Mindset by Carol Dweck is a book that says we sometimes develop a fixed-ability mindset. A mindset where who we are can’t change. This mindset says that our level of ability and skills are determined from birth and are constant, and since most of us define ourselves by our skills and what we do, it means that we ourselves can’t change.
This happens when we start believing that the reason we are good at something is because of natural talent. Unfortunately, I had that mindset for years and years throughout school. When people tell you you’re smart, you start believing it. You also start shying away from areas where you’re not smart. I carefully and methodically avoided languages, history and woodwork because it didn’t come to me easily and because I had a “bad memory”.
If I wasn’t smart at it, it wasn’t worth putting effort into especially when I might fail. At least if I failed without trying, I had an excuse that I hadn’t given it my all.
But having a hobby, an obsession, a martial art, an anything really; it gives you an example of how your skills can change and can grow. For me, in Form 4 (something like grade 10) I started playing basketball.
Basketball taught me that I can grow
Before this, I’d always defined myself as the smart kid. Why? Because I didn’t really have anything else. It sounds a bit nerdy now, but it really was true at the time. I’m not saying this for pity, that part of my life is done and over with now and I have very little, if any, regret about it. I embrace it as part of my past.
My parents are awesome. They never said they wanted results. Rather, they continually stressed that they wanted effort. “If you work hard and do badly, it’s fine. It’s not about the result, it’s about the effort. Remember that.”, my mom repeated again and again. But I just never really got it, not least because other people kept piling on the “praise”.
So in Form 4, the apartments that I stayed in built a basketball court. Afterwards, it was only natural for all the kids in the area to go down and test out the court. We had no experience mind you. None of us knew anything about basketball. My dribbling (bouncing the ball to move it around), my shots, my knowledge of basketball rules, they were all zero. I vaguely knew who Michael Jordan was but had never watched even a single NBA game.
But we learned. It was just a bunch of kids playing around without much skill involved, but I stuck to it. 6 pm, the kids would usually come down. I was usually there every day from 5pm to 7pm. I’d practice throwing shots in, over and over again. Then somebody told me something that hurt. He said that I should just stay near the ring and wait for the ball, because my shooting was alright but my dribbling was horrible. I was hurt, but it made me think that I wanted to show him up. I did. And my dribbling improved. (P.S. It was stupid of me to feel hurt because he told the truth, but there you go)
An odd thing about basketball was that there were no real metrics for me to keep track of. It wasn’t as if my goal was to be able to dribble the ball 80 times a minute and if I was below that count then I had failed. No, it was much more subjective, and that subjectivity meant that I could feel myself improving, but without the existence of numbers that would distract me from the game itself. I couldn’t fail.
This was completely different from my normal “intelligence” and being “smart”. We had tests and exams, and every time there was a grade that went along with it. When I did well, it was just because of my “natural (and fixed)” intelligence, while low grades just proved that I wasn’t “naturally talented” at that subject. I was fixated on those grades.
I would look at them and keep looking at them to reassure myself that I was “smart”. I wasn’t proud of my effort. I was proud of skills that I had never had to work on. It’s like being proud to be a guy. Or proud to have fingers. Yes, they were (and still are) integral parts of me, but the pride I had in them was extreme and distracted me from the skills I was weak in and needed to work on.
I’ll be honest, I played basketball because I wanted to play with friends. But then I got good at it. I don’t mean tournament-worthy good, but good enough that I wasn’t embarrassed to play any more.
After 2 years of this, I finally realized that I’d slowly adopted a growth mindset.
The growth mindset
I suddenly noticed that I believed I could change. It wasn’t on a conscious level mind you. I just suddenly wanted to do things to break out of my shell. After 2 years of basketball, I graduated from high school and went to pre-university. Matriculation, they call it here. And crazy me, I volunteered when they asked for names to be the student representative.
Here’s why it’s so crazy. I was a guy who was timid. No, that doesn’t even begin to describe me. Timidity, shyness, social anxiety; I had those in bucket loads and more. I barely knew all the people in my classroom and I couldn’t begin to even look at girls or talk in front of a room of people. My voice was so low that you couldn’t hear me if you were 3 feet away. And the worst part here is that I’m not exaggerating… not even a little.
