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Fixed Mindset vs Growth Mindset

 There is a very interesting TED talk by Carol Dweck where she talks about the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. The terminology fixed vs growth here should be taken as a person's belief about his or her attributes. People with a fixed mindset believe that they are pigeonholed with a certain set of immutable abilities, while people with a growth mindset are aware that they their abilities can improve. This awareness, as far as I understand, need not be taken as something they are consciously aware of, but its effect is seen in how they react to their success or failure in tasks.

Carol talks about various experiments with children which laid bare the existence of these mindsets. Most interesting is the response of children with these two mindsets as the difficulty of tasks is increased. Growth mindset people often see a more difficult task as an opportunity for them to grow, while fixed mindset people are petrified! For fixed mindset folks, they and their abilities are up for a test and a harder test means a bigger possibility of failing. Most interestingly, this difference is even seen in brain scans, with growth mindset people having a very different brain activity pattern than their fixed mindset brethren. Growth mindset folks are energized, while the fixed mindset people are almost paralyzed with fear.

Carol offers this as a criticism to the culture where parents place onus on their children to obtain rewards, rather than placing onus on the process of growth that the children can go through while competing for rewards. While Carol does not offer any cricism of the growth mindset, I think that no particular mindset is the best in all cases.There may be certain scenarios in which the growth mindset may be a disadvantage. A growth mindset person might spend too much time on a difficult task rather than giving up and going ahead to more fruitful tasks. But keeping in mind that the real world is much more complicated than the school environment with many tasks being more difficult than how they appear to be at first, perhaps the growth mindset is the better mindset to be inculcated in children. This is especially true in underprivileged children, as Carol also illustrates with some examples. The kids who are burdened with the belief that they have less of a headstart in the world will definitely be more motivated when presented with the hope of growth and a better tomorrow.

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