First, watch this video.

The belief in right and wrong is a major factor why most college students, especially those that have done well in school, approach their schooling with a fixed mindset.  Sadly, the education system encourages this.  A student pays a high price for failure with respect to future opportunities.  With grades and honors, students are sorted into categories of achievement (Dean’s lists, graduation honors, scholarships, etc.).  Worse, students must adapt to constant judgment by authority figures who know the right answers.

Carol Dweck, who first developed the theory of fixed and growth mindsets, uses an example that helps us see the difference between the two mindsets and how education creates a environment where fixed dominates.  She found a high school in Chicago where students had to pass 84 units to graduate.  A student who didn’t pass, rather than get an F, got the grade “Not yet.”  Dweck refers to this as “the power of yet.”  If one fails, you are nowhere.  “Not yet” means that a student is on a learning curve and, thus, has a clear path to the future.  The “grade,” at that point, is merely feedback on where the student is on the path to success, rather than an outcome that labels the student a failure.

Think about how that one basic change would alter a student’s experience in education.  It certainly would alleviate a lot of anxiety if students knew they would eventually achieve their goals and would not have their missteps show up on some record.  More important, though, that one structural policy would undoubtedly impact the way students see all other aspects of schooling.  [By the way, this is an excellent example for OrgTheory:  a structural change – in this case a policy – that influences individual and collective behavior.]

Another structural aspect of a school or classroom has to do with its grading policies.  As noted in the previous chapter, if you take your first exam and do poorly, that grade will likely impact your final grade in the class.  That is definitely a failure because there is nothing you can do to remove it.  And yet, that is not the way the rest of the world works.  Whether you play a sport, do rock climbing, or have a job in public relations, all of them require early failures in order to learn.  And yet, those turn out to be important lessons if a person learns from them, learns what not to do again, or learns how to improve with practice.

As a result, our playbook requires you to try and then try again; in other words, practice.  Get feedback on your practice about how to improve.  Once you believe you are ready, you’ll determine when you are graded.

When it comes down to it, mindset is a choice of each individual,  However, as you can see in these two examples, things can be organized to make it more likely that one can choose to adopt a growth, rather than a fixed, mindset.

As i suggest, in addition to the fixation on right and wrong, another critical determinant of mindset is how one responds to failure.  Education plays a major factor in helping us be terrified of it.  This, of course, has spilled over into people’s lives and careers.  The primary consequence of this is that people become terrified of taking risks.  Fifty years ago, when life involved little change, that was not a problem.  In today’s world, being risk averse is a huge obstacle to people’s careers, let alone for entire companies.

You see articles on the importance of failing pop up everywhere now (just today as i was editing, this article was in the NYT Sunday Business section).  i also got a notification yesterday from Linked it with this.

Ray Dalio, author of Principles:  Life and Work, the #1 best selling book in business on Amazon, says the following:

Be open-minded, radically open-minded.   You can fail. You can make mistakes.  But you need perspective, beyond your own, to make use of these experiences.  Being open to diverse points of view can only make you better.  You might have issues, as a leader, not knowing all the answers.  Yet in my experience, I’ve seen that the best leaders are the ones who seek out fresh perspectives. 

It is through new perspectives that we learn how to make the most of failure.  Indeed, that is why you continually hear that the most prominent business people:  Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, for example, read constantly.  According to Blinkist magazine, the average CEO reads 60 books a year.  Or how about the best reading 200 a year?  They are always looking for new perspectives.

One can easily see the importance of finding employees with growth mindsets.  No one wants to hire employees who avoid challenges and withdraw when things get tough.  Everyone wants employees who are constantly learning, taking on challenges, working to improve themselves at their jobs.  Thus, increasingly companies are making the idea of mindset part of their hiring process.  Among those are American Express and Google, as well as many others.

Dweck and others who study neuroplasticity (altering the structure of our brains) make the point that we all have both fixed, and growth, mindsets and we use these in different settings.  However, in situations where we strive for success, most people will engage one mindset over the others.  In this class, things are structured so that – in order to do very well in the class – you must bring your growth mindset, while leaving your fixed mindset at the door.  Don’t worry, you can pick it up again when you leave class.  You will likely need it for your next class.