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I have the book, started reading it about a year ago and stopped halfway, because my bullshit cup got full.

The reason I think this book is nicely packaged bullshit is because it presents exceptions as rules and then tries to build a theory out of it.

I wish it were as easy as Dr. Dweck describes it, but there are gotchas.

I can agree with the distinction of 'fixed' versus 'growth' mindsets (although... .. how do you measure that?), but that success is guaranteed if you believe and try... Not necessarily. Ask 9 startup founders out of 10.

Not achieving "success" (failing) is rarely free: it leaves emotional and physical scars.. Repeat it a couple of times and you're either dead or on your way there.

No, success is not guaranteed even if you try many many times times, even if you train a lot and believe a lot.

In fact, the rule is this: No matter how hard you try, you might still lose. Sorry about that.

And the reason for this is not mindset - the reason is your definition of success. If you try to win at the wrong game, you will probably lose at it. So pick your game wisely.

Of course, a fixed mindset will only land you some semi-boring job, a family, a couple of kids and a lot of mainstream entertainment.. I guess that's the definition of "failure" these days... But is it ?

*

By the way, if you want useful advice about how to be successful in life, Bill Gates is a very bad choice. It might be counterintuitive at first, but think about it ... As a bird, is it smart to fly around with your mouth wide open in order to catch food... because that's what the whale does ?

This is such an unhealthy way to view the world, so full of cynicism and an easy path to self-loathing.

> Not achieving "success" (failing) is rarely free: it leaves emotional and physical scars.. Repeat it a couple of times and you're either dead or on your way there.

This is where the mindset change matters so importantly. If you view every point of lack of success as failure, of course it will defeat you- but if you instead view it as a learning experience, and you try your best to understand why the failure came, you can build something out of it.

This is a common strategy to gaining skill in- well, anything- but especially in games. Often the difference between someone with innate talent and someone with experience, is that the person with innate talent can keep up in terms of general mechanics- they can think ahead, guess their enemy out, and go faster, just stressing their enemy out.

But they'll still be beaten incredibly quickly by someone with experience, because they don't recognize the patterns that lead to loss. In fact, one can climb the ladder of skill to the highest echelons of Chess, Formula 1, or Starcraft off of simply exploiting other people's lack of knowledge in a specific pattern.

> In fact, the rule is this: No matter how hard you try, you might still lose. Sorry about that.

For sure. But then again, to always lose no matter what, is about as likely as being Bill Gates. And none of us- truly, none of us- know what the future holds for us. Some of this decade's most successful people didn't see it until their late 40s.

Life is a lot more interesting than "settle for average". We haven't even begun to figure it out, that's why you can even still have such crazy outliers as Gates.

> No matter how hard you try, you might still lose.

This is true and inspires tremendous fear. It prevents many would-be successes. I suspect far more than enough to offset the would-be failures. We could recapture this lost value with a universal basic income. We're just too busy chasing down all the "lazy" people while simultaneously declaring their uselessness. It would be funny if it weren't so sad. Why are they useless anyway?

"Bill Gates: No. I think after the first three or four years, it's pretty cast in concrete whether you're a good programmer or not. After a few more years, you may know more about managing large projects and personalities, but after three or four years, it's clear what you're going to be. There's no one at Microsoft who was just kind of mediocre for a couple of years, and then just out of the blue started optimizing everything in sight. I can talk to somebody about a program that he's written and know right away whether he's really a good programmer." http://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-become-a-better-programm....
Lord, the grandiosity here is breathtaking.

You've set it up as: I achieve SUCCESS and am a winner, or I fail again and again and again at everything I do and I'm a failed startup founder and on my way to death.

I understand that voice, I really do, and it's the voice of perfectionism coming through grandiosity. It's an incredible barrier to success, because your choices are, "I'm going to write THE BEST math paper!! ! !" or "I'm a failure." This keeps you from writing the ones in between that might be crappy and might not be (ask me how I know).

It's much more functional to break tasks down into concrete items without a value judgement. I'm going to learn three chords on the guitar. I am going to accomplish the following tasks with the goal of increasing conversions x%. I will see how these efforts work and adjust accordingly.

These habits don't guarantee success, but they give you the perspective to react proportionately.

Kill the voice of grandiosity & perfectionism, which is disguised as "reasonable thinking" because you & I are so smart and really can do some things faster & more easily than others.

