The Growth Mindset: The Assumption of this Blog

This blog in general is premised on the idea that you can improve your skills. But what do we know about whether that is true?

I cannot remember how I first learned about the growth mindset. I somehow stumbled across it when I was an undergraduate student, and I found it very helpful. I had often had debates with friends about whether people could become more intelligent, and it helped to show me, with research, that this was indeed possible.

​Some people in academic environments think that if you are smart, you don’t have to study. But the truth is, if you do not study, then you do not receive the grades as you could have received, and you close doors on yourself for your future. Even very smart people need to study – you ca not know things you have not studied.
 
You become more intelligent when you learn how to study and work more effectively – research shows this (as reviewed by Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success). The people who receive high grades in university are those who have learned how to learn, learned how to write well, and who have learned the other skills needed to produce excellent work.
 
Carol Dweck (in her popular book Mindset and in many other publications, such as her academic book Self-Theories) builds on knowledge of neuroplasticity – neuroplasticity means that your brain changes – to show that people who learn how to improve at what they do are the people who usually succeed. It is the people who try hard, practice, and improve who are the greatest successes. It is the people who learn from failures who succeed.

Something Dweck has found in her research is that about half of people have a growth mindset: when they encounter challenges or failures, they become motivated to learn something new and improve. About half of people, in contrast, have a fixed mindset: when they encounter challenges or failures, they think that they are not meant to do something, and give up. Those with the fixed mindset carry with them a latent understanding of genetic determinism – they think they are inherently good at certain things and not at others, and that they should stick with what they are good at. In terms of intelligence, people with the fixed mindset believe that they have a fixed amount of intelligence, and that the situations life throws at them will uncover what their level of intelligence is. In contrast, people with the growth mindset think of their skills and intelligence as something that can be improved. What the research on these has found is that what you believe in this context becomes true, since people with the fixed mindset do not try to improve and people with the growth mindset do, and in fact humans have a remarkable amount of neuroplasticity and we can in fact improve over time if we try to.
 
But at the same time, a believe that you can improve isn't enough. The ability to learn from failures is a skill. We are not born with a highly developed ability to learn from failures, failures which are often quite complex and lead us to doubt ourselves. If we want to learn from failures, we have to learn how to learn from failures. 
 
Despite my appreciation of the growth mindset idea, I have some reservations about how the growth mindset is usually portrayed. It is not a very structural theory, at least as portrayed by Dweck. As a sociologist, I wonder: who tends to have the growth mindset? Do particular races or particular class groups tend to have it more often, because of social privileges or lack of those privileges? My guess is that social privileges give people more of a sense that they can improve their skills.
 
And who does the growth mindset tend to be more true for, in the real world? People with more social privileges – such as more time and money on their hands – have a greater ability to improve their skills. If you want to improve the quality of your writing, but you are struggling to make financial ends meet each month, and are in university and working (perhaps a full time job or multiple part time jobs), you are not going to have much time to look into how exactly one improves their writing skills, and to practice improving their writing, for example. So it seems to me that there are some people, because of structural advantages, who are able to grow more.
 
But I also think that a lack of social privileges does not stop you from having the growth mindset and benefitting from it. I think the most difficult part is getting access to the knowledge of the growth mindset, and which I'm doing here, and many people do in addition to my efforts of course. Once you know this is the way things are, nobody can tell you that you are just not cut out for something. There is real plasticity in how much people can change. You can become more intelligent. You can become more skilled at making professional documents, taking tests and exams, public speaking, reading, and anything else. While your circumstances do matter, recognizing that you are not fixed is liberating, still. Feedback you receive on your work does not reveal whether you are smart or not. Who you happen to be at this moment does not define everything about what you can achieve. Rather, the decisions you make about improving your skills and abilities is what matters most.
 
It is the methods you use, and the skills you have in using those methods, that determine the quality of your academic and other professional work. As a result, this post is essentially the starting point of this entire blog, even though it isn't exactly posted at the beginning of it. If you don’t believe that you can improve your skills, abilities, and methods, then there is no point in trying. But there IS a major point in trying. Anyone you see who is succeeding at something has methods behind what they are doing that are leading to their success. You can learn those methods. You can improve your skill at using those methods. And as a result, you can improve your performance at whatever that thing is.
 
In Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she doesn’t only focus on academic contexts. She also shows that across many areas of life, such as sports and business, having a growth mindset is a critical feature of success. I think it is an important book, and I recommend reading it. It tells you that you can indeed change a great deal about who you are, if you want to do that. You aren’t fixed in how you are at this moment.
 
Despite my appreciation for the Mindset book, I have one other critique of the growth mindset, which is connected to my first critique describe above, about social privileges. This second critique is that in a sense, you are fixed at any given time. Yes, ok, we can all improve our skills and methods. But since we only have a fixed amount of time in the week/day/our life, and there may be many demands on our time, we can only really try to improve in a certain limited number of areas at any one time. We can’t become better at everything all at once, because there are only so much time available to us.
 
So the growth mindset is connected to something else I’m interested in as a professional/academic method, which is planning. Planning methods are some of the most important tools you have in creating your success. If you want to get better at anything – using the growth mindset idea as a guide – you need a plan for it. You need time for it allocated in your week, or some repeating task that you actually get to in your task system. That is only the first step though, because after you make the time or prioritize the task (to improve at whatever you want to improve at), you have to figure out what you are going to do in that time, and not everything you do to try to improve will be equally effective.
 
