They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.” – Interview with Carol Dweck In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. “In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits.

What she says, is that people can be placed on a continuum which has people who adopt a growth mindset on one end and at the other end people who adopt a fixed mindset.ĭweck describes this continuum as following It explains why other people tend to give up even though they have the same abilities and skillset to start with.Ĭarol Dweck introduces the idea of the growth mindset vs. Mindset explains why there are some people who thrive despite facing challenges and failing. It defines how you react to them and influences the conclusions you draw. So mindset defines what and how you think of your environment or situations that occur in your life. More narrowly defined it is the established set of attitudes held by someone (Oxford Dictionaries). Very broadly defined a mindset refers to a person’s way of thinking or their opinion. So what actually is this mindset thing? What’s a Mindset?Įven though one has a general understanding of what a mindset is, it helps to take a close look at its definition to better understand it. Most articles or videos I make touch the topic in one way or another. I do agree with her on it and therefore keep working on improving my mindset. Her argument is that mindset is one of the key factors to success. Her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success from 2004, tells the story of her research on mindset and draws conclusions on how to best motivate yourself and others. She has given a TED Talk and spoken at the White House.

To give you some background, let me introduce Carol Dweck first. She is a professor at Stanford University and a leading researcher in the field of motivation. In this post I want to share some of the ideas I learned from her talks. Since then I have kept this idea in mind and applying it to my life had a large positive impact. I first heard about Carol Dweck’s research on mindset and the growth mindset on YouTube around 2014. Growth Mindset: The New Psychology of Success -Photo by Patrick Tomasso

Carol s dweck ted talk