us is, what am I doing without the great leaders? Because of that, they maximize the moment.
Just do it
Today you’re preparing to make tomorrow a success. We all want to be motivated, yet we often fail to find the secret of motivation. Motivation is not the cause of action. It’s the byproduct of action. There’s a lot of difference.
If you think motivation is the cause of your action, you will wait to be motivated. But if you realize your action’s byproduct that you will start doing something, then motivation will come up. So let it be the byproduct you like. Don’t let it be the foundation for the actions that you take.
- Don’t cheat yourself out of the possibility of the potential on the other side of commitment.
Nothing comes to you until you commit yourself. Nothing comes to you if you’re going to try, but you’re not committed. It’s not until you take the action step. It’s not until you take the direction that things start to flow through you.
Develop habits
The great value of a good habit is you don’t have to think about it. That’s why it’s a habit. In other words, what you began to do over days and times and periods, began to practice something good. After a while, it becomes automatic to you. It becomes who you are. Practice a good habit long enough to make it yours. Once it’s yours now, it’s automatic.
Every day you’ll do what you should do. There were no shortcuts. It’s all effort to get you to the top of the mountain. I want you to understand that inspiration does better when coupled with perspiration. There are a whole lot of people. They want to be inspired by great things but don’t want to work hard to achieve those great things. You’ll be amazed that you get inspired once you do the work. Don’t wait to get inspired before you do the work.
Learn more: Mindset Book Review With Summary
Author: Carol Dweck
Average Rating: (4.6 /5)
Category: Business, Parenting, Relationship, Management & Leadership
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