Book Review - Mindset:The New Psychology of Success

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck is a book about learning. It's a book about how people can learn their whole life when believing in learning and growth.

Book talks about two different kind of mindsets; the fixed mindset, which means believing that talent is given and born, and the growth mindset, believing that people can always learn to be better on everything. Book goes through examples and science behind it from many different views. It looks sports, business and arts. It introduces many good examples of people who are in growth mindset and some who are in fixed mindset.

Book goes through how this mindset difference affects on people's behavior in different challenges and daily routines. It also introduces reasons why people has grown in to either fixed or growth mindset.

Book has its own section for parents, coaches and teachers. I see parents to be most important ones. They can accidentally grow their children easily to fixed mindset with having good intentions to grow to be successful and open for learning. Giving credit for good grades for example can turn against the child, so that they are not taking challenges anymore in the future, since they become afraid of not being good at something. I actually believe this to be true, many of the people who got the best grades at school, haven't taken the challenge anymore at the work life.

I highly recommend this book to everyone who has kids, is a teacher or is a coach. There is lot of proof that genes don't mean everything and everyone really can learn. Also important is to understand that for learners, willingness to learn is more important than the immediate results and grades.

I really liked the book. It was entertaining with many good examples. I've read couple of books about the same subject from different perspectives , so the area starts to be familiar to me. Still I found some good new information from this book. It was entertaining.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen