Why Mindset?

I came across this book online and was immediately drawn to it. I am excited to learn more about the psychology of human beings and how we can improve ourselves and reach our full potential. The fear of stagnation could be the reason why I started the blog. I was therefore very keen to understand the impact of mindset on our personal and business lives.

Chapter 1: The Mindsets

• Most experts agree that an individual’s intelligence is not nature OR nurture, genes OR environment, but a constant give and take between the two.
• There are two types of mindset
  • The fixed mindset
  • The growth mindset
• The fixed mindset
  • Based on the belief that current qualities are set in stone.
  • People with this mindset tend to magnify their current abilities to fit their beliefs.
• The growth mindset
  • Based on the belief that initial talents and aptitudes, interests and temperaments can be changed through effort, strategy and the help of others, and therefore growth is possible through application and experience.
  • People with this mindset are open to accurate information about current abilities in order to learn effectively.
  • Produces persistence and resilience, which is the most important ingredient in creative achievement.

Chapter 2: Inside the mindsets

• The fixed mindset
  • Success is about proving you’re smart or talented.
  • Failure is about having a setback (a bad grade, losing a tournament, being rejected), it means you’re not smart or talented.
  • Effort is a bad thing because it means you’re not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn’t need to put in the effort.
  • Makes people non-learners because they only pay attention when they are told whether their answers are right or wrong, not when presented with information that could help them learn, according to the Brain Wave Lab in Columbia.
  • They thrive when things are safely within their grasp. When things get too challenging, they lose interest.
  • People expect skill to appear on its own before any learning takes place.
  • It’s about being flawless right away.
• The growth mindset
  • Stretching to learn something new
  • Failure is about not growing, not fulfilling your potential
  • Effort is what makes you smart or talented
  • People pay close attention to information that might stretch their knowledge
  • They thrive when they stretch
  • It’s about learning over time, rising to a challenge and making progress.
• Another way of looking at potential
  • Potential is someone’s ability to develop their skills over time with effort and coaching.
  • People with a growth mindset know that it takes time for potential to blossom.
  • People with a fixed mindset choose success over growth because they are trying to prove that they are special or superior.
• Mindsets change the meaning of failure
  • The growth mindset
    • Failure can be a painful experience, but it doesn’t define you.
    • It’s a problem to be faced, dealt with and learned from.
  • The fixed mindset
    • Losing yourself in failure can be a permanent, haunting drama.
    • This mindset gives you no good recipe for overcoming it. Instead of trying to learn from and repair their failures, people with this mindset may try to repair their self-esteem. For example, they may seek out people who are worse off than they are.
  • Another way they try to repair their self-esteem after a failure is by assigning blame or making excuses.
  • College students were given the opportunity to look at other students‘ tests after doing poorly in a test.
    • Those with a growth mindset chose to look at the tests of people who had done much better than they had.
    • But students with a fixed mindset chose to look at the tests of people who had done really badly in order to feel better about themselves.
• Mindsets change the meaning of effort
  • The story of the rabbit and the tortoise made it an either/or proposition: either you have a skill or you make an effort.
  • The growth mindset
    • Even geniuses have to work hard for their achievements.
    • They may value talent, but they admire effort, because effort is what ignites ability and turns it into achievement.
    • It’s almost unthinkable to want something badly, think you have a chance of achieving it and then do nothing about it.
  • The fixed mindset
    • Effort is for those who don’t have the ability.
    • If you work at something, you must not be good at it.
    • Things come easily to people who are true geniuses.