And the job of the student representative was to stand in front of nearly a thousand students (if my memory serves me) and recite the student oath loudly for them to repeat. Needless to say, I didn’t get the part. (The person who did get it though, Aiman, is an awesome person who ended up being my classmate and a good friend.)
But playing basketball, having that hobby; it drilled into me that I can change, that I can improve, and that natural talent isn’t the only thing I have.
I made it into a goal for myself to be able to speak, and speak well dammit!
I changed myself and I’m pretty proud of it
4 years later, I found myself in the ESL championships of the World Universities Debate Tournament, speaking in front of around 2 thousand people from all corners of the world, while being recorded.
And guess what? I was fine with it. I was worrying more over whether our case would win than I was over the huge number of people watching us. Unfortunately, me and Danial didn’t manage to take the prize. But it still goes to show,
People don’t DO change
We can change. The only downside is that not enough people have the growth mindset, and so they treat you through that filter and treat you as if you can’t change either.
Believing the world is constant
I believe that most people who feel like they are “failing” at one thing or another are operating out of a fixed mindset. We start believing that our skills are constant because that’s what we’re born with, or maybe even because we believe that it’s wrong to change who we are.
Change is the only constant
I’m sure you’ve heard this many times, but I don’t know if you’ve ever really thought about it and internalized it.
If you have, then not only does it start applying to you, it also starts changing your worldview. You’ll now start viewing *other *people as having the ability to change too.
In a fixed mindset, people won’t believe that you can change and in fact they’ll want you to stay the same. Imagine you were about to make a huge change in your life now. How many of your friends do you think would tell you:
Don’t change, just be yourself
or if you’ve already made a change, how many would say:
I don’t know you any more. You’ve changed.
And they say it as if it’s an insult.
Here’s the thing. To them, it is an insult. You’ve insulted their entire reality and worldview. You’ve just told them to their faces that what they believe in is not true, that people DO change and that their talents and skills are not fixed.
There’s a crazy consequence to this as well. If your talents and skills can be changed by your effort, then your failures are your responsibility. And most of us just can’t handle that fact.
I need to clarify something here very quickly. I didn’t say that your failures are your “fault”. I said that your failures are your “responsibility”. I honestly didn’t notice the language I used until I noticed how it could be misunderstood. This is a great example of how your beliefs determine the word choice you use. Anyway, what I mean by your failures being your responsibility is that even when your failures are caused by something or someone else, it is still your responsibility to make sure that you fix it and get it back on track.
After all, when you have a growth mindset, it also means that you are in control and that even when it’s his fault, you can still do something about it.
So yes, you’ve just insulted your friend because you’re saying that you’re changing to become better, so if your friend isn’t changing, he must be bad and at fault for his life problems.
On a deep subconscious level, I believe this is why we don’t want to change. By having a fixed mindset, we can easily pass off our problems as not being our fault. After all, even if you tried really hard and did your best, your limits are already set. So it’s not your fault if you can’t succeed at life or whatever project you have, because it was just too much for you.
A growth mindset, however, would make you try really hard and when you failed, you’d just try again. Like they say:
It’s not how many times you fall, it’s how many times you get back up
Without a growth mindset, you’ll just never get back up. After all, if you’ve failed once, that’s already showed you your limits right?
Conclusion
Ok. So that fixed mindset you have might not completely destroy your life, but it will keep you from changing it. In fact, it won’t just keep you from succeeding at changing; on a deeper level, it will tell you that change is bad.
Planning to make a change in your life but you’re not sure if you should change or be yourself? Here’s a question (and I want you to think deeply about the answer to this): Why is that change bad? When you get your answer, using a growth mindset, figure out a way around that problem, even if it’s not your fault.
A growth mindset means that you believe you have control over your future, and also that you are just a little bit responsible.
Guess what? I don’t believe I have a “bad memory” any more.