So, given that there are only so many hours in the week, in a very real sense your abilities are fixed for most things at a given time. But they are not fixed in a genetic way – that is the point that always still stands, with growth mindset thinking. So do not let anyone tell you that you are just one way, and that you will be that way for the rest of your life. Do not let anyone (including yourself!) judge you as worthless forever because of your performance at any one time. You can improve, even if you can only realistically improve in a certain limited number of areas at any one time.
 
And there is more time in the week than you may be admitting. With careful planning, everyone can find pockets of time in the week to improve their skills.
 
Balancing “Cultivation” and Enjoyment 

I also want to touch on a critical topic here, which is balancing what I’ll call “cultivation” and enjoyment. “Cultivation” is what the growth mindset says you can do: you can do things that help you improve. Farmers cultivate plants not necessarily because they are having the best time of their lives, but because the result of the cultivation is a very good thing. For the farmer, it gives them a livelihood. It gives them the financial resources that allow them to live their life, and in many cases, farmers also (or primarily, depending on the context) cultivate food for themselves as well. But you “cultivate” something for its result, not for the enjoyment it gives you (I'm sure there are many farmers who do appreciate their work, of course, and do enjoy it, though).
 
The “growth mindset” stuff is cultivation. It is not necessarily fun to learn how to become a better writer, test-taker, public speaker, or reader. But the result of this activity is what we really care about. We want to improve how we do things, and so we engage in activities that help us cultivate ourselves.
 
So if you are doing some of these improvement activities and you’re like, “this is really not enjoyable at all”, that is not a problem. That is normal for cultivation activities. That is the point of talking about this. Maybe you do really enjoy learning about how to improve at something, and then that's great. But if you do not enjoy it, I think that is normal.
 
In this blog, I am not going to only advocate to only do things that aren not enjoyable. Life should be enjoyable! So whenever you are thinking about adding some “cultivation”-type activities to your week, I recommend that you also make sure there are some enjoyable activities in your week as well.
 
I make sure that I also plan in time for things that are purely enjoyable. Otherwise, if you get really excited about the growth mindset, all your free time can become “cultivation” activities, and that can just lead to an emotionally distressing life. You can end up feeling a bit inadequate! In some ways, wanting to improve at things is a negative judgment of yourself: you think something needs improving, i.e., that something is not ideal at the moment. So if you are doing too much of this, you can end up being a bit negative about yourself. I think it is extremely important to try to keep a balance between positive and negative thoughts about yourself, and to actually spend some time every day thinking of at least one good thing about yourself (if you struggle with that balance). In any case, since trying to improve your skills is a bit of a negative practice, I think it could lead people to become a bit depressed if they, in addition, do not find the cultivation activities they happen to be doing fun, and I’d be surprised if they were fun (but that’s great if they happen to be!).
 
So cultivation activities might not be fun, but that’s ok. But make sure you do plan in activities that feel like pure play to you, that are fun, enjoyable, and emotionally rewarding.
 
A Key Move of the Growth Mindset: Orienting to Failure Differently 

A key move of the growth mindset is to orient to failure differently. Let’s take public speaking as an example.
 
Say you give a big presentation to an audience of 100 people, and everyone thinks it was a very bad presentation – that you did not do it well.
 
If you were not using the growth mindset, you would look at your failed presentation and say something like, “I’m just stupid, I guess”, or “I just can’t do this apparently”, or “I wasn’t born with the ability to do this, so I should just give up now”, or “I’m not a born speaker”, or “I’m fundamentally worthless and should just give up”.
 
If we use the growth mindset, in contrast, we might think like this: “Ok, I clearly did not know how to do this well. What incorrect knowledge was my failure based on? How can I improve at this? Are there books, or online videos on YouTube (or anywhere else online), or other resources I could work with to help me get better? How could I develop and improve my presentation skills? I can do this, but I need to improve my methods”.
 
So instead of thinking you’re just stupid or weren’t born a natural presenter, you figure out what went wrong and how you can build the skills that allow you to be successful in future presentations.
 
As you deal with failure, it is also so important to be kind to yourself. That is why I also think self-compassion is extremely important, and I plan to write about that on this blog soon.

University of New Mexico

I currently work at the University of New Mexico as an assistant professor, and in one of my first semesters here I enrolled in a program they have called the Student Experience Project. This is a multi-university project aimed at improving teaching (https://studentexperienceproject.org/).

I was pleasantly surprised when, in this program, they discussed the growth mindset. It is central to the Student Experience Project program. Something they said there was that teaching is increasingly understood as needing to incorporate the growth mindset, and that faculty have a responsibility to convey this to students.

The University of New Mexico (UNM) has also recently developed a teaching and learning framework, where the growth mindset has a central place. They have this image that summarizes the framework (accessible here: https://ctl.unm.edu/framework/index.html):

You can see that "Embrace a Culture of Growth" is one of the principles, and that is the growth mindset principle.

I say this about UNM as examples, beyond what you can find on YouTube or in most publications about the growth mindset, of this being normalized and used on a daily basis.

Two videos about the growth mindset that you may be interested to check out:

Ali Abdaal, someone who makes his living out of helping people improve their skills, has a helpful YouTube video summarizing the ideas from Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. The video is called, “The Mindset Shift that Changed My Life” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L11WCsRqrIg).
 
Carol Dweck has also given some talks that are available online about the growth mindset, such as a video from Stanford Alumni called, “Developing a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiiEeMN7vbQ).