Book review: Mindset by Carol Dweck

This book is scary! If I had ever bothered to keep a dairy during my life, and managed to faithfully jot down my emotions and thoughts, then reflecting on those diaries now would I am sure have taught and shown me everything that Dweck has somehow managed to capture in her book. She has given words to thoughts and learnings I have only begun to learn for myself. This book has opened up a new world to me, a world that confirms more than ever just how similar we all are, and that feeling of being special is just an illusion we build to protect ourselves. It is an uncanny experience to read a book by a total stranger and to recognize almost every example in the book as something you have personally experienced. And yes, if you were wondering, I have a fixed mindset in many areas, or at least had to a high degree.

This is a must read for anybody who has ever been/felt a natural or a talent in some area. Most likely, such a situation will have fostered some form of fixed mindset thinking and most likely, this mindset will be blocking your further development in some way. This book will at least make you more aware of this, and hopefully give you a "mindset" to tackle and overcome these blockades.

This is not to say the book is The Truth. In fact, the simple split into fixed mindset vs growth mindset is I think a little over simplified. Personally, although I recognise most of the examples of fixed mindset in myself, I also recognise strong elements of the growth mindset in myself. Especially in different areas such as business, family, friends, etc different mindsets seem to apply, overlap, or flow into one another. For example, I tend to have a strong fixed mindset initial reaction to many things, but after some reflection and time, I tend towards growth mindset actions as a result. In short, it's not all as black and white as the book sometimes seems to suggest.