Learning through quick reflections on books / Mindset by Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D.

Okay, this is a bit of an introductory episode. I've been wanting to do a podcast about what I'm learning, what I'm reading, but I found that when I got to the end of the book, sitting down to encapsulate the entire book was a deterrent because it felt overwhelming and I felt a tremendous responsibility to do the book right and then I had conflicts over am I sharing too much from the book, you know, am I undercutting the author by just telling all the best parts of the book or what I think are the best parts of the book and because of that I've never been able to really progress with the project. In fact, in the past I did I think it was about 10, maybe a little bit under 10 episodes, full-length episodes and then I just stopped and it was for all the same reasons. So the conflict has been consistent in the whole time that I've had this. I also don't want to do a book podcast that's shallow. I don't see the purpose in that at all and suddenly it occurred to me that what I've been doing with my other podcast, It Matters But It Doesn't, just recording short little audio things as they pop into my head could be applied to the book format. That when I'm reading a book each day I can evaluate have I learned anything interesting today that's worth sharing. If so, record a quick episode just about that little portion of the book. If not, you know, skip the day, no pressure. Nobody's desperate for an everyday podcast. So I am going to use that as the format and I'm going to go forward with this and I'm going to be using voice notes pages which is an excellent way to do this because it cuts out all the complexities of having to edit and publish and all of the back-end stuff and just keeps things very simple and it also provides a really cool AI for searching and discussing things with the episodes which will be more valuable when we've talked about many books for me and for you to be honest. So I've been reading, we'll just jump right into this real quick. I have been reading Mindset by Carol Dweck, The New Psychology of Success. This is a book that has been on my queue for a really long time and I'm actually, I don't know, maybe almost 25% of the way through the book. So I'm not starting this, these episodes from the beginning of the book because in order to do that I would have to finish this book and wait to start with whatever book I started next. So we're just going to kind of start 63 pages into this book. This book has been, I guess I'm going to give it a little bit of an overview maybe of what the first 63 pages have been like. It's been really transformative for me. I think first of all her writing ability is probably far underrated. This is a very readable and very enjoyable to read book which for this type of book is usually surprising. The basic premise here is that there are two mindsets about how we approach life and the challenges of life. That's the growth mindset and the fixed mindset. The fixed mindset says we have traits. We are who we are. Our brain, our intelligence is set. We can't change that. We can't affect that. We're either good at things or we're not good at things. It buys into the whole idea of natural talent. And the growth mindset says that we can learn, we can grow, we can change. We are always continually changing and growing. This sounds pretty straightforward. I think most people would say yes. I think the second one is more true. But as you go through the book and you hear examples of how these things manifest, you may, as I have, realize that okay, I've been living mostly in the fixed mindset and many of the challenges that I've had are because of the fixed mindset. One example that she talks about is children given difficult puzzles. I think if I remember correctly, it was jigsaw puzzles. The children with fixed mindsets would get frustrated andand they would measure their ability or inability to do the puzzle as a measurement of themselves. I'm not good because I'm not smart enough to do this. Fixed. Closed. Definitive identity. Whereas the other children who did really well at the puzzles were like, wow, this is really challenging. This is fun. They're looking forward to it. They ask the people doing the test, where can I find puzzles like this so that my mom can buy them for me so I can do more of these? It's pretty profound. I've always been against the idea of natural talent because of my own abilities or inabilities at writing. I know that as I work more and more in writing and read more about it and try more about it and edit more of my writing, I get better. I was never born naturally talented at writing. Same with drawing. Everybody in my family assumed I was naturally artistically talented at a young age, but the truth is I just spent more time drawing. So I got better. Nobody in these areas tends to see all the effort and all the work you do. It's like when you see somebody who's really good at basketball, you don't see all the hours that they spent on the court practicing their shot. There's a kid down the street. Every time I drive by, he's out there shooting hoops. He's going to be good. He's going to be great. I don't know, but he's going to be good. You know why? Because he's doing the reps. But what I didn't realize about the fixed mindset is that while I could believe that, that there were large parts of the growth mindset that I had not embraced and that I was actually living a fixed mindset, even the way that I was approaching or not approaching this podcast was stuck to some degree in a fixed mindset. Because one of the main questions that I was dealing with was, can I do this? Am I good enough to do this kind of podcast? Am I capable? And the answer to all those things is no, I'm not. You know why? Because I haven't done it before. And the only way I'm going to become good at it, the only way I'm going to become capable at it is doing it, which means being sloppy and messy and not understanding how to do it and all that and be willing to accept that. That's the growth mindset, to be willing to accept that. And I think that's a big deal. So while we are starting 63 pages into this book, it's probably the best book to start with.