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Some years ago, as I passed through the Center for Teaching and Learning at the private college where I’d been asked to give a workshop for faculty on writing and publishing, I saw a big stack of books on the floor. I asked the director what was up with that.
She explained that they gave a copy to each new faculty member. “Here,” she said, chucking one to me. “Enjoy.”
It was the just-published revised paperback edition of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s mega-selling Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, a book whose main ideas had already trickled down to second graders.
I started reading on the plane going home, finished before I landed and haven’t stopped talking and thinking about this book since. I’ve just dug it out again for a reread, since that seems like an apt way to start a new year that could turn out to be, um, challenging.
You already know the gist: some people have a fixed mindset and believe that talent, intelligence and ability are innate. Those with a growth mindset know to put in hours of practice and self-analysis until they perform better.
After Dweck sets out her premise, she gives the results of her own experiments with children whom she could divide into the two camps. The fixed mindset kids, who were told “this puzzle will test your intelligence,” tended to give up after they get stuck because they didn’t want to expose deficiencies. Then there were the kids who greeted a challenge with oh goody, I can’t wait to try this. The rest of the book shows what these two mindsets look like in different areas.
The argument seems, like all brilliant insights, obvious once you think about it. A delightful read filled with anecdotes of people whose names you know (kind of an academic People magazine), the real power of the book comes if you can see yourself in the behavior of others.
Dweck uses tennis racket–throwing John McEnroe and Lee Iacocca, the guy who turned around and then tanked Chrysler, as examples of fixed mindsets. The blamers, the screamers, the I-am-the-greatest dudes. It shouldn’t take more than a nanosecond to come up with more recent examples.
As I read about sports, I thought, Hell, yes! I’m an ultramarathon runner. I have benefited from excellent coaching. I can do hard things and not give up. A hundred miles over five days in the Himalayas? Bring it on!
As a writer, I love being edited. If someone reads my work and tells me where it goes wrong, I am slobberingly grateful. Having been raised by a father who bloodied my angsty teenage poems with his professorial red pen, I receive brutal criticism as love.
Yay me, I thought. I am the very embodiment of a growth mindset.
Until I got to the chapter on relationships.
Dweck gives an example of a woman who broke up with a guy because he put ketchup on his food and wore white shoes. Well, sure. In 2016, that made perfect sense (actually, still does to me). But that’s not nearly as bad as a dude who abused semicolons and added extra periods in every text message—a sin for which, yes, reader, I dumped him.
Even though I saw myself in the fixed mindset examples, it took me a few years to change my behavior in the dating arena.
Unsurprising, since Dweck makes clear that it’s not unusual for folks to have growth and fixed mindsets in different areas.
After reading Mindset, I knew exactly what to say to academics who consider themselves lifelong learners and assert, often with no sense of embarrassment, “I’m just not a good writer.”
That just means you don’t care enough to work hard to get better at something that is simply a learnable skill.
I’d like to be six feet tall. I’d also like to be able to parallel park. One of those goals is achievable.
Even if you are a good writer, it doesn’t mean you’re a good author.
People who write books love to complain about publishing. Peer reviewers are mean-spirited (they may be) or out to get them (perhaps) or just plain wrong. Some writers post their rejection letters in a fit of pique. Copy editors who labor to protect authors get trashed as annoying nitpickers. Instead of seeing themselves as partners in a process that requires communication, these authors want publishers to read their (fixed) minds.
I like to think there is an inverse relationship between the quality of a person’s work and their ability to take and use feedback to become better at whatever they do—including those at the top of the food chain.
This summer I took on a new project for Inside Higher Ed, developing a weekly newsletter for, by and about university leadership. There, in a publication where no one gets personal or institutional credit (everything is published without attribution and presidents write honestly and vulnerably about their challenges), I’ve found that that the successful leaders are quick learners, easy edits and humble in ways that often astound me.
While it’s possible to succeed with a fixed mindset, and some folks can get by on talent and fortunate circumstances—or sheer force of personality—most of us aren’t that lucky.
Maybe in Dweck’s work you will read yourself into behaviors you’ve witnessed (or exhibited) in faculty senate meetings, during thesis defenses or on hiring committees. I shudder when I reflect on my own past missteps—which, of course, doesn’t always stop me from repeating those mistakes.
Or maybe you’ll want to assign the book to students—or at least introduce them to some of the key ideas with examples that they may be able to relate to. I’ve learned not to praise results but process, to give feedback much less along the lines of “this is a terrific piece of writing” and more along those of “I can see how hard you’ve worked on revision.”
Administrators might heed the advice of basketball coach John Wooden and remember that it’s the failures who default to blame (“the faculty always does this”). Instead of bristling during meetings, successful leaders know how to lean into critiques and ask questions about what they might be missing. At this point in history, when higher ed needs to adapt or die, inculcating a growth mindset in institutional culture may be the only way to survive.
I’d like to tell you that I was able to change my fixed mindset about dating just from reading the book. If only.
Instead, it took the sudden death of a man I didn’t realize I loved to show me how I got in my own way. The things about that kind man that bothered me and kept me from committing were trivial, and the real problem, it turned out, was me, not the things I criticized him for (white shoes, weird food choices, constantly losing phones and eyeglasses).
Change is hard and often made possible only by catastrophe. His death unmoored me and forced me to reflect in ways that paved the way for me to fall in love with and marry a man who meets none of the superficial criteria I thought I needed and who makes me happy in ways I previously thought unimaginable.
And maybe, someday, I will care enough to learn how to parallel park.
