The Growth Mindset
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The Growth Mindset
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The Growth Mindset (Believing that you can improve)
“The idea that we can grow our brain’s capacity to learn and to solve problems.” Carol Dweck
The most important thing I’ve learned while pursuing a career in professional software development is that learning to learn and being willing to connect to others doing the same is the foundation through which everything in this industry is built. “The Growth Mindset” is a way of saying just that. Believing you can change your understanding of how to think and reason better than you did before.
Things Learned
You know you’ve upgraded your skills if you’re mentally exhausted after a technical challenge.
Pushing Yourself Through Deliberate Practice:
- Pushes you just outside your comfort zone
- Repeated often
- Feedback on results is continuously available
- It’s highly demanding mentally
- It’s difficult
- It requires good goals
Seeking a grade (A, A+, …) or any other form of constant validation/rewards that are not directly attached to effort and difficulty promotes a “Fixed Mindset” instead of promoting “Critical Thinking”. Changing our systems of education to provide difficult problems which require real effort as well as using praise and reward for those efforts or when a solution is actually achieved has been shown to greatly improve the ability of independent thinking in the individual.
What we need in education is a better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, a psychological perspective. Angela Lee Duckworth
Grit is passion and perseverance. Grit is working really hard to achieve a goal. People with grit are significantly more likely to achieve goals (succeed) opposed to others who have high scores but don’t apply themselves to a problem through passion and resolve.
In light of all this, “success” and how it’s defined, rises to the surface and begs for our attention.
Is success always earned? Is failure? Alian de Bottom
- You can’t be successful at everything.
- Most ideas of success and failure are not our own.
More than anything, it is important to actually spend time thinking about and finding true understanding of our own ideas of success and failure so that we know what it looks like as we progress through life.
Things I want to know more about
- What role does competition play in this?
- Can you authenticate and reward yourself in a meaningful way or is it necessary for others to play a part in our own validation.
Links
Upgrade Your Technical Skills with Deliberate Practice
Carol Dweck on the Growth Mindset
Angela Lee Duckworth on Grit
Alain de Botton on Redefining Success
Your Emotional Intelligence
Your Biases