Mindset for Success

Carol Dweck: A Summary of Growth and Fixed Mindsets (Farnam Street). Your view of yourself can determine everything. If you believe that your qualities are unchangeable — the fixed mindset — you will want to prove yourself correct over and over rather than learning from your mistakes. There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development.

How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything (ryanholiday.net). Everything we do matters — whether it’s making smoothies to save up money or studying for the bar — even after we’ve already achieved the success we sought. Everything is a chance to do and be our best. Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires. Wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, and wherever we are going, we owe it to ourselves, to our art, to the world to do it well. That’s our primary duty. And our obligation. When action is our priority, vanity falls away.

5 Mindsets for Success by Mark Manson. Here are five stories from five different people that reveal the mindsets of the most successful among us.

How Your Beliefs Can Sabotage Your Behavior by James Clear. In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.

The Surprising Benefits of Being (Slightly) Crazy by Mark Manson. Our psychological faculties are like athletic ability or height. Most of us cluster around a stable average height, but there are people at the extremes—some are dwarfs and some are giants. And just as the dwarfs and the giants experience the world much differently than the majority in the middle, the people at the extremes who see the world differently from the majority in the middle also have a very different experience. And those extremes, while usually negative, are the same extremes that result in bursts of creativity and genius. And it’s not a question of getting rid of them, but rather how we manage them.

How to Be a Genius (theschooloflife.com). Genius can be defined as paying closer attention to our real thoughts and feelings and being brave and tenacious enough to hold onto them even when they find no immediate echo in the world beyond. The reason why we disavow so much of what passes through our minds is in essence anxiety. We kill off our most promising thoughts for fear of seeming strange to ourselves and others.

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