A Fixed Mindset Was My Blindspot

I recently finished reading an incredible book: “Mindset” by Carol Dweck. It has easily earned a permanent place on my short list of books that taught me something about life. I wanted to write this right away after reading it so that someone else could find it and decide to pick the book up.

The core message of the book is the concept of two ways you can think about skills and abilities. You can have a “fixed mindset” where you think everyone is pretty much predetermined in how intelligent, or really, how capable they are at anything is fixed. Or you can develop a growth mindset where you believe that your abilities are not really limited, but instead can be cultivated and developed and improved.

For all of my life, I thought I belonged to the growth mindset camp, but when I read the book and went through examples, I was totally in the fixed mindset camp! It was shocking to me. I spent an incredible amount reading and learning over the years so you would think development would be something that I would believe in. I did but in a shallow sense. It turns out deep down, especially in my younger years, I thought that at the end of the day, your ability is fixed, and you just have to discover it.

While I have improved myself over the years, this metamorphosis could have been more rapid and intentional had I understood the importance of cultivating a growth mindset as Dweck describes. Her book was an eye-opening experience — a missing piece of the puzzle about myself.

I now recognize how much my fixed mindset dominated my worldview in the past. Especially at work. It explains well how much I preferred to work by myself, on my own. Always trying to be the best, fastest, smartest, but really of course not always being that, so on your own you can hide that better.

Looking back I realize how I almost refused to learn from my colleagues or people I encountered in everyday life. Doing that would prove to me that someone else close to me is more capable than me (OF COURSE THERE IS!!! NO ONE KNOWS EVERYTHING!!). And that leads to poor teamwork and unnecessary stress. And of course, the work output of a single mind is inferior to close collaboration, especially when others can contribute to the areas where you are weaker or haven’t learned as much. If anything, I could have cut out so much effort and time from my projects by adopting bits from others instead of trying to do so much on my own.

Thank goodness somehow someway I had learned to continue reading and learning into my adulthood, but did so only through the books. If not the books, oh my, not sure what I would have accomplished.

I don’t think I was a terrible coworker because I learned to still remain polite and professional. But, now that I look back, I always found a way to split up work where I could be left to my devices on some parts of the projects while letting others own their bits and keep the two isolated. I think working for a smaller company “helped” where one person did a lot anyway. But either way, I definitely missed out so much by not collaborating more.

Even in personal relationships and friendships, fixed thinking definitely made an impact on me. For instance, I never had good friends who were also software engineers, an area of my expertise! Hilarious when you think about it, but now makes so much sense. Sigh… of course I was avoiding becoming friends with someone who is in my field and gasp! could be better than me (and of course millions of people are!!!). My fixed mindset was protecting the image I had of myself by not exposing me to people in my field. Instead, all of my close friends were outside of software engineering. That’s just so crazy when you think about how much time I spent a) interacting with software people and b) how much more I could have learned and built if I had someone in the same area working with me. Maddening.

The book ends with this great chart describing key differences between two mindsets:

I thought this chart does an excellent job describing how different mindsets can impact your actions and behavior.

Embracing more of a growth mindset earlier on could have changed my path profoundly. While the past is set, I now have an updated mental model for the future. I definitely changed as I got more experienced and older and understood the importance of social interactions, almost forcing myself to shut off the fixed mindset for periods of time when close collaboration was necessary. I think now I will have a much easier time with this. At the end of the day what truly matters to me is to get stuff done, how or by who, it does not matter.

I highly suggest reading Mindset to inspect and better understand your self-limiting beliefs. I wish I had done so years ago!