IGX

This book by Carol S. Dweck was strongly recommended to me and as a person whose mindset was broken for a very long time, I thought I should give it a read.

First, the bad: Dweck is a Stanford psychologist who has written and researched this subject on a scholarly level, and this is her attempt to write a popular treatment of her work. As a reasonably intelligent person, I felt that she was aiming low. It's not written on the insulting Seussian level of "Who Moved My Cheese" or similar crap, but most of it feels like getting hit over the head repeatedly with the same point, example after example after example. And if you tire easily of "conversational" writing that includes sentence fragments and colloquialisms, this book will be annoying in the extreme.

Now for the good parts: you should ignore all of the above because they are minor quibbles with her presentation of an idea that is very powerful and useful. To oversimplify it, she describes the two extremes of "mindsets," or beliefs about talent and learning. On one end the "fixed mindset" emphasizes talent and a fixed level of intelligence, and on the other the "growth mindset" emphasizes the ability to keep learning and increasing one's skills.

She uses a wide range of examples (John MacEnroe shows up a lot) to show how people with a fixed mindset behave in contrast to those with a growth mindset. She provides examples in sports, business, teaching, parenting, etc. and ends each chapter with a set of questions meant to stimulate the reader to examine his own mindset.

I found it to be an excessive amount of repetition, but upon reflection it might not be excessive for many people. I'm very used to playing with the inside of my own head, especially with cognitive therapy. So for me, this was really just another tool in the toolbox, albeit a very effective and powerful one. Others who are not very used to this kind of work may need all those examples.

Take home message: a very valuable perspective, and worth a read, but cloaked in a "pop" format. If you've done a lot of self-work you'll be able to fly through about 90% of it, take no notes, and will never have to read it again, while retaining the message and being able to apply it. You'll have to just ignore the annoying style and "dumbing down" while zipping through and mining the good stuff. (If you want the original research BTW, there are notes and references in the back.)