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Mindset Carol Dweck Analysis

Decent Essays

Carol Dweck writes about an excellent concept to live by in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, although it is not necessarily a new concept. She words her concept as the “growth” mindset versus the “fixed” mindset. The “growth” mindset is what she suggests the reader should translate into different aspects of their everyday life. The growth mindset is about learning from mistakes, and always trying as hard as possible to improve oneself. Whereas, the fixed mindset is when people have the idea that they were born with quantifiable traits, and are not able to change or improve them. In my opinion, for the growth mindset, she is essentially just rewording what I call the golden rule which is “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again”. …show more content…

The way Dweck describes it is that successful leaders are “not constantly trying to prove they’re better than others. For example, they don’t highlight the pecking order with themselves at the top, they don’t claim credit for other people’s contributions, and they don’t undermine others to feel powerful” (110). This is something I deal with on a day-to-day basis with different organizations I am involved with especially my fraternity. Someone gets voted into a certain position and feel as if they are all powerful just because they are on the executive council. One thing I struggle with the most is calming those people down and bringing them to reality. Mindset has really given some good tips on how leaders in the past have gone about resolving this and how I personally can go about resolving this. Dweck has a whole chapter devoted to people with this mindset. Leaders with fixed mindsets will get too caught up in the elitism that they are involved in, and continuously try to prove their superiority. This ultimately results in failure for the organization. Leaders like this believe that they do not need an excellent management team, and that they can do it on their own just with “little helpers to carry out their brilliant ideas” (112). Dweck gives many examples to prove time after time that this does not work in the long

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