What Mindset are You?

The book Mindset incorporated many concepts that we have been discussing throughout the semester. Things like motivation, failure, innate abilities, hard work, time, and effort where all topics of discussions when learning about the two different types of mindset, the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. A person with the fixed mindset fears failure because they feel like they themselves are failures instead of learning from it. They also neglect hard work and effort because to them it’s either your good at it or not but it is not up to you, it’s what your born with. In the growth mindset putting in the time to get better and learning from failure are the key to success.

How this book relates to me is that it showed me that I sometimes can get caught up in the fixed mindset ways. I wouldn't say that when I fail at something I feel like a complete failure but I do tend to think “well this is just not what I am good at” and I give up. Also for a big part in my life I would say that I was a believer of innate talent. You were born smart, or born talented but the talent couldn't be acquired and that sort of stopped me from doing a lot of things I wanted to do. Mindset is also a continuum with the fixed mindset at one end and the growth mindset on the other end and I would place myself somewhere in the middle. When I was younger I loved drawing and obviously no one is born a Picasso but that was one area that I never gave up on, no matter what. If a painting or sketch didn't turn out the way I had meant I would start over but I wouldn't get rid of the other sketch because from that I was able to take what I did like and what I wanted change.  In that area of my life I was definitely in the growth mindset, learning from my mistakes and always looking to improve.