Chapter 3: The truth about ability and accomplishment

• There are many myths about ability and achievement, especially about the lone, brilliant person who suddenly produces amazing things.
  • Mozart worked for more than 10 years before he produced a work we admire today.
  • Darwin’s ‚On the Origin of Species‘ took years of teamwork in the field and half a lifetime of dedication before it came to fruition.
• The low-effort syndrome
  • Low-effort syndrome is a type of disengagement on the part of students, based on the idea that the main aim of school is to do things as easily as possible, so as not to have to work very hard.
  • This is often seen as a way for adolescents to assert their independence from adults, but it is also a way for students with a fixed mindset to protect themselves.
• The growth mindset
  • Because they think in terms of learning, people with a growth mindset are attuned to all the different ways of creating learning.
• After 40 years of intensive research on school learning in the United States and abroad, Benjamin Bloom, an eminent educational researcher who studied over 120 high achievers, concluded that almost all people can learn what any person in the world can learn, given the appropriate prior and current learning conditions.
• Falko Rheinberg, a researcher in Germany, studied teachers with different mindsets.
  • Teachers with a fixed mindset believed that students who entered their classrooms at different levels of ability were deeply and permanently different.
    • In their classrooms, students who started the year in the high ability group ended the year there, and those who started the year in the low ability group ended the year there.
  • Teachers with a growth mindset focused on the idea that all children could develop their abilities.
    • In their class, both the pupils who started the year in the high ability group and those who started in the low ability group ended the year at a much higher level.
    • The differences between the groups disappeared under the guidance of the growth teachers.
• Artistic ability is seen as a magical ability that few people possess.
  • This is because people do not understand the learnable components of drawing.
  • They are not drawing skills but seeing skills – the ability to perceive edges, spaces, relationships, light and shadow, and the whole.
  • Drawing requires you to learn each component skill and then combine them into a process.
  • Some people pick up these skills naturally in the course of their lives, while others have to work at learning them and putting them together.
  • Just because some people can do something with little or no training doesn’t mean others can’t do it (and sometimes do it better) with training.
• The danger or praise and positive labels
  • The author conducted studies with hundreds of students, mostly early adolescents, regarding praise and positive labels.
    • Some of the students were praised for their ability (‚you are so talented‘).
      • e.g. ‚Wow, you got eight right. That’s a really good score. You must be clever at this.‘
    • The other students were praised for their effort.
      • e.g. ‚Wow, you got eight right, that’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.
    • The two groups were the same level at first.
      • But immediately after the praise they started to differ.
      • The ability to praise pushed the students into the fixed mindset, and when presented with a choice of a new challenging task from which they could learn, they rejected it in order to avoid having their mistakes exposed.
      • In contrast, when students were praised for their efforts, 90 per cent of them wanted the new challenging task to learn from.
    • There was another striking finding in the study: 40 per cent of the students who were praised for their ability lied about their results.
    • Ordinary children were turned into liars just by being told they were clever.
• Negative labels and how they work
  • Research by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson shows that simply checking a box to indicate your race or gender can trigger the stereotype in your mind and lower a test score.
  • When stereotypes are invoked, they fill people’s minds with distracting thoughts – with secret worries about confirming the stereotype without even being aware of it.
  • The fixed mindset
    • This influence happens mainly to people with a fixed mindset.
    • Positive and negative labels can confuse your mind.
    • If you’re given a positive label, you’re afraid of losing it; if you’re given a negative label, you’re afraid of deserving it.
  • The growth mindset
    • The stereotype doesn’t affect the performance of people with a growth mindset because they don’t believe in permanent inferiority.
    • If they’re behind, they work harder, seek help and try to catch up.
• Trusting people’s opinions
  • Most women have a problem with people’s opinions of them in general and trust them too much.
    • When they are little, girls are often so perfect and they love it when people tell them they are.
    • They’re so well-behaved, so sweet, so helpful.
    • Girls learn to trust people’s assessments of them.
    • If they are criticised, they think it must be true.
  • Boys are constantly scolded and punished.
    • In primary school, boys received eight times more criticism than girls.
    • Boys also constantly call each other lazy and stupid. The evaluations lose a lot of their power.
• The fixed mindset, plus stereotyping, plus women’s trust in other people’s judgments of them, all contribute to the gender gap in maths and science.
• Maths and science need to be made more hospitable to women. Women need all the growth mindset they can get to take their rightful place in these fields.
• The growth mindset allows people – even those who are targets of negative labels – to use and develop their minds fully. Their minds are not filled with limiting thoughts, a fragile sense of belonging and a belief that other people can define them.