> I can agree with the distinction of 'fixed' versus 'growth' mindsets (although... .. how do you measure that?), but that success is guaranteed if you believe and try... Not necessarily.

where does Dr. Dweck make that implication anywhere? in fact, her research is more about how the growth mindset gets more exposure to failure, while the fixed mindset tends to avoid failure in the first place, which is just a different type of failure. so in that sense, her work is all about failure, not about "success being guaranteed if you believe and try".

You might just lose indeed. But there are so many interesting things you can lose at, you'd be crazy not to take that chance. I've "lost" at skydiving, stage improv, novel writing, screen writing, foreign language acquisition, and so many other things. There's a whole lot of fun to be had embarrassing yourself and setting yourself up to get yourself killed.

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On the flip side of that, fixed mindsets in the context of a "semi-boring job" can lead to a LOT of psychological trauma. I won't go into the details but I will say this. Given the choice, you're better off jumping out of the airplane. Trust me on this.

Reading your post...lots of misconceptions about Dr. Dweck's work. You might want to finish that book.
This comment is both black and white, negative, and reductive.

How do you measure a growth mindset? Well, we could look at Dweck's research with school children, where kids exposed to the concept that the brain is a muscle score markedly better than the control groups. [1]

Your views on failure suggest you have either forgotten childhood, or have a warped perspective on it: all kids do is fail, over and over, until they get the hang of things. We scrape our knees, our towers of blocks fall down, we can't get the puzzle pieces into the holes and constantly misidentify letters and numbers. To say that you repeat failure a couple of times and 'you're either dead or on your way there' is bleak and also wrong.

What Dweck's research shows is that children who are praised for their efforts fare better than those who are praised on being innately smart. You seem fixated on success being a zero-sum game. Like, whether a startup succeeds or fails. Dweck isn't guaranteeing that with positive thinking, you can achieve anything. It's not so black and white. The idea is that with the proper mindset, people can achieve a whole lot more than society might otherwise make them believe – and for so many people (children especially), that can be a life-changing realization.

1: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct0...

> No, success is not guaranteed even if you try many many times times, even if you train a lot and believe a lot. In fact, the rule is this: No matter how hard you try, you might still lose. Sorry about that.

I agree. As soon as you stop trying, you've lost.

I think this is an inversion of cause and effect. The reality is much less inspiring; It's "What you achieve affects what you believe" not so much the other way around.

I know this for a fact because as I become more sceptical/pessimistic over time, my achievements increase. If I was a blind optimist, I would probably fail as soon as reality reared its ugly head.

If someone is really lucky throughout their lives, they will have an optimistic view about the world and the people around them.

Unfortunate people might find a statement like this offensive because they know for a fact (based on their own experiences) that this isn't true - It's almost like saying "It's your fault for being poor; it's all in your head!".

I don't think this means an inversion

What comes first? - belief or achievement or self-confidence?

You won't achieve something if you don't believe in it. You just won't persevere and will give up or find workarounds.

But if you believe in it and keep failing consistently, your self-confidence will go down and so will your trust in self. It gets to that miserable "I'm no good" belief until one breaks out of that.

Once you achieve something, it will boost your self-confidence and trust in self will rise and your belief is validated. Then your belief will make you try more and achieve more. Sometimes it leads to overconfidence and bouts of overconfidence will break that trust within oneself - and we just need avoid getting into that downward spiral.

Many times "starters" define limits that are just self-imposed limits. People fall into the ugly 'I can't do that' loop without trying. And they have to be forcibly, inconveniently and painfully pushed out of that. This quote from Star Trek sounds so true "stallion has to be broken to reach it's potential"

I'm a pessimist but I don't believe that pessimism motivated achievements can make one happy unless it is a side-effect. Such achievements root from a negative inner rebellion behaviour. And if we aren't truly happy with those achievements, that makes us doubt and kill our own inner beliefs that led to those achievements. I'm not saying we should be a blind-optimist but stay close to reality.

I've read some interesting articles that suggest consciousness may actually be a parallel construction of the brain; the allusion of free will being constantly back-filled. If so, it would be the case that what you achieve effects what you believe quite literally.
I don't think it's anyone's fault for starting out poor, or becoming poor from outside factors (war, medical condition, etc.)

But barring all those factors, if you don't make a deliberate choice to change something, the world around you will keep you down.

