Mindset by Carol S Dweck, a book that despite its age holds wisdom that everyone can benefit from. The author is an esteemed psychologist and her research has long benefited the community and theories relating to motivation. The book talks about how everyone, despite their innate intelligence, talent or qualities, is able to grow or stagnate with just their mindset alone. The thing is, this develops very early on in our lives and the people around us ultimately affect whether we have a growth or a fixed mindset. Without spoiling the book for you, here are 3 lessons that we can learn from the book Mindset by Carol S Dweck.
Improvement Requires Effort
A common theme throughout the book talks about how people with different mindsets end up achieving different levels of mastery throughout their lives. The fact that the fixed mindset hinders personal growth is an important truth that everyone should get through into their head. Improvement requires effort and only a growth mindset will encourage that kind of behaviour amongst the population. People with a fixed mindset tend to associate their self-identity with the talents they were born with. That is more often than not a bad thing if you have a fixed mindset because the effort will reduce your abilities. You steer clear of challenges that may result in your failures, inadvertently withdrawing the chance for you to improve.
Changing Your Life Requires Just a Change in Mindset
People with a growth mindset are able to envision a future that sees them improving in their potential, and that alone is a commendable effort. Turning your life around doesn’t require you to change things in your life, it just requires a change in the way you see the things around you. It’s not that you lost the genetic lottery resulting in your life being doomed to failure. Instead, with a growth mindset, you will see that true potential is unknown and thus you’ll work at every opportunity to improve yourself.
With that being said, a change in mindset to one of the growth mindset may not come easy, so do read the book to find out how some of the ways which you can turn your life around.
Life Isn’t Just Static
Life isn’t static and that’s what the book shows at every corner. Intelligence can be improved slowly through the active art of learning, setbacks are but mere learning opportunities and effort can lead to mastery. Most of us probably don’t adopt a fixed mindset in every aspect of our lives. Instead, there are some activities where we tend to adopt a more pessimistic and fixed mindset and others where we naturally have a growth mindset in. The goal here is to really identify those areas in our life with a fixed mindset and aim to improve on them. Life isn’t static, and we most definitely should not be living it as though no improvements can be made.
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