Chapter 4: Sports: the mindset of a champion

• In sport, the belief in natural talent is so strong that many scouts and coaches look only for naturals and pay exorbitant sums to recruit them.
  • Compared to intellectual ability, physical ability is visible – height, build, agility.
  • Boxing experts used to rely on physical measurements called ‚tales of the tape‘ to identify naturals.
    • These included measurements of the fighter’s fist, reach, chest expansion and weight.
    • Muhammad Ali failed these tests.
      • He had great speed, but he didn’t have the physique of a great fighter, he didn’t have the strength and he boxed all wrong.
      • But his brilliance was his mind.
      • Not only did he study his opponent’s fighting style, but he also closely observed what kind of person he was outside the ring.
      • Ali’s victory over Sonny Liston is boxing history, but it did not change people’s minds about physical ability. We now look back at Ali and see the body of a great boxer.
    • Michael Jordan wasn’t a natural either.
      • He was probably the hardest working athlete, perhaps in the history of sport.
      • He was cut from his high school team and wasn’t recruited by the college he wanted to play for (North Carolina State).
      • As a result, he left home at six in the morning to go to practice before school, and at the University of North Carolina he worked constantly on his weaknesses – his defensive game and his ball-handling.
      • He explained that mental toughness and heart are stronger than some physical advantages.
• The naturals, carried away by their superiority, don’t learn how to work hard or how to deal with setbacks.
• Character, heart, will, or the mind of a champion is what makes you practice, and it’s what allows you to dig down and pull it out when you need it most.
  • You do not believe that you are special, born with the right to win.
  • You work hard, learn to stay focused under pressure, and go above and beyond when you need to.
  • Character is what gets you to the top and keeps you there.
• The growth mindset builds character because you believe that your performance in sport will always improve if you work harder at it.
• The growth mindset
  • Those with the growth mindset found success by doing their best, learning and improving.
  • This is exactly what we find in champions.
  • People with a growth mindset in sport (as in medical chemistry) took control of the processes that brought about – and sustained – success.
  • Those with a growth mindset found setbacks motivating, informative, a wake-up call.
• The fixed mindset
  • For people with a fixed mindset, success is about establishing their superiority, about being someone more worthy than the nobodies.
  • In the fixed mindset, people do not take control of their skills and motivation.
  • They look to their talent to get them through, because they are a finished product, not a work in progress.
  • They have to protect themselves, complain and blame, anything but change.

