Book Review: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

This wasn’t the normal DevOps book that I enjoy reading, but it wasn’t too far from it either. The focus of the book was on creating a mindset such that your goal is to learn from the activities you do, rather than focus on winning or achieving a prize. This isn’t a new concept, but the history she relates helps paint a more detailed picture of how people can fall into a mindset where completing a task is the goal, rather than gaining the deeper understanding of how you complete a task.

Her description of how people fall into this mindset comes from a tremendous amount of research and first hand experience educating children. Her theory is that education systems that put pressure on teachers to teach towards a test often set an unfortunate precedence that passing the test is the highest priority. This changes the goals, or mindsets, of the teachers so that they can rationalize that if they get the children to memorize the answers and regurgitate them, then they have completed their task. That if the children pass the test, it corresponds with the false belief that the children have learned. Extending from that idea, this sets up classrooms where children are given tests throughout the year and they either pass or fail the test, and then they move on to the next subject. Which creates a psychological barrier that the children either know it or they don’t, and there’s no way that can possibly change. Creating a false impression that the test has decided, this is all they will ever know.

Instead, research from Dr. Dweck and others have shown that if you change the goal from testing into fostering positive learning experiences that can take root in children, then the children are self motivated to tackle hard problems using hard work, overcome discouragement through a desire to improve their own knowledge and abilities, and create a virtuous cycle by looking at knowledge gain as the real reward. This is very similar to the Lean practices of Continuous Improvement (Toyota Kata stresses continuous improvement as does Lean Startup), Dr. Westrum’s Generative Culture, and W. Edwards Deming’s thoughts on education (The New Economics: For Industry, Government, Education).

I truly enjoyed the many examples that she had working with children, and the advice she gave on how to encourage children to learn is equally applicable to adults; so there is a lot of value within those pages.

However, I would encourage others to skip the chapters which use sports examples. Dr. Dweck can be a bit single minded in her focus to connect success with a learning mindset. While a willingness to continually grow and improve are necessary to achieve great success, it’s often a breakthrough within a particular field or a combination of improvements that create a new framework which actually creates the success; it doesn’t come from just having a learning mindset.