# Mindset  ## Metadata - Author: [[Carol Dweck]] - Full Title: Mindset - Category: #books ## Highlights - My work is part of a tradition in psychology that shows the power of people’s beliefs. These may be beliefs we’re aware of or unaware of, but they strongly affect what we want and whether we succeed in getting it. This tradition also shows how changing people’s beliefs—even the simplest beliefs—can have profound effects. ([Location 103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=103)) - Tags: [[favorite]] [[psycology]] - In this book, you’ll learn how a simple belief about yourself—a belief we discovered in our research—guides a large part of your life. In fact, it permeates every part of your life. ([Location 105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=105)) - Much of what you think of as your personality actually grows out of this “mindset.” Much of what may be preventing you from fulfilling your potential grows out of it. ([Location 107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=107)) - You’ll suddenly understand the greats—in the sciences and arts, in sports, and in business—and the would-have-beens. ([Location 109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=109)) - Tags: [[blue]] - They knew that human qualities, such as intellectual skills, could be cultivated. And that’s what they were doing—getting smarter. Not only weren’t they discouraged by failure, they didn’t even think they were failing. They thought they were learning. ([Location 149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=149)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Others pointed to the strong differences in people’s backgrounds, experiences, training, or ways of learning. It may surprise you to know that a big champion of this view was Alfred Binet, the inventor of the IQ test. Wasn’t the IQ test meant to summarize children’s unchangeable intelligence? ([Location 162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=162)) - Tags: [[psycology]] - In fact, no. Binet, a Frenchman working in Paris in the early twentieth century, designed this test to identify children who were not profiting from the Paris public schools, so that new educational programs could be designed to get them back on track. ([Location 164](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=164)) - Tags: [[psycology]] - Note: Why have these never been implemented? - A few modern philosophers . . . assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism. . . . With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before. ([Location 169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=169)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Who’s right? Today most experts agree that it’s not either–or. It’s not nature or nurture, genes or environment. From conception on, there’s a constant give-and-take between the two. In fact, as Gilbert Gottlieb, an eminent neuroscientist, put it, not only do genes and environment cooperate as we develop, but genes require input from the environment to work properly. ([Location 172](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=172)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Robert Sternberg, the present-day guru of intelligence, writes that the major factor in whether people achieve expertise “is not some fixed prior ability, but purposeful engagement.” Or, as his forerunner Binet recognized, it’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest. ([Location 177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=177)) - Tags: [[productivity]] [[favorite]] - This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others. Although people may differ in every which way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments—everyone can change and grow through application and experience. ([Location 199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=199)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training. Did you know that Darwin and Tolstoy were considered ordinary children? ([Location 202](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=202)) - Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives. ([Location 209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=209)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Instead, as you begin to understand the fixed and growth mindsets, you will see exactly how one thing leads to another—how a belief that your qualities are carved in stone leads to a host of thoughts and actions, and how a belief that your qualities can be cultivated leads to a host of different thoughts and actions, taking you down an entirely different road. ([Location 264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=264)) - Tags: [[blue]] - But it was those with the fixed mindset who accounted for almost all the inaccuracy. The people with the growth mindset were amazingly accurate. ([Location 279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=279)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What’s more, if you’re oriented toward learning, as they are, you need accurate information about your current abilities in order to learn effectively. However, if everything is either good news or bad news about your precious traits—as it is with fixed-mindset people—distortion almost inevitably enters the picture. ([Location 282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=282)) - Tags: [[productivity]] [[psycology]] - Howard Gardner, in his book Extraordinary Minds, concluded that exceptional individuals have “a special talent for identifying their own strengths and weaknesses.” It’s interesting that those with the growth mindset seem to have that talent. ([Location 285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=285)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The fixed mindset makes you concerned with how you’ll be judged; the growth mindset makes you concerned with improving. ([Location 317](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=317)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Benjamin Barber, an eminent political theorist, once said, “I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures. . . . I divide the world into the learners and nonlearners.” ([Location 352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=352)) - Tags: [[blue]] [[favorite]] - “When you’re lying on your deathbed, one of the cool things to say is, ‘I really explored myself.’ This sense of urgency was instilled when my mom died. If you only go through life doing stuff that’s easy, shame on you.” ([Location 438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=438)) - Tags: [[blue]] - There was a saying in the 1960s that went: “Becoming is better than being.” The fixed mindset does not allow people the luxury of becoming. They have to already be. ([Location 508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=508)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When people with the fixed mindset opt for success over growth, what are they really trying to prove? That they’re special. Even superior. ([Location 571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=571)) - Tags: [[blue]] - John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them. ([Location 691](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01M036N60&location=691)) - Tags: [[psycology]] [[favorite]]