Justin Nunez
Cullen Bailey Burns
English 1A
September 10, 2018
Mindset & How It Affects Your Success
Your mindset is one of the most crucial things you need in order to be successful and to be where you want to be in your life. Having confidence that you will do good and that you will get through your current setbacks or problems you are facing can make you grow to become a better person. In Brainology, by Carol S. Dweck, she explains how there are two crucial mindsets seen in most people, which are fixed and growth mindsets. A fixed mindset is the belief that you cannot go beyond limitations that are set onto yourself while a growth mindset is the opposite of this. Instead growth mindset is the belief that you can actually go beyond these limitations and break through these barriers to make a positive effect in your life that can benefit you a lot. In Angela Duckworth’s TED talk she speaks about how GRIT and growth mindset correspond with each other in order to become successful. The belief that developing your knowledge and passing your known limitations is obtainable through a growth mindset and having GRIT, the way you think about your abilities and the amount of work you invest ultimately makes you as a person are both the things anyone needs to use as a foundation for success.
Dweck explains two mindsets that are very different from one another, one is very optimistic for the future and where someone can be while the other is very different where it believes that limitations are set up that cannot be overcome. The first is fixed mindset which means that a person believes that their intake of education cannot go over a certain point that they have already reached or that the skills they were already born with cannot be enhanced to a better state.The other is growth mindset which is when a person believes that they can always learn more and expand their knowledge with nothing being able to stop them. In Brainology, Dweck says, “These different beliefs, or mindsets, create different psychological worlds: one in which students are afraid of challenges and devastated by setbacks, and one in which students relish challenges and are resilient in the face of setbacks” (Dweck 1). She explains that the ways that students believe in their own abilities and skills are split in half to make two different belief systems. To me this shows how people can think very differently and how their self confidence within themselves to be limited by setbacks be able to stop them from going beyond the place they are already in.
Angela Duckworth uses a different platform, a TED talk, to speak on the topic of GRIT and how intelligence was not what made students successful. Instead she says that how hard someone works and the amount of effort they put into something even when things are hard to be able to overcome them. GRIT is how hard someone is willing to work to be determined for something that they are trying to achieve or attain in their lives. These things can be goals, dreams, or just anything they want to accomplish and in order to be able to have success they have to endeavor any barriers that are set on this journey to become something and to be successful at it. Duckworth says, “So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset" (Duckworth, TED Talk). She is supporting her statement of GRIT while combining it with the idea of “growth mindset”. I believe that what Duckworth is trying to explain with this is that GRIT and growth mindset both work together to be able to produce success. And if you do not have one or the other then the outcome will not be the same so both are needed in order to have a positive affect in students achieving their goals in both academics and life.As long as someone uses skills that would coincide with GRIT and used these strategies in their day to day lives then they can be able to succeed by empowering their mindset with the decisions they make to be able to achieve what they have set for themselves.
The way that your mindset can cultivate the way that students and people in general live everyday is that it keeps them optimistic and wanting to learn more everyday. In Brainology, Dweck says, “Other students believe that intelligence is something that can be cultivated through effort and education. They don't necessarily believe that everyone has the same abilities or that anyone can be as smart as Einstein, but they do believe that everyone can improve their abilities“ (Dweck 1). Expanding your knowledge and the ability to comprehend concepts is the only way that you will better understand yourself and the world around you. If you are in a fixed mindset all the time then you will never grow as a person and you will not be able to achieve any of your goals that you have set for yourself. And due to this you will be stuck in a binding situation that will only limit you, then you will never be able to get to where you want to be or achieve what you need to do to become successful. A real life example of a person that used growth mindset to become successful is Malala Yousafzai, at age 15 she risked her life everyday to go to school because she had a tenacity and passion to improve herself academically although of being shot in 2012. She later was able to recover and is now a prime example of a person that had many challenges set on her life but still prevailed to do what she loved and is now successful as an activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. This is why a growth mindset is ultimately the best mindset to have because it is much more positive and will free yourself to finally be able to grow as a person mentally and physically. This mindset can break you from the constant restraint that you would otherwise feel if you had a fixed mindset.
In order to truly be successful your mindset is not the only thing you need, you also need a proper work ethic and being strong enough to push through anything put in front of you. This combination is truly the things you need in order to become who you want to be in your life. Duckworth says, “Turns out that grittier kids, were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure” (Duckworth, TED talk). This is showing us an example of an experiment that Duckworth conducted which shows that the more GRIT that kids had the better chance they had to be able to graduate. This is a clear sign that the more that students or people work and have a long term passion for achieving what they want to do in life the more success they will have in the future. This perseverance that people should have for their dreams and goals is something that all people that want to become better should keep in mind because the more you work towards something and more of the time that you put into it the more you will get out. Bill Gates, a real life example of GRIT had many setbacks and obstacles that he had to overcome due to many products that had failed for him, he did not stop until he was finally able to come up with Microsoft, one of the most successful companies in the world. This shows that you can fail many times but if you stay consistent and motivated to achieve a dream you will be able to do it. Ultimately this benefits the people because instead of being stuck in one place with only a limited amount of knowledge that cannot be improved they will never grow as people which will make them ignorant to the new advances that come into the world on a daily basis.
Both of these texts that I have mentioned, Brainology by Carol S. Dweck and Angela Duckworth’s TED talk, both speak on the combination to utterly achieve success in students and people in general. This combination consists of the first factor which is the growth mindset, the ability to have self motivation and belief that you are able to expand your current stage of academic intellect and you are not limited to the knowledge that you currently have. The other factor would be GRIT which is how you can grow while trying to achieve your goals even if there is adversity, you are resilient by working the hardest you can attain triumph within yourself.