It is a common belief in our society that success is linked to talent, an innate and unchanging quality, that people have from birth. This gives rise to the concept that those who do not display certain talents from the outset are very unlikely to develop them and those that have talent do not need to work to improve it. So how can we explain the cases of the painter Jackson Pollock and the writer Marcel Proust or indeed the great mind behind the theory of evolution Charles Darwin, who are some of the most important names in their fields today, but as children were considered mediocre, if not talentless in the subjects where, in later life, they displayed great skill?
According to research carried out by Dr Carol Dweck in the field of psychology, there is an explanation, and it is called mindset: the mindset is literally the settings of your mind, meaning the psychological reaction mechanism, which each one of us activates when dealing with our life’s events, whether they are obstacles or victories. By studying the contrasting reactions to complex problems and failures within groups of school-age children, the author soon realised that there are two types of mindset:
- the fixed mindset, based on the idea that each of us is born with a certain level of intelligence, talent or ability, which is fixed and unchangeable, thus impossible to improve over time;
- the growth mindset, which conversely, supports the idea that each of our abilities can be developed and improved.
In Dr Dweck’s research, children with a fixed mindset were less inclined to accept more complex tasks and to learn, the opposite of the children with a growth mindset. The result was a discrepancy in the approach to short term and long term learning between the two groups.