You reminded me of this article[1] by Scott Adams, whereby, one should have a system rather than relying on passion.

Heck, there is even a slide[2] for this.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023046261045791218...

[2] http://www.slideshare.net/Scottadams925/goals-are-for-losers...

Success, of course, begets success. And vice versa.

That's kind of what this article was all about. That you can break through that barrier if you can understand what is shaping your thinking about how the world works.

Do you think it's possible you're conflating scepticism and pessimism with an increased understanding of how the world works? That is, with more experience?

I know I was very optimistic of life what I was in my 20s. Then, in my 30s, that optimism faded. Now, in my 40s, I've come to realize that I'm optimistic again, and I was just naive in my 20s. Perhaps this cycle will repeat or take a new form as I grow older. I'm kind of excited to see what happens.

Same here! I didn't start achieving until I started becoming skeptical, mostly about other things or people.

I am super optimistic about things that I control however.

There's an important idea I feel is being missed. Something can be true "in distribution" but not true in a "pathwise" sense. That means, over the long run, for most people, on average x is true. But for specific individual and/or specific time frame it can be very untrue.

Point being I can say to you "adopt a growth mindset", you do it, but it doesn't work and life throws you 'a curve ball' again and again. Doesn't mean my hypothesis was wrong, and doesn't mean you didn't follow through properly. We can both be right in this case.

All it means is, we should act as if our actions/thoughts count, but accept it as a fundamental property of the universe that they may not 'bear fruit'.

All we can do is embrace the chaos^

^ as in chaotic systems

This is a bit late but this should be noted :

"Bill Gates: No. I think after the first three or four years, it's pretty cast in concrete whether you're a good programmer or not. After a few more years, you may know more about managing large projects and personalities, but after three or four years, it's clear what you're going to be. There's no one at Microsoft who was just kind of mediocre for a couple of years, and then just out of the blue started optimizing everything in sight. I can talk to somebody about a program that he's written and know right away whether he's really a good programmer."

http://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-become-a-better-programm...

So Does Bill still believe this or is he a hypocrite in hiding ?

This is interesting in the context of American History. Basically, a majority of settlers were Calvinists. A big part of Calvinist belief was "predestination" which basically holds that a person's destiny (heaven or hell) is determined by God before they are born. This would seem to me to reinforce a "fixed mindset". Paradoxically, out of that same belief system came the "Protestant work ethic" which depending on who you ask made America the greatest country on Earth. I think that one could argue that the "fixed mindset" enabled a sort of wishful thinking attitude: believers though they were predestined so they focused on growth and self improvement over the usual Catholic traditions (which focused on a growth mindset in religious observance while having a more fixed mindset in practical work ethics).
I believe everyone should have a growth mindset, but the paper from Dweck is popularized and interpreted a little too loosely. The stricter interpretation is less compelling:

In the Bloody Obvious Position, someone can believe success is 90% innate ability and 10% effort. They might also be an Olympian who realizes that at her level, pretty much everyone is at a innate ability ceiling, and a 10% difference is the difference between a gold medal and a last-place finish. So she practices very hard and does just as well as anyone else.

According to the Controversial Position, this athlete will still do worse than someone who believes success is 80% ability and 20% effort, who will in turn do worse than someone who believes success is 70% ability and 30% effort, all the way down to the person who believes success is 0% ability and 100% effort, who will do best of all and take the gold medal.

It might seem pedantic, but I worry that propagating this loose interpretation will lead to many people believing their positive "growth" attitude, and not years of concentrated practice, is enough to grow.

From: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/10/i-will-never-have-the-a...

Gates speaking about the "fixed mindset" vs. "growth mindset" reminds me of this [1] article by Aaron Swartz.

[1]: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck

Is this maybe a western cultural bias, that somehow God blesses you with talent and that's it? Some residue from aristocracy?

When you look at things like Japanese martial arts, it's all about learning from someone more experienced and lots of hard work. The limiting factor is your endurance, and the general sentiment is that "if someone learned before me, I can too".

Love this idea, but I do not recommend the book. It's clearly a science article that has been stretched into 250 pages. Same idea, repeated repeated repeated.

I highly recommend a summary, unless you think you'll benefit from reading twenty examples of the same concept. It's one of the few books that I started but didn't finish this year.

