Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Sharing a few highlights from Carol Dweck's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.  I have been meaning to read Mindset for some time.  However, I am glad that I read it on the heels of Paul Tough's How Children Succeed.  Several powerful connections between the two works and furthers the conversation about cultivating and promoting the development of essential non-cognitive skills.

What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait?

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.

At the same time, scientists are learning that people have more capacity for lifelong learning and brain development than they ever thought

This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.

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

But for children with the growth mindset, success is about stretching themselves. It’s about becoming smarter.

One seventh-grade girl summed it up. “I think intelligence is something you have to work for … it isn’t just given to you.… Most kids, if they’re not sure of an answer, will not raise their hand to answer the question. But what I usually do is raise my hand, because if I’m wrong, then my mistake will be corrected. Or I will raise my hand and say, ‘How would this be solved?’ or ‘I don’t get this. Can you help me?’ Just by doing that I’m increasing my intelligence.”

I am simply saying that a growth mindset helps people to see prejudice for what it is—someone else’s view of them—and to confront it with their confidence and abilities intact

Those with the growth mindset found setbacks motivating. They’re informative. They’re a wake-up call.         

How Children Succeed

Sharing some select highlights from Paul Tough's work, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.  Very much worth reading as well as beginning to discuss the importance of focusing on noncognitive skills.  

What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character

scientists have reached a consensus in the past decade that the key channel through which early adversity causes damage to developing bodies and brains is stress

It wasn’t poverty itself that was compromising the executive-function abilities of the poor kids. It was the stress that went along with it.

The second, called the cognitive control system, allows you to regulate all those urges. The reason the teenage years have always been such a perilous time, Steinberg says, is that the incentive processing system reaches its full power in early adolescence while the cognitive control system doesn’t finish maturing until you’re in your twenties. So for a few wild years, we are all madly processing incentives without a corresponding control system to keep our behavior in check

Parents and other caregivers who are able to form close, nurturing relationships with their children can foster resilience in them that protects them from many of the worst effects of a harsh early environment. This message can sound a bit warm and fuzzy, but it is rooted in cold, hard science. The effect of good parenting is not just emotional or psychological, the neuroscientists say; it is biochemical.

But the principle behind it—improving children’s outcomes by promoting stronger relationships between children and their parents—is increasingly in use across the country in a wide variety of interventions

Seligman and Peterson defined character in a different way: a set of abilities or strengths that are very much changeable—entirely malleable, in fact. They are skills you can learn; they are skills you can practice; and they are skills you can teach

It seemed that what Stefl was attempting to do was convince her students that not just their intelligence and their character but their very destinies were malleable; that their past performance was not an indication of their future results