My thoughts on Growth Mindset - Ted Talk
I have never heard of Carol Dweck until now, however I do think her talk on Growth Mindset is one that many people all over should listen in on. She talks about how praising someone for their intelligence needs to stop and I agree with it for many reasons. First, people that are intelligent know that they are and do not need people to recognize that for them, rather they want the work they are doing and their accomplishments to be what people notice. At the same time however, praising someone for completing something itself whether it was easy or hard sets up the one who is praised with the belief of always getting some form of praise when they do a good job. I played sports all my life and as a child to even now one of the things I believe needs to stop is "Participation Trophies". At the end of the sports season, only the top three teams should be rewarded with trophies getting bigger the better a team does within the top three. By giving everyone a trophy it rewards those who did not do as well or try as hard as others while saying to those who did work harder "you're the same as this person who didn't do well or didn't try". What this does is it kills the drive to do better and work harder at the sport the following season. This attitude translates to the work environment as Ms. Dweck mentions that this generation of employees expect to be praised or rewarded for doing their job. NO, you do not get a reward or praise for doing your job. You get rewarded or praised for doing more than what's asked of you, more than your coworkers are doing and going above and beyond in your field. Like sports, the working world is a competitive environment where things like praise and rewards should be given to those who work harder than others, not just for completing something. Moving to the power of yet, I agree that the grade of "Not Yet" creates a different mindset than "Fail". As mentioned in a previous post, I struggled the first few years of school and honestly for a while I started to wonder if I'd ever graduate because I had failed many exams here and there and had to drop courses quite often because of that. Because of the failed exams I started to think I would do terribly in the course no matter what I did which then caused me to lose the drive to study and work harder. Thankfully, that mindset has been corrected!
Photo taken from Growth Mindset Memes blog
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