Chapter 5: Business: mindset and leadership

• According to Malcolm Gladwell, writing in The New Yorker, corporate America’s obsession with talent in the 2000s created the blueprint for Enron’s culture and set the stage for its downfall.
  • Enron hired great talent, mostly people with fancy degrees, which is not a bad thing in itself.
  • By putting its faith in talent, Enron created a culture that worshipped talent, forcing employees to look and act extremely talented, and thus forcing them into a fixed mindset.
  • A company that cannot correct itself cannot thrive.
• Jim Collins set out to discover what made some companies go from good to great.
  • His research team conducted a five-year study and selected eleven companies whose stock returns had soared relative to others in their industry and who had maintained that lead for fifteen years.
  • They matched each company with another in the same industry that had similar resources but failed to make the leap.
  • He also studied a third group of companies: those that had made the leap from good to great, but had failed to sustain it.
  • In his book Good to Great, he reported that the type of leader who took the company to greatness was absolutely critical.
    • They were not larger-than-life, charismatic types with outsized egos and self-proclaimed talents.
    • They were self-effacing people who constantly asked questions and had the ability to face the most brutal answers – to face failure, even their own, while still believing they would succeed in the end.
    • These leaders have the growth mindset.
      • They believe in human development.
      • They don’t constantly try to prove that they are better than others.
      • They don’t emphasise the pecking order with themselves.
      • They don’t take credit for other people’s contributions.
      • They don’t undermine others in order to feel powerful.
      • They constantly seek to improve.
      • They surround themselves with the most capable people they can find.
      • They ask openly what skills they and the company will need in the future.
• CEOs and the big ego
  • The fixed mindset helps us understand where big egos come from, how they work and why they become self-destructive.
  • Leaders with a fixed mindset start with the belief that some people are superior, they have a need to prove and display their superiority, they use their subordinates to feed this need, rather than fostering the development of their employees, they end up sacrificing their companies to this need.
• Warren Bennis studied the world’s greatest business leaders.
  • These great leaders said they did not set out to be leaders.
  • They had no interest in proving themselves.
  • They just did what they loved – with tremendous drive and enthusiasm – and it led where it led.
• Harvey Hornstein writes in his book ‚Brutal Bosses‘ that the mistreatment of the company’s workers represents the bosses‘ desire ‚to increase their own sense of power, competence and worth at the expense of their subordinates‘.
  • This is the same principle as when people with a fixed mindset want to compare themselves to people who are worse off than they are.
  • The principle is the same, but there is one important difference: these bosses have the power to make people worse off, and when they do, they feel better about themselves.
  • Sometimes the victims are people the bosses think are less talented, to feed their sense of superiority.
  • But often the victims are the most competent people, because they are the ones who pose the greatest threat to an entrenched boss.
  • If you are really worried about your competence, pick on the best performers.
• When bosses become controlling and abusive, they put everyone in a fixed mindset.
  • This means that instead of learning, growing and moving the company forward, everyone starts to worry about being judged.
  • The bosses‘ fear of being judged becomes everyone’s fear of being judged.
  • It’s hard for courage and innovation to survive a company-wide fixed mindset.
• Growth leaders start with a belief in human potential and development – their own and their employees‘ – and use the company as an engine for growth – for themselves, their employees and the company as a whole.
• Jack Welch learned from experience the kind of leader he wanted to be: a growth leader – a guide, not a judge.
  • When he was a young engineer at GE, he caused a chemical explosion that blew the roof off the building he was working in.
  • He explained himself to his boss and was treated with understanding and support, which shaped him.
  • He learned to select people for their mindset, not their pedigree.
  • Initially, he hired engineers from MIT, Princeton and Caltech, but then he realised that it wasn’t what they had that mattered, it was their passion, their desire to get things done, their inner hunger.
  • He spread the word that the company was about growth, not self-importance.
  • He shut down elitism by asking an elite club of GE executives to think of a role that made more sense for them and the company, because he saw no value in what they were doing.
  • The programme, open to all employees, has been running for twenty years, mentoring in inner-city schools and building parks, playgrounds and libraries for communities in need.
  • He got rid of brutal bosses because they practised the company’s values.
  • The accepted way to encourage productivity was now through mentoring, not terror.
  • He rewarded teamwork, not individual genius.
• Researcher Robert Wood and his colleagues did a study where they created management groups, thirty groups of three people each.
  • Half of the groups had three people with a fixed mindset and half had three people with a growth mindset.
  • Those with a fixed mindset believed that people have a certain fixed level of management ability and that there is not much they can do about it.
  • Those with a growth mindset believed that people can always significantly change their basic ability to manage other people.
  • They were given complex management tasks in which they ran a simulated organisation.
  • The result was that the growth mindset groups were much more likely to give honest opinions and openly disagree when communicating about their management decisions.
  • Everyone was part of the learning process.
  • The fixed mindset groups did not have the same productive discussions because they were more preoccupied with their concerns about who was smart and who was stupid, and their fear of rejection of their ideas.
• Irving Janis popularised the term groupthink in the early 1970s.
  • It’s when everyone in a group starts to think the same way, no one disagrees, no one takes a critical stance.
  • It can lead to disastrous decisions, and it often comes from a fixed mindset.
  • It can happen when people put unbounded faith in a talented leader, a genius, or when the group gets carried away with its brilliance and superiority.
  • It can also happen when a fixed mindset leader punishes dissent.
  • People may not stop thinking critically, but they stop speaking out.
• Workforce feedback
  • Instead of awarding people for the best idea or praising them for a brilliant performance, praise them for taking the initiative, for seeing a difficult task through, for struggling and learning something new, for not being intimidated by a setback, or for being open to criticism and acting on it.
• Negotiations
  • Laura Kray and Michael Haselhuhn have shown that mindsets have an important impact on negotiation success.
  • In a study, they observed people with fixed and growth mindsets as they engaged in negotiations.
  • Those with a growth mindset were the clear winners, performing almost twice as well as those with a fixed mindset.
  • Those with a growth mindset persevered through the rough patches and stalemates to achieve more favourable outcomes.
  • Negotiations often require people to understand the other person’s interests and try to serve them.
    • At the end of a negotiation, both parties should feel that their needs have been met.
    • Those with a growth mindset were able to move beyond initial failures by constructing a deal that addressed both parties‘ interests and came up with a creative, win-win solution.
• Managers – born or made?
  • Growth mindset managers think it’s nice to have talent, but that’s just the starting point.
  • These managers are more committed to their people’s development and to their own.
  • They do a lot more developmental coaching, they notice improvements in people’s performance and they welcome criticism from their people.
• The growth mindset can be taught to managers.
  • Heslin and his colleagues ran a workshop based on well-established psychological principles, showing a video and a scientific article about how the brain changes with learning, to help people understand how dynamic the brain is.
  • The managers go through a series of exercises in which they consider why it’s important to understand that people can develop their skills, think about areas in which they once had low skills but now perform well, write to a struggling protégé about how his or her skills can be developed, and recall times when they’ve seen people learn to do things they never thought people could do.
  • After the workshop, there was a rapid increase in the managers‘ ability to identify improvements in employee performance, their willingness to coach a poor performer, and the quality of their coaching suggestions.
  • These changes were sustained over the next six weeks of follow-up.
• Leaders – born or made?
  • According to Warren Bennis, leaders are made, not born, and they are made more by themselves than by any external means.
  • Many leaders go through a period of great learning, with lots of coaching and training, but once they have learned the basics, some stop trying to improve.
  • They become satisfied with their jobs rather than developing themselves into leaders.
• Organisational mindsets
  • To determine a company’s mindset, several employees were asked if the company values natural intelligence and business talent (fixed mindset) or if the company values the personal development and growth of its employees.
  • The outcome was that the people who worked in growth-mindset organisations have more trust in their company and a much greater sense of empowerment, ownership and commitment.
    • They say the company supports (reasonable) risk-taking, innovation and creativity.
    • Supervisors in growth-mindset organisations had significantly more positive views of their employees.
      • They rated their employees more collaborative and more committed to learning and growing, more innovative and having far greater management portential.
  • Those who worked in fixed-mindset companies expressed greater interest in leaving the company for another.
    • They state that their companies do not support them in risk-taking and innovation and are more likely to agree that their organisations are full of unethical behaviour.

