Failure. What is failure? Is failure something that can be learned from or is failure something that defines who we are and what we do. In Carol S. Dweck’s book Mindset, the author evinces that the answer to this question truly lies within ourselves and what we think, i.e. our mindset. Dweck, unlike Malcolm Gladwell (author of Outliers), believes that people themselves are in complete control of what they think and how they succeed or do not succeed. According to Dweck, we are all born with a certain amount of talent or a set of skills and what we do throughout our lives can drastically impact what we become: for better or worse.
There are two mindsets which a person can have: a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. A person with a fixed mindset tends to take their failures and lets them define them and really bring them down on an emotional level. However a person with a growth mindset utilizes their failures to better themselves in future endeavors. In her book, Dweck mentions college students with a fixed mindset who refuse to look at the test scores of those who performed better on a given exam. Instead they choose to look at the test scores of those who don’t perform as well. However, college students with the growth mindsets were more concerned with those people who performed extraordinarily on the exam so that they could learn from their failures. The students with fixed mindsets chose to look at test scores of those who didn’t perform as well because they needed to do what people with fixed mindets tend to do: “repair their self-esteem” (Dweck 36), rather than their failures.
I do not want to think of myself as a college student with a fixed mindset, but the parallels that I was able to draw between myself and those Dweck mentions with fixed mindsets is astonishing. I know that I would never want to see another student’s papers on something I performed poorly on. It just makes me feel like more of a failure. It leaves me thinking: “If he/she could have done so well, why couldn’t I”. But perhaps this is something that I can work on. Maybe I can stop being a college student who always needs self-assurance and become one who learns from failure.
Dweck, Carol S. Mindset. New York, New York: Ballantine Books, 2006.
Very well written. I like your choice of words: evinces, for better or worse. The conclusion is a good connection between you and the book. It shows you understood and applied what you were reading. I think the same thing too "If he/she could've done so well, why couldn't I?" It annoys me when someone does better than me on a test who I know has not done half as much preparation as I did...but I guess that's the fixed mindset part of me I need to work on.
ReplyDeleteThe "for better or for worse" part reminds me of marriage, which is fitting because I think a lot of people are "married" to their fixed mindset. I know how you feel, and I think lots of people are like that. I just don't believe that just because you may do that every once in a while you should be labeled as fixed. But that's just me. And I think you questioning why you couldn't have done better shows your desire to grow.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Ali about questioning why you couldn't have done better. I don't think that is part of a fixed mindset. I see it as a way of evaluating what happened and trying to figure out where I went off course from what I should have been doing to do better. I feel like asking yourself why you couldn't have done better is a way to reflect on your study habits and try to determine if you really studied for 3 hour or if you studied for 30 minutes and texted/facebooked/watched tv the other 2 1/2 hours.
ReplyDeleteHannah: Gracias :P
ReplyDeleteAli: I never thought of it that way...the fact that i was questioning my ability to perform on the exam does somehow reflect a desire to grow....hmmmm...
Ryan: The comment about the facebooking and texting while studying made me smile...because that is something that I have to try very hard not to do...and sometimes i fail...