"Energy flows where attention goes"

Above is another line, like the one in the title. On one hand, it's obvious because if you focus your attention, for example, on building a computer, of course your energy goes in that direction. On the other hand, if you don't realize your attention (ie, thoughts) is on certain matters, you may be expending energy on that unknowingly. Of course, if you're a generalist and your attention goes everywhere, your energy is following suit.

I think the same about the language we use.

Or rather, I think... "What we hear affects us, and we hear ourselves.".

This is an extension of the "surround yourself with positive people" thing, in that I believe it's important to be positive, kind, generous, as the language and tone that we use to express we hear constantly and those words, that tone, shapes our thoughts, mood, aspirations.

It's important to be mindful and to be the person you want to be. By doing so, we frequently are that person.

>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.”

Couldn't agree more with this specific example. But you shouldn't ignore reality either. A man with no legs is not going to win the 100 meters at the Olympics. Understanding where your potential lies is important for deciding where to invest your effort. That doesn't mean he can't improve at all though.

Especially in things like math, there is a popular belief that you need some kind of 'math gene' to be decent at it. There is little evidence that there are math specific genes beyond general learning ability.

[Same genes 'drive maths and reading ability'] http://www.bbc.com/news/health-28211676

Sadly, in a lot of cases this will lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy where you will stop trying to improve your math skills because you weren't "made for it".

But that's really more a problem of a false belief that these things are set from birth. A blind belief in 'I can do anything i want despite the situation or environment i am in!' isn't going to help anyone. I would advise the runner with no legs to invest his precious time and resources in something other than trying to win the 100 meters at the Olympics.

You know what's worse than thinking you're not capable? Others telling you you're capable and despite your best efforts you fail to meet these expectations whether those reasons are within your control or not. This is putting a carrot on a stick in front of a lot of kids potentially and saying "you just need to believe you can do this and try real hard, gosh anyone can do it!"

Expecting a person with severe learning disabilities that they can go work at a top HFT shop or a paraplegic that they'll be able to beat the world record for a 100 meter dash is the kind of goalpost that is being set for many children that are born disadvantaged. Bill Gates may have been studying what keeps the world's poor the way they are for a long time but there are a lot more factors that keep people down than just simply motivation.

Part of why I haven't started a company yet is out of fear of kind of literally destroying my life and others around me. The sheer amount of work that you put into a company is one thing, and not having the closest people you know be supportive of the work you do puts you into a position where you must either be so secure that failure is not a problem or that you must succeed on a first try.

Reid Hoffman's tips on when you DON'T want to start a company come to mind. Some of those criteria include "if you cannot get another job" or "you will put yourself in harm's way by doing so" (paraphrased, can't find the slides he had). So for the poor, despite having not much to lose in theory, they do have everything to lose in that their lives are all they can give up in the absence of capital or remarkable domain knowledge / skill advantages. Risk tolerance for the poor is actually very low thusly.

The central idea seems so important, with so much benefit to education if it were true, that it would justify a large scale rigorous experiment [ just as a new kind of promising medicine would be trialed over a wide sample ]

Maybe schooling is stuck in a local maximum, because we don't do things like this, because its not socially acceptable to 'experiment with our childrens education' ?

There is no intrinsic motivation. http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/inmotiv.htm
Another way to view it is that the biggest limits in your life are the ones you set.

I'm perfectly aware that some people start with huge disadvantages in life, but whatever your starting point, you can end up much higher. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.

If you don't fail 90% of the time, you're not aiming high enough Alan Kay
Ya, but... are some people more genetically predisposed to have growth mindset? :)
I did not read the book, but I think the book is not about becomming succesful but about getting to know your potential. Success and potential are related/connected but there is a huge difference.

Being able to help out your neighbor isn't connected to success in our society. I think a lot of posters in this thread don't realize the destinction between potential and success.

Also, take this to the second derivative. You can learn to learn faster and more efficiently. You can set yourself up for success. You can start small, and gain momentum from there. You can learn to hack your motivation.

Will this guarantee success and a happy life? Of course not. But it will greatly increase your chances.

I think it is easy to praise growth mindset if you are the one who wants to learn and wants to get better through failing. But what about the other side of the coin?

Just imagine you are a teamlead and one guy in your team tells you "hey, I have found 2 new ways how not to impelent Feature X. May I work on feature Y and use the knowledge I gained fucking up feature X?"