Chapter 6: Relationships: mindsets in love (or not)

• Finding true love is often filled with disappointment and heartbreak. Some people allow these experiences to scar them and prevent them from being able to form satisfying relationships in the future. Others are able to heal and move on.
• The fixed mindset
  • In the case of a rejection, people with a fixed mindset felt judged and permanently labelled by the rejection.
    • It was as if a verdict had been branded on their foreheads: unlovable.
    • Since the fixed mindset offers no recipe for healing, all they could do was hope to wound the person who had inflicted it. The ultimate goal was revenge.
  • People can have a fixed mindset about three things:
    • They can believe that their qualities are fixed
    • That their partner’s qualities are fixed
    • That the qualities of the relationship are fixed.
  • One problem is that people with a fixed mindset expect everything good to happen automatically.
    • Partners will not work to help each other solve problems, but it will happen magically through love.
    • Part of the low-effort belief is the idea that couples should be able to read each other’s minds.
      • Reading each other’s minds instead of communicating inevitably backfires.
    • Those with the fixed mindset felt threatened and hostile after talking about even minor discrepancies in the way they and their partner felt about their relationship.
    • Another major difficulty with the fixed mindset is the belief that problems are a sign of deep-seated flaws.
      • When people with a fixed mindset talk about their conflicts, they assign blame.
      • Sometimes they blame themselves, but often they blame their partner.
      • They assign blame to a characteristic – a character flaw.
      • Furthermore, when people blame their partner’s personality for the problem, they feel anger and disgust towards them.
      • Because the problem comes from fixed characteristics, it can’t be solved.
      • As a result, they become contemptuous of them and dissatisfied with the whole relationship.
      • In the fixed mindset, where you have to prove your competence all the time, it’s easy to get into a competition with your partner – who’s the smartest, the most talented, the most likeable.
      • This mentality can infiltrate friendships: ‚the lower you are, the better I feel‘.
• The growth mindset
  • In the case of rejection, people with a growth mindset focused on understanding, forgiving and moving on.
    • Although they were deeply hurt by what had happened, they wanted to learn from it.
    • They did not feel permanently branded. Their ultimate goal was forgiveness.
  • In the growth mindset, you, your partner and your relationship are capable of growth and change.
  • In the growth mindset there may be this initial combustion, but people in this mindset do not expect magic.
    • They believe that a good, lasting relationship comes from effort and working through inevitable differences.
• Shyness
  • Jennifer Beer studied hundreds of people to find out what mindsets tell us about shyness.
  • People with a fixed mindset were more likely to be shy.
    • The fixed mindset makes you worry about being judged, which can make you more self-conscious and anxious.
    • There are many shy people with a fixed mindset.
  • Shyness affected the social interactions of fixed mindset people, but not the social relationships of growth mindset people.
  • Although both fixed and growth shy people looked very nervous for the first five minutes of the interaction, after that the growth shy people showed greater social skills, were more likeable, created a more enjoyable interaction and began to look like non-shy people.
  • The reason for this is that the shy growth people saw social interactions as a challenge.
  • Despite feeling anxious, they actively welcomed the chance to meet someone new.
  • The shy, fixed people wanted to avoid meeting someone who might be better at social skills than they were, because they were afraid of making mistakes.

Chapter 7: Parents, teachers and coaches: where do mindsets come from?

