Reading Reflection No. 2 21A

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

By Carol S. Dweck Ph. D.

1. What was the general theme or argument of the book? The book essentially addresses two main mindsets that people have. Either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset will ultimately determine how you react to situations in your life. There are several main keys to each and throughout the book Dweck shows the long-term effectiveness of the growth mindset versus the safe and controlling fixed mindset. Essentially, a fixed mindset creates a desire to look smart and avoid challenges that could prove difficult or create opportunities for failure. In contrast, the growth mindset creates a desire to learn and embrace challenges. Failures are then only seen as failures if it returns you to a fixed mindset that avoids them. By embracing challenges and seeking to learn from them and from the success of others, it opens many new opportunities to learn and grow.

2. The biggest thing that this book helped in force that this class has taught is to be open to failure and to not shy away from challenges and risks. I do not like failure and have done everything I could to avoid that. I like to be successful, but I have now realized that part of that process is learning from failure. This book and the class have enforced this idea and I will seek to change my mindset to be growth minded and not adverse to learning from my failures and other successes.

3. There are some great exercises that were talked about in the book, but there is a different one that would be a great exercise to drive these points home. Each person in class would have to talk to a young elementary age child about their struggles and their successes and walk them through how to think about that from a growth mindset. This would be a great way to see the growth mindset in a simpler way that makes it obvious to us how effective it would be in our lives and tougher scenarios as well. It also helps us to realize the folly of the fixed mind set in our own lives whenever we can see from a child’s perspective the proper mindset in each situation.

4. The biggest surprise in the book was when she took a whole chapter to discuss the mindset and how it affects athletes in different sports. I love sports and have played many of them since I was a child. It was very interesting to hear how despite the different talent levels; it has been shown that those with a growth mindset typically can develop the skill with greater consistency even if lacking in some natural talent. She even discussed famous people such as Billy Beane and Pedro Martinez that struggled with the fixed mindset. Whenever people run into a roadblock in athletics, they either train harder and learn from the struggle or begin to lose hope and become distracted. Also, how they handle success is a key factor whether they are puffed up when they succeed or taught to handle success with humility. Many of these things are developed throughout adolescence and helps shape them as they become collegiate and professional athletes. It was a very interesting chapter and really helped explain the mindset in ways that were clear and decisive to me.