Just recently, using a recommendation, I read the book “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”. In the book, Carol S. Dweck argues that people can be divided into two groups. Those who have fixed mindset and those who have growth mindset. This is how she explains it:

Believing that your qualities are carved in stone — the fixed mindset — creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character, well then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.

A growth mindset comes from the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through effort. Yes, people differ greatly – in aptitude, talents, interests, or temperaments – but everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

Qualities of successful people and the growth mindset

Apparently the whole book argues that people with the growth mindset usually have better odds of becoming successful. Professor Dweck demonstrates this through the research she has done. Her team showed that the view people adopt of themselves has profound impact on their lives. This resonates with a famous quote by Henry Ford “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right”.

When I think of myself I cannot tell if I’m more of a growth mindset or of a fixed mindset. I am afraid to fail, but at the same time I am fine with trying things I could fail in. I like to prove myself, but at the same time I am open to learning and can easily admit if I don’t know something. Top grades in high school was my thing, but this didn’t stop me from taking part in math, physics, chemistry, programming competitions even I knew that at some level I will be stopped revealing that I am not that “all knowing”.

From my own observation, many successful people whom I met in life usually had an urge to prove themselves, which is explained in the book as a quality of a fixed mindset person. These people were so much afraid to fail that they put tons of effort into things they were doing. This might be one bit where I somewhat disagree with the author. Even more, it was somewhat ironical to read about desire to prove yourself as a fixed quality from a successful person who admits of being taught of fixed mindset in her childhood.

Of course, it is totally different issue when people try to prove themselves by pretending to be smarter, cooler, or whatever. I consider this to be a very bad behavior and in general a red flag for any relationship, including employer-employee.

Learning like children

In my opinion, the chapter on parenting is where the book really excels. The advice I took for myself is not to praise my children for how smart they are, but instead praise them for their effort. I strongly agree that it is important to develop children’s desire to learn things, to encourage their curiosity, and to work on their resilience to failure. It has been for couple of weeks as I try to use this advise with my daughter and it really works. My toddler daughter now seeks to put more effort into little things she does.

We all should be more like little children when it comes to learning and trying new things. A baby doesn’t question its ability to learn how to walk. Small failure is nothing more than a learning experience. While I was writing this blog post I also stumbled upon another idea that when we are young we are full of curiosity and intrinsic motivation but overtime it is replaced by extrinsic motivation in form of grades, ratings, incentive pay, etc. I think this idea by Edwards Deming plays very well with the ideas in the “Mindset” book, especially considering that Carol S. Dweck has done a lot of her research on students and children.

I want to leave you with this great illustration of the two mindsets.

A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.

I have listened to the audio version of “The Black Swan” twice. First time at the beginning of the year and the second time just recently. The book is philosophical in a way. It is not very easy to fully comprehend conveyed message as author frequently diverts to fictional stories, terms in French, and thinkers that are long time dead.

There were two striking statements in the book “anyone can be a president” if someone like “these people can get a Nobel prize”. Sounds actual? Think of Trump vs. Clinton presidential race and Bob Dylan receiving Nobel prize in Literature if you are not reading this in Autumn 2016.

This does not mean that Nassim Taleb is any sort of predictor or prophesy maker. He himself says that he cannot make predictions, instead he highlights over and over again that rare events that seem improbable do occur more frequently than most of us would imagine and at the same time it is impossible to come up with mathematical models that would somehow calculate probabilities for these events. Unfortunately, we cannot know what we don’t know, therefore the best strategy for any of us is to build robustness to black swan events.

Application of the ideas expressed in the book is very wide. Starting with building financial portfolio consisting of 90% of very safe investments and 10% of extremely risky ones, therefore exposing yourself to probability of catching a black swan, like Google or Facebook. Ending with applying it to your life by exposing yourself to variety of endeavors. Careful here: event’s consequences are even harder to predict than occurrence of such events.

There is one aspect of the book that I don’t like. The author almost throughout the book despises other people imagining them as aggressive apes and suggesting nasty things like putting a rat down someones shirt. I do not exclude that he imagines his readers in the same way: silly monkeys reading higher caliber philosophical work. This, though, does not disqualify his book from being a really valuable contribution to human knowledge, but, in my opinion, it is only thanks to the black swan event of him benefiting from the 2000 crisis that made him successful and subsequently allowed him to write this and other books.

Conclusion

This book is definitely worth reading. It may make you look at the world as sequences of improbable events that change everything around. It could also make you way more skeptical about the theoretical modeling suggested by economists and other tie wearing experts. The book is not an easy read. On the contrary, it requires a lot of attention and thinking. Maybe leave it for a time when you are in a “philosophical” mood.