• Children are very sensitive to every word adults use to convey a message. It tells them how to think about themselves.
  • It can be a fixed message such as:
    • You have fixed actions and I judge them.
  • Or it can be a growth mindset message that says:
    • You are a developing person and I am committed to your development.
• Parents think they are giving their children permanent confidence by praising their brains and talents.
  • It has the opposite effect: it makes children doubt themselves as soon as something is difficult or goes wrong.
• The best gift parents can give their children is to teach them to love challenges, to be fascinated by mistakes, to enjoy effort, to seek new strategies and to keep learning.
  • That way, children do not have to be slaves to praise.
  • They will have a lifelong way of building and repairing their confidence.
  • Examples:
    • ‚You really studied for your test and your improvement shows. You read the material several times, you outlined it and you tested yourself on it. It really worked!
    • ‚I like the way you tried all kinds of strategies on that maths problem until you finally got it. You thought of lots of different ways to do it and found one that worked!‘
• Constructive criticism means helping the child to fix something, make a better product or do a better job.
• Many educators believe that lowering their standards will give students success experiences, boost their self-esteem and increase their performance.
  • This comes from the philosophy of over-praising pupils‘ intelligence.
  • Lowering standards only leads to poorly educated students who feel entitled to easy work and lavish praise.
• Success can put people in a fixed mindset because it makes the most ambitious people complacent, thinking they are the success and throwing away the discipline and work that got them there.
• A growth mindset is about people believing they can develop their capabilities.
  • It is not about being open or flexible. It is not just about effort, especially praising effort.
  • It is about the process we want them to value: working hard, trying new strategies and seeking input from others.
  • It’s not about telling children they can achieve anything, it’s about helping them acquire the skills and resources to make progress towards their goals.
• A growth mindset can be passed on to children through:
  • the way praise is given (focusing on the learning process when giving praise)
  • the way adults respond to children’s mistakes (responding with interest and treating them as opportunities to learn)
  • by ensuring that teachers are more concerned with deepening understanding than with memorising facts, rules and procedures.

Chapter 8: Changing mindsets

• Change is hard. If people hold on to a way of thinking, it’s for a reason. At some point in their lives it served them well. It gave them self-esteem and a path to love and respect from others.
• Sustaining change is also important. Once a problem gets better, people often stop doing what made it get better. Once you feel better, you stop taking your medicine.
• The Journey to a Growth Mindset
  • Step 1 is to accept your fixed mindset.
  • Step 2 is to become aware of your fixed mindset triggers.
    • This persona can come out when you’re thinking about a big new challenge, when you’re struggling with something and you hit a dead end, when you’ve failed decisively, when you meet someone better than you in the area you’re proud of.
  • Step 3 is to give your fixed mindset persona a name.
  • Step 4 is to educate your fixed mindset persona once you are in touch with your triggers.
    • The fixed mindset persona was born to protect you and keep you safe.
    • But it has developed some very limiting ways of doing this.
    • Educate your persona in the new growth mindset ways it can support you: taking on challenges and sticking with them, bouncing back from failure, and helping and supporting others to grow.
    • Understand the persona’s point of view, but slowly teach it a different way of thinking and take it with you on your journey to a growth mindset.
• For your growth mindset to bear fruit, you need to keep setting goals for growth. Define when, where and how to make the plan concrete.
• Change can be hard, but people who have gone through a painful initiation say it’s worth it. Keep the growth mindset in mind when you encounter obstacles.

Chapter 1: The Mindsets

Action Point 1: Write down scenarios in which I have had a fixed mindset and scenarios in which I have had a growth mindset.

Chapter 2: Inside the mindsets

Action Point 2: Write down two failure scenarios in the last 5 years and my reaction to the failure.

Chapter 3: The truth about ability and accomplishment

Action Point 3: Write down three examples of effort-based praise.

Chapter 4: Sports: the mindset of a champion

Action Point 4: Write down a training plan to keep improving your stamina.

Chapter 5: Business: mindset and leadership

Action Point 5: Write down how you deal with your top performer and define whether you have a fixed or a growth mindset.

Chapter 6: Relationships: mindsets in love (or not)

Action Point 6: Write down your view of yourself, your partner and the relationship and decide whether you have a fixed or a growth mindset.

Chapter 7: Parents, teachers and coaches: where do mindsets come from?

Action Point 7: Write down three way to praise someone in order to pass on the growth mindset.

Chapter 8: Changing mindsets

Action Point 8: Write down when the fixed-mindset persona is being triggered.