dichotomy of mindsets

I came across a very insightful book called ‘Mindset’ authored by Stanford psychology professor Dr. Carol Dweck which shares an extremely powerful viewpoint on mindsets. She illustrates 2 types of mindsets typically possessed by people and the drastic contrast in how they view the world and operate in it. On one end there is the fixed mindset and on the opposite end there is the growth mindset. Fixed mindset individuals are driven by ego and heavily concerned about maintaining status. Ego - a termed coined by neurologist and father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, is a very high level abstraction constructed by the mind to approximate all underlying low level complex neural interactions within the brain and define a singular sense of self. While construction of a singular abstract self is a natural mechanism needed to operate effectively in the world as a cohesive system, the ego is naturally focused towards preservation of the self and focus towards ego can be detrimental as it blocks our feedback loop with reality by avoiding true information seeking or taking any actions that would harm the ego. Fixed mindset individuals are afraid of failure and taking risks which prevents them from learning and inciting change. Fixed mindset individuals divert their limited time and energy towards protecting the ego from getting harmed and they de-prioritize truth seeking by blocking useful information flow and avoiding running experiments as they do not want to risk being wrong. Growth mindset individuals on the other hand suspend ego i.e. they do not waste their limited time and energy in protecting or satiating their ego but channels it towards purely performing true learning and true work unhampered by the distractions of maintaining status which is considered as a wasteful leakage of their limited time and energy. Growth mindset individuals vigorously prioritizes truth-seeking where they do not have a problem with being wrong and they maintain a rapid feedback loop with reality continuously undergoing a process of error correction to get to the truth. Another interesting distinction between the two mindsets is on how they view their own capabilities. Fixed mindset individuals believes that a person’s ability is limited and more or less set in stone with no scope for changing even if they want to. Growth mindset individuals believe that their mind has virtually unlimited potential to learn and accomplish anything they want if they put in the required time and effort. The scientific basis behind the possibility of growth mindset with infinite potential to learn and grow revolves around the neurobiological phenomenon of neuroplasticity. Any specific skill we possess arises due to certain neural pathways or folds created in the brain structure and neuroplasticity states that our brain is a continuously moldable clay of sorts on which new folds corresponding to new skills can be consciously created with effort. This biological possibility thereby negates the permanence of innate mental aptitude as believed by fixed mindset individuals. To further understand this, we can analogize the mind with hardware where the same hardware of say a computer or phone can be programmed to do different tasks provided we are able to install the right software for the corresponding tasks. So our brain is a type of hardware which can always be molded through new information consumption and processing to ultimately construct new neural pathways which is equivalent to new software that should ideally enable us to perform any new possible task given we put in the necessary effort to program the required biological software. This perspective on mindsets is interesting in a way as we all universally start out our lives as growth mindset individuals early on during our childhood where we are naturally very curious but we gradually (and unknowingly) transition into becoming fixed mindset individuals as we move into adulthood when our ego becomes more developed and we become highly self-conscious resulting in a fear of failure and weaker urge to learn or experiment. Ultimately, adopting a growth mindset allows us to truly self actualize which is what most humans aspire for and I found this dichotomized viewpoint of mindsets to be a very useful framework which could allow us to perform periodic self-checks to ensure that we do not at any point in time inadvertently deviate into the wrong track of mindsets.