I am still a proud member of Nerd Nation even if my glasses have gotten smaller and hopefully cooler over the years. Because of this, I read a lot—usually more than 50 novels per year. Because I believe readers are typically more interested in learning about newer works, many of the books I review on Gates Notes are recent publications. Yet, I also enjoy rereading earlier novels that strike me as particularly significant or pertinent. One of those books is Mindset: The New Psychology of Achievement (2006) by Dr. Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist.
At a fantastic brainstorming session about schooling with my buddy Nathan Myhrvold a few years ago—sessions like those Malcom Gladwell wrote about in “In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?,” I first learned about mindset. That day, Dweck’s findings had a significant influence on our thinking. And over the years, Dweck’s work and the results of her research have aided in my understanding of these attitudes and routines, as well as the understanding of my foundation’s colleagues.
Dweck’s main argument is that while intelligence and talent are influenced by our genes, they are not fixed at birth. You function with what Dweck refers to as a “fixed mindset” as opposed to a “growth mindset” if you erroneously think that your abilities come from DNA and destiny rather than from practice and tenacity. The perspective we adopt is greatly influenced by our parents and teachers, and this mindset in turn has a significant impact on how we learn and the directions we pursue in life.
In experiment after experiment, Dweck has shown that the fixed mindset is a huge psychological roadblock—regardless of whether you feel you were blessed with talent or not. If you have the fixed mindset and believe you were blessed with raw talent, you tend to spend a lot of time trying to validate your “gift” rather than cultivating it. To protect your self-identity as someone who’s super smart or gifted, you often steer clear of tough challenges that might jeopardize that identity. Here’s how Dweck puts it: “From the point of view of the fixed mindset, effort is only for people with deficiencies…. If you’re considered a genius, a talent, or a natural—then you have a lot to lose. Effort can reduce you.”
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.”