Or you have a project team and the profect manager tells you "Hey, I found one new way how not to manage a project, how not to deliver on time and how not to motivate people. May I manage your next project and maybe waste an other million dollars?"

In my experience situations like these end badly...

There was a good episode on the podcast "Invisibilia" discussing this topic of expectations influencing/shaping reality: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/544/b.... Some pretty fascinating stories in this one; well worth a listen! I believe Dweck is referenced/interviewed early on in the episode.
I only know that if you have strong Will you can achieve many things. Personally, the difference between Wish and Will is when you decide to achieve what you wish.
The same thing [Derek Sivers] explains with amusement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYTN7yVYbeg

Fortunately, yesterday night I was listening it.

[Derek Sivers](https://sivers.org/)

Interesting contrast, stories like this compared to the stories about how everyone who is successful feels like they are a fraud.

Maybe my study will be of note: If you believe headlines, you should read more.

Mindset is everything (at-least extremely important for any level of success in entrepreneurship and most other things)

Most entrepreneurs solving ambitious problems look crazy to outsiders. Hence the famous Steve Jobs quote

"The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."

Look at what the Gates, Jobs and Musks of this world have achieved with their 'anything-is-possible' mindsets..

Btw, for those who are interested in this stuff I've created an app to help people develop a growth/positive mindset at http://positivethinking.net

Well, if you read title, then you can safely skip the rest of it.

It's a good summary of an essence :)

Takeaway from this: I'm imagining Bill Gates practicing his fadeaway jumpers.
Can someone explain to me what claim Dr. Dweck has demonstrated that is both novel and true? I have read a bunch of articles about her work, but it all seems to me like she has framed "growth mindset" against a strawman.

It seems blindingly obvious to me that ability in most fields is a function of both genes and effort. Genes shape how fast you improve with effort, and where you plateau. Genes shape the curve of the achievement-to-effort graph. Effort determines where you are on that curve. Effort determines how much of your potential you actualize. This dynamic is true in basketball, math, golf, painting, speech-making, guitar playing and virtually every other complicated human endeavor.

Some people need to be told, "You have are naturally gifted in this field, stop being so hard on people who are not as good as you, they are doing the best they can."

Some people need to be told, "You are naturally gifted in this area. You have a responsibility to work extra hard in order to maximize your gifts. If you work your butt off, you have the potential to be truly special."

Some people need to be told, "This stuff might not come as naturally to you. You're going to have to work extra hard to keep up."

Some people need to be told, "Look you have been practicing harder than anyone, and honestly, I just don't think you have the raw talent to be a professional in this field. You can do it for fun, but be realistic about your career choices."

Some people need to be told, "Look you can't say you are bad at painting/writing/music/math/etc. You haven't even tried to learn it. This stuff is not natural for most people, there are books and youtube videos that can show you how to do it. You need to build step-by-step. Practice one technique until it is in mental memory and then add more complexity. Unless you're mozart, you don't just start from day one being able to produce great stuff."

It seems that as a culture, there are mistakes in messaging going both ways. For example, the premise of the "No Child Left Behind" education law was silly. There is in fact a bell curve with regards to natural academic aptitude. For instance, if you are in the bottom ~20% of that curve, it is nearly impossible to learn algebra. ( for some articles from a real teacher who is trying to teach algebra in the field, read: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/algebra-an... and https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/noahpinion... ). Someone in the middle of the bell curve can learn algebra, but if they try to go into a career that involves advanced quantitative or logical skills, they will be competing against those who both have a natural aptitude and an economic incentive to try hard. The person with normal aptitude will likely lose that competition. So it might not be good advice to tell that person to double-down on math, even if they could make themselves better.

On the other hand, I hear a lot of smart friends say stuff like, "I'm just bad at math" or "I'm just bad at painting." In many cases, they never had good teaching, or they never tackled the problem aggressively. They never tried to learn incrementally, by building muscle memory on a simple technique and then adding more complications. They started with the hard stuff, and when it did not work, they just assumed they were bad at it. For people like that, a "growth mindset" can be helpful.

All of this should be pretty darn obvious. I don't really gather what new, credible information Dweck is adding to our understanding of how learning, motivation, and achievement works.

Well the problem with the growth mindset is that ultimately you die, so your growth does a nosedive eventually.

If something excites or intrigues you, then do it. But don't delude yourself that your personal growth really matters.