Reading Reflection 2

For the second reading assignment, I chose Mindset: The New Summary of Success by Carol Dweck. 

1) What was the general theme or argument of the book?

This book was all about the mindset someone has, and how to become self-aware of your own mindset and strive towards keeping a better one. The author really emphasizes the power of the mindset and how being successful in everyday life, school, work, sports, relationships, and more are all related to the mindset. The main point was the two different kinds of mindsets, one being a fixed mindset and one being a growth mindset. The fixed mindset believes that someone accepts things being predetermined for them, like being able to do certain skills or activities. The growth mindset is the opposite, believing that traits aren't fixed and someone is able to learn new skills, adapt to changing environments, and change their attitude or abilities. Because mindsets are usually linked closely with one's behavior, the growth mindset also benefits relationships and allow someone to be flexible, open-minded, driven to accomplish new things and become great at old ones, and be TENACIOUS! Fixed mindsets are easy to get into but ultimately lead to giving up when you fail and never growing. 

2) How did the book, in your opinion, connect with and enhance what you are learning in ENT 3003?

The book had a lot of overlap with what we have covered in class so far. Tenacity is one of the main things someone gains when having a growth mindset, and we had an exercise involving that in class. The book helped me understand being tenacious even more and how to get to a point in my life where I want to constantly grow, be tenacious, and persistent even when I do not feel motivated at all. The growth mindset emphasizes learning new skills and never giving up even when meeting failure, which I feel majorly connects with what we've learned about entrepreneurship. So many ideas fail to even take off and even the ones that do require working through many steps in a difficult process and overcoming small failures within that. With a fixed mindset, nothing would ever most past the failure stage! Understanding the whole mindset theory and being able to change a mindset from being discouraged with yourself to instead being motivated to improve is something that I definitely comprehend deeper after this book. 

3) If you had to design an exercise for this class, based on the book you read, what would that exercise involve?

One of the main points in the book about how to change your mindset involved becoming cognitively aware of negative behavior and negative habits that you have engrained in your life, and becoming actively aware of the negativity as you are doing or thinking it. Once you're able to identify this, you can alter your thoughts, remind yourself of a different outlook, or change your actions. This was interesting to me but it is sometimes hard for people to identify their negativity at all, and would be especially hard having to actively rewire your thinking on the spot. 

For an exercise, students could make a post with two lists. The first being negative behaviors or thoughts they've had recently, like eating a party size bag of Lays for breakfast or talking bad about a friend. In a second list, the student can write a positive behavior or changed mindset that they want to work on implementing instead of the negative behavior in the future. For example, someone's first column could say how they hate what coronavirus has done and how angry they are about things being cancelled. The second column could list positives, like being able to run outdoors more and having time to put things in your daily routine that you never would have had time for before. Doing this can force people to actively change their mindset and how they think or act.

4) What was your biggest surprise or 'aha' moment when reading the book? In other words, what did you learn that differed most from your expectations

I was surprised to hear that teachers are actually a huge source of where the fixed mindset originates for a lot of people. After reading the explanation for this, it makes sense, but you would assume that teachers are supposed to all cultivate the growth mindset and help students always think that way. However, the way that teachers at a young age give certain praises to kids by saying things like, "You're a natural, you're learning so fast!" can make other kids who are struggling more think that they just weren't born with this 'natural' skill. Phrases like this are always repeated throughout childhood, even by other authority figures like coaches and parents. The good, successful actions are always praised and rewarded and failure is not accepted as much as it is in adulthood. I had an "aha" moment after reading this bit about the teachers because I myself have always just told myself I wasn't a math person and I would never be good at it, since I've always struggled a LOT in math and hated it. Now, I see that if I honestly wanted to better my math skills I could have tried harder to grow.