Rating: 8/10
Growth mindset used to be a quite trendy topic about 5 years ago and I remember myself being determined to develop the growth mindset. This book is sort of a revisit to the concepts that I was exposed to earlier.
What I learned from the book:
- if fixed mindset people want to validate themselves, why don’t they stop after validating themselves once?
- there will always be challenges in life and fixed mindset people treat each of the challenges as a potential pitfall that can depreciate their worth, instead of an opportunity to grow.
- how should we educate children?
- we should not praise children on their qualities or success, but we should praise them on their effort. When children fail, it is fine to say things like “You do not deserve the win because others put more effort than you” instead of “this competition is useless and the judges are out of their mind”
- growth mindset are area-specific. One can have growth mindset in certain areas (e.g. programming) but fixed mindset in others (e.g. language learning).
- fixed mindset people tend to sacrifice their companies long-term growth for their short-term personal gains
What I would have changed about the book :
I would cut the book to be about 1/2 of its current length. The author gave a lot of examples to illustrate his point but those links are somewhat elusive to me. The author stated that these people succeeded because they had growth mindset and those did not (or failed after initial succcess) because they had fixed mindset. Unless the author has done the psychological tests on these people, I am not fully convinced that their mindset must be the main reason that these people succeed or fail, let alone the only reason.
Overall, I think it is a good book that is worth skimming through (I listened to the audiobook at 1.5x to 2x the speed). What has really changed me is that instead of seeing growth mindset just as a personal development tool, I begin to view the world more in this lens so I can help to build a growth mindset community around me (and change/avoid fixed mindset people).
