Absolutely! Dweck’s fixed and growth mindsets are absolutely central to my work. I used to call them “naturally struggling” and “naturally successful”—well, I still do for marketing reasons. But Dweck showed with brilliant clarity where the mindsets come from: struggle results from believing that your ability in any area is a fixed quantity, rather than a variable one under your personal control.
This is one area where rational thinking is of real benefit. Because not only is a ‘growth mindset’ more effective than a ‘fixed mindset’ when it comes to learning skills it is also simply far more accurate.
While I was devouring the various therios and findings compiled in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance I kept running across one common observation. There is, it seems one predictor of expert performance in a field that has a significant heritable component. It isn’t height or IQ. Although those two are highly heritible they aren’t all that great at predicting successful acheivement of elite performance. As best as the researchers could desipher, the heritable component of success is more or less the ability to motivate oneself to deliberately practice for four hours seven days a week for about ten years.
Now, I would be surprised to see you concede the heritability of motivation and I definitely suggest it is an area in which to apply Dweck’s growth mindset at full force! You also have a whole bag of tricks and techniques that can be used to enhance just the sort of motivation required. But I wonder, have you observed that there are some people who naturally tend to be more interested in getting involved actively in personal development efforts of the kind you support? Completely aside from whether they believe in the potential usefulness, there would seem to be many who are simply less likely to care enough to take extreme personal development seriously.
But I wonder, have you observed that there are some people who naturally tend to be more interested in getting involved actively in personal development efforts of the kind you support?
Yes and no. What I’ve observed is that most everybody wants something out of life, and if they’re not getting it, then sooner or later their path leads to them trying to develop themselves, or causing themselves to accidentally get some personal development as a side effect of whatever their real goal is.
The people who set out for personal development for its own sake—whether because they think being better is awesome or because they hate who they currently are—are indeed a minority.
A not-insignificant-subset of my clientele are entrepreneurs and creative types who come to me because they’re putting off starting their business, writing their book, or doing some other important-to-them project. And a significant number of them cease to be my customers the moment they’ve got the immediate problem taken care of.
So, it’s not that people aren’t generally motivated to improve themselves, so much as they’re not motivated to make general improvements; they are after specific improvements that are often highly context-specific.
This is one area where rational thinking is of real benefit. Because not only is a ‘growth mindset’ more effective than a ‘fixed mindset’ when it comes to learning skills it is also simply far more accurate.
While I was devouring the various therios and findings compiled in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance I kept running across one common observation. There is, it seems one predictor of expert performance in a field that has a significant heritable component. It isn’t height or IQ. Although those two are highly heritible they aren’t all that great at predicting successful acheivement of elite performance. As best as the researchers could desipher, the heritable component of success is more or less the ability to motivate oneself to deliberately practice for four hours seven days a week for about ten years.
Now, I would be surprised to see you concede the heritability of motivation and I definitely suggest it is an area in which to apply Dweck’s growth mindset at full force! You also have a whole bag of tricks and techniques that can be used to enhance just the sort of motivation required. But I wonder, have you observed that there are some people who naturally tend to be more interested in getting involved actively in personal development efforts of the kind you support? Completely aside from whether they believe in the potential usefulness, there would seem to be many who are simply less likely to care enough to take extreme personal development seriously.
Yes and no. What I’ve observed is that most everybody wants something out of life, and if they’re not getting it, then sooner or later their path leads to them trying to develop themselves, or causing themselves to accidentally get some personal development as a side effect of whatever their real goal is.
The people who set out for personal development for its own sake—whether because they think being better is awesome or because they hate who they currently are—are indeed a minority.
A not-insignificant-subset of my clientele are entrepreneurs and creative types who come to me because they’re putting off starting their business, writing their book, or doing some other important-to-them project. And a significant number of them cease to be my customers the moment they’ve got the immediate problem taken care of.
So, it’s not that people aren’t generally motivated to improve themselves, so much as they’re not motivated to make general improvements; they are after specific improvements that are often highly context-specific.