I Can, I Will, I Guess I Can't

The book were currently reading, Mindset, has turned out to be surprisingly interesting. Carol Dweck believes that people can have two different types of mindset, the growth mindset and the fixed mindset. The growth mindset is when you believe in improvement and the fixed mindset is when you believe that you can’t improve. The reason I find this book interesting is because it makes me really think of where I am at the moment and in what kind of mindset I am in. It makes you question the choices you've made and how it has affected your success.  I realize that I am one of the many that are in the fixed mindset area. This book has made me acknowledge that a lot of the time I do give up when the going gets tough and that has led me down a road that I am sometimes not happy with.  When talking about procrastination I said that I used it as an excuse, because I didn't want to put the effort in and fail. In that case if I failed it would mean to me that I am not smart enough or capable of doing the task and those are characteristics of someone with a fixed mindset.

I feel like the main issue that we've been talking about throughout this semester is being all summed up by this book. Agency, the action of growing and becoming, the 10,000 hour article about effort and enthusiasm, motivation and doing things for yourself and doing things for others, it all fits into these two mindsets. In the growth mindset it is all about the effort, the learning, and just trying. Agency fits into this mindset because agency is about growing from a learner to a thinker, from a follower to a leader, from not knowing to knowing and this is exemplified by this mindset because you grow to be it, unlike in the fixed mindset were you expect yourself to “just” be; just be a thinker, just be a leader, just be knowledgeable.  The 10,000 article to me also goes along with the growth mindset because they both believe in improvement through practice and putting in effort, whereas once again in the fixed mindset you are just expected to be that talented or that amazing in your field. Finally Motivation, I think this is very big for mindset because it seems like depending on how you’re motivated, it’s going to shape your mindset. For example if you’re intrinsically motivated you do things for you, so let’s say you aren't good at math and you took a test last week. This week when you receive your test you see that you got a B. An intrinsically motivated person would be happy because they know that they struggle in this subject so for them a B is improvement and improvement is success  and it gives you encouragement to want to strive for that A the next time, which is the growth mindset. But let’s say you’re an extrinsically motivated person then that B, that self-improvement means nothing because you didn't end up getting the A that society would applaud so you would consider it failure and probably continue to not try because you’re not good at math and there is nothing you can do, which is the fixed mindset.