This article by Jeana Lee of the Daily Californian does a good job summarizing what we know so far about growth vs fixed mindsets. It starts with an interesting real life story in 1939 when “a first-year doctoral student at UC Berkeley named George Dantzig, arrived late to class. His professor, famous statistician Jerzy Neyman, had written two statistics problems on the blackboard. Dantzig quickly jotted them down, assuming that they were homework problems. A few days later, Dantzig turned in the problems late to Professor Neyman, apologizing for the overdue assignment.” To his surprise, “Six weeks later, an ecstatic Professor Neyman knocked on Dantzig’s door. As it turns out, the problems weren’t homework at all. They just so happened to be two famous unsolved problems in statistics. And Dantzig had solved both of them.”
Just the right story for Hollywood, right? Yeah, but perhaps it was too early for Hollywood back then, no movie made out of it. It did inspire the 1997 academy award winning film Good Will Hunting (I think I have seen this one with Matt Damon), which tells a far more dramatic story for “Will Hunting, a 20-year-old South Bostonian janitor who is an unrecognized math prodigy. In the scene, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology math professor challenges his students to solve an incredibly difficult math problem, which he writes on a hallway blackboard. Will, who works as a janitor for MIT, comes across the problem and solves it in a matter of minutes.“
I say “far more dramatic” because unlike Dantzig who is a doctorate student at UC Berkeley working on problems in his own field, Will Hunting was a janitor at MIT with presumably no formal math training and yet was able to solve problems that puzzled MIT math major students! You can hardly expect anything more shocking than this.
Psychological Explanation of Genius
The article then moves on to talk about whether talents are naturally born or learned from life. On the one hand, “intelligence is depicted by the media, as a trait that can only be genetically inheritable. Will was born a ‘genius.’ Dantzig was ‘destined’ to make mathematical breakthroughs.”
Carol Dweck a psychologist at Stanford, tells us how bad the so called fixed mindset can be: “A child who possesses a fixed mindset sees their abilities as set in stone. They are either good at math or not; either talented at singing or not. An individual’s skills are only of a certain amount, and if they face difficult challenges, their limited skills are put into question.”
A bigger danger is that “If you’re considered a genius, a talent, or a natural—then you have a lot to lose. Effort can reduce you.” On the other hand, “a growth mindset is believing that abilities can be developed through effort and persistence.”
In Dweck’s book, “people with growth mindsets ‘believe a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.’ With this hope of greater potential, people become more willing to devote their time to improving their skills in various areas.”
The Power of Mixed Mindsets
Bill Gates was right to point out the mixed mindsets for all of us. He wrote in a review of her book, “My only criticism of the book is that Dweck slightly oversimplifies for her general audience. … most of us are not purely fixed-mindset people or growth-mindset people. We’re both. When I was reading the book, I realized that I have approached some things with a growth mindset (like bridge) while other things in a fixed mindset (like basketball).”
Back to the examples discussed earlier, “Dantzig’s willingness to put such a high level of effort into a couple of homework problems shows that Dantzig genuinely cares about his learning and likes to challenge himself.” In other words, Dantzig has a growth mindset. What about fixed mindset? The question to ask is whether Dantzig would work on the “homework problems” if he knew they were not homework?
“According to Dantzig himself, the answer is no: ‘If I had known that the problems were not homework but were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics, I probably would not have thought positively, would have become discouraged, and would never have solved them.’ Therefore, Dantzig’s story may not be a complete display of a growth mindset after all.” One may say the story has component of fixed mindset.
Of course the reality is more complicated. Not knowing these questions were challenging puzzles, Dantzig would not be so confident before he worked on them. In his mind, these were tough homework questions that were workable. Knowing the truth on the other hand would have deterred his efforts.
Diverse Talents + Mixed Mindsets
I would add another dimension to the topic. From the psychological perspective, yes we should focus on mindsets. From a genetics perspective, we are all endowed with different innate capabilities to begin with. True, a part of the endowment includes some degree of growth mindset rather than pure genetics. For example, parental level of motivation will impact children’s motivation. However, genetics differences do exist and some people would have to overcome more barriers than others in learning math, while others would encounter more barriers to learn arts.
An individual should therefore find out (1) which topics s/he is particularly good at; (2) which is weak but learnable and (3) which requires extraordinary efforts to master. This analysis helps the individual focus on efficiency of learning. Instead of betting all resources on learning the most difficult skill, we may want to work on the skills that are relatively easy to get after putting in time and efforts, simply because the return of investment from learning those is likely higher than others due to higher talent in those fields.
A simple fact of life is that we all have limited time and energy, so we cannot have a growth mindset for all things. Tradeoff is inevitable. I heard from a gentleman named James I met in the succor field, who once knew some student at Berkeley who spent little time on his statistics course and still got A+. Meanwhile, he spent more time on History or English and still got only A-.
When it comes to parenting however, making parents aware of growth mindset is the most important thing, because kids have potential in many different fields and if we could expand their goals instead of prematurely limiting their potential in one or two fields, that would waste social resources because some kids may do great in some field later in life — all they need is a little push from when they were young!