The Secret Of Success? It's All In Your Mind(set)!
Charles Darwin and Leo Tolstoy were considered pretty average children. Ben Hogan was uncoordinated and graceless as a child, and his early golf career wasn't very impressive. Contrary to the movie, while Amadus Mozart was trained very young in music performance and composition, his early works weren't genius - they were often patched-together bits taken from other composers. Muhammed Ali was clearly NOT cut out to be a championship boxer. And Michael Jordan was cut from his varsity basketball team, because he just wasn't as good as the other players.

Good thing they all quit before embarassing themselves, huh?

It's All About Mindset
I read a book last week entitled "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success" by Carol S. Dweck, which was a pretty eye-opening experience. Not because anything in there was really mind-blowingly new, but rather that it summed up a great deal of my own experience and belief. Dweck is a professor of psychology at Stanford, and an expert in the field of human motivation and intelligence. Her book pretty handily demolishes a lot of popular (and deeply-held) myths about success, successful people, failure, human learning, and progression.

Dweck breaks everything down by mindset: The "fixed" mindset, and the "growth" mindset.

Fixed Mindset
The fixed mindset is of the belief that this is how a person is, that their qualities and talents (like intelligence, athletic ability, etc) are relatively fixed, and while they might develop some new skills, its limited by their aptitude and fixed characteristics. The fixed-mindset perception is that success is "easy" for those who are good at that kind of thing. That "naturals" will quickly rise to the top of the heap. This includes both their perception of themselves and others.

People exhibiting the fixed mindset tend to overestimate their skills, and they focus a great deal of energy to protecting their own self-esteem and hiding any deficiencies and "proving themselves" to others. They tend to shy away from challenges and instead focus on repeating what they already do well. And when things go wrong, they tend to search for places to put the blame.

Growth Mindset
The growth mindset believes that talents and abilities can be improved through passion and effort. Always. People with the growth mindset are less concerned about image in the short term, and more readily accept difficult problems that challenge themselves in hope of learning and growing.

The growth-mindset tends to look at deficiencies more openly and honestly, and then seek ways to overcome them rather than hiding them. It's committed to learning, to seeking out challenges in spite of the risk of failure.

Which Way Yields Success?
If you define success as never failing at what you do, then being a growth-mindset individual will lead to heartache. Because with it comes lots of failure. The fixed mindset tends to view success as something that "comes easy" to people who are good in their field. The growth mindset assumes that once something does "come easy," it's time to move on to bigger challenges.

Backed by plenty of research and anecdotal evidence, Dweck submits that the fixed mindset greatly inhibits success, and the growth mindset promotes it. In fact, her studies show that this mindset is an extremely strong indicator of future success in any endeavor.

Where Did We Go Wrong?
And it makes sense. We're all born with the growth mindset. Nobody comes out of the womb as an expert electrical engineer, brilliant guitarist, or a star basketball player. But society's views tend to favor the fixed mindset, and tends to comment on ability and performance rather than effort. We praise people by saying things like, "you must be really smart," or "you are amazingly talented," or "you are really good at this." In fact, when we do praise effort, its usually used as a way to hide criticism for a poor performance. After all, if someone was evaluating your work, and the first thing that came out of their mouth was, "Well, I can see that you really put a lot of work into this," what would you think?

Dweck has a great commentary about some of the popular children's parables in Western culture:

The story of the tortoise and the hare, in trying to put forward the power of effort, gave effort a bad name. It reinforced the image that effort is for the plodders and suggested that in rare instances, when talented people dropped the ball, the plodder could sneak through.

The little engine that could, the saggy, baggy elephant, and the scruffy tugboat - they were cute, they were often overmatched, and we were happy for them when they succeeded. In fact, to this day I remember how fond I was of those little creatures (or machines), but in no way did I identify with them. The message was: If you're unfortunate enough to be the runt of the litter - if you lack the endowment - you don't have to be an utter failure. You can be a sweet, adorable little slogger, and maybe (if you really work at it and withstand all the scornful onlookers) even a success.

Thank you very much, I'll take the endowment.

The problem was that these stories made it into an either-or. Either you have the ability or you expend effort. And this is part of the fixed mindset. Effort is for those who don't have the ability. People with the fixed mindset tell us, "If you have to work at something, you must not be good at it." They add, "Things come easily to people who are true geniuses."

It makes sense. According to Dweck, Michael Jordan might very appropriately have been dubbed the hardest-working basketball player in the NBA during his career. Even as age had its effect on some of his earlier trademark moves, he continued to learn and grow, eventually becoming one of the best-rounded players in the game. It didn't come easily to him. Yet can anyone say he wasn't a true genius of the game?

Self-Analysis
Dweck includes plenty of great info in the book on analyzing one's own mindset, and ways to escape the fixed mindset. She shows how it can be used in anything - in business and career, in artistic pursuits, in education - even in such things as dieting and overcoming bad habits (short version: Forget willpower or vows to oneself. That's fixed-mindset thinking and does not work. Instead think making and executing on alternatives to whatever those habits are).

One thing that kind of shocked me was where I found myself falling victim to the fixed mindset myself. I think I generally have a good view of my own potential for growth - though I may have been limiting myself even with my comments on how I aspire to "suck less" at something. But I have been putting some time in on "learning the ropes" in areas I previously knew very little about. Marketing, business, art, 3D modeling, blogging, running a website - these are all skills I have been enjoying learning, in spite of the fact that they can be exhausting to learn.

But one area where I was surprised to find I had a pretty fixed mindset on is my skill as a programmer. Particularly now that I am a "senior programmer" in my career, and I feel like I'm supposed to be this super-powered John Carmack-esque programming god. I'm not. And I have come to realize that I've been pretty fixed-mindset about it, not jumping into challenges and learning new stuff related to programming with the zeal I used to. Which could really be hampering my overall potential (okay, making it clear: According to Dweck's research, that attitude is killing me in a field I view as my specialty). I remember how much I enjoyed learning to program in Python when required by the job (and, since I was hired with the full knowledge that I didn't know the language, there was no expectation that I be an expert at it on day one). Obviously, the mindset needs to be changed. I've still got plenty to learn, and no excuse for sitting on my laurels.

Mindset is a pretty simple, straightforward idea. It's funny how something so simple could be so strongly linked to success or failure. I highly recommend checking out the book (I snagged it from the library after reading a review about it). Again - nothing in it was earth-shatteringly new - it made perfect sense to me, but it did help me look on my life and career with a new perspective.


(Vaguely) related proof I need all the help I can get:
* How Much Difference Does Preparation Make?
* The Power of Vision
* How to Sleep Less and Get More Done
* Playing To Crush With Life

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Labels: productivity

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