Why The Growth Mindset is Key to Success

How your mindset impacts entrepreneurship, leadership, and relationships

Jan 21, 2024

The million-dollar question “how to become successful?” is not an easy one to answer. Many factors, including genetics, talent, and a little bit of luck, can certainly explain why some people fare better than others in life. But a crucial explanatory factor that not many people might be paying attention to is the mindset.

In her best-selling book Mindset: the new psychology of success, Carol Dweck explains why the way you think strongly influences the person you become. She lays out the many reasons why having a growth mindset trumps the so-called fixed mindset. In this article, I will explain how this plays out in the entrepreneurship and business domains, as well as in our romantic lives.

Growth vs Fixed Mindset? Please explain!

Having a fixed mindset means that you believe that your qualities are carved in stone. Everything, from your IQ to your charisma, is given, and there is not much you can do to change that. The growth mindset, though, is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Everyone can change and improve with continuous practice and hard work.

Entrepreneurship

As an entrepreneur, setbacks are your everyday bread. From the rejection of the 10^th investor approached, to a client that has decided to go with the competitor, to the best engineer that decides to leave the firm. Startups are constantly facing these sorts of problems. In the face of them, it is your job to take full ownership. The setbacks are probably pointing at a deficiency, so you might very well reflect upon it and draw some lessons from them.

The growth mindset types have been shown to be better at dealing with failure. They see any setback as an opportunity to grow. A bad grade, getting fired, being rejected, losing a tournament. All these are signs that are telling us that improvements must be made.

This differs from the approach of the fixed mindset people. Given that they believe that your qualities are immutable, a failure would simply mean highlighting that you are bad at something. Thus, like John McEnroe, they might not thrive when problems arise. He, who believed that talent was all, did not love to learn. When things got rough, he often succumbed.

In fact, McEnroe did not learn from failures because he blamed it on others. He once lost a match because he fell victim to the tabloids. In another match it was because of the weather - it was too cold. Next week, though, the weather was hot. On another occasion, he was overtrained. Another time, he was undertrained. It was never his fault! As a result of all this, and by his own admission, he did not fulfil his potential.

McEnroe did not thrive in the face of challenge

Something else entrepreneurs have to do often is to learn new skills. Whatever the industry you are in, there will always be abilities that you need to learn or polish in order to get better. Sales, management, negotiation, finance, marketing, and maybe some programming. Thus, you have to be willing to plunge into learning new stuff often, even if you are not good at it. If you shy away from learning, instead of loving the challenge, then you will have a hard time as an innovator.

The growth mindset, and not the fixed one, will help you take on new challenges. The growth types actually love them. And the bigger the challenge, the more they get excited by it. On the contrary, people in the fixed mindset thrive when things are safely within their grasp. If things get too challenging (when they start feeling that they are not smart or talented enough) they lose interest.

Leadership

The type of mindset you adopt will also affect the type of leader you end up becoming. We can see how the different mindsets play a role in the book Good to Great. As Collins explains, a key factor that explained success in the companies analysed was leadership. They were self-effacing people who had the ability to confront the brutal reality – even if this meant acknowledging failures, even their own.

If you are a fixed mindset leader, then you will surround yourself with those who idolize you. You will get rid of those who pose a challenge to you and who raise the voice with original ideas in the meetings. Without the critics, though, you will lose touch with reality and stop learning.

Groupthinking

From this, we can infer that the fixed mindset managers can lead to groupthinking. This term, popularized by Irving Janis in the early 70s1, occurs when everyone in a team tends to support the widely accepted opinion, even if they don’t believe it to be correct. This can lead to catastrophic decisions in an organization. An example would be the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs, which many attribute to the lack of criticism of Kennedy’s plan and to the blind faith that his subordinates had on him.

Growth mindset leaders are more likely to avoid this. Alfred Sloan, former CEO of General Motors, postponed a meeting where there was complete agreement between the parties. “I postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement”.

Some growth mindset leaders even rewarded contrarians. That was the case of Packard, who gave an employee at HP a medal for “extraordinary contempt and defiance”. The reason? The engineer kept working on a product on his own and making it successful despite the opposition he had received from his bosses.

“I postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement” - Alfred Sloan, former CEO of GM

Company culture

The mindset of the leadership also has a strong impact on the company culture. For firms that adopt the fixed mindset, everything revolves around pleasing the boss. In many of Collins’ comparison companies (the ones that did not make it from good to great) the leader became the main thing people worried about. Either making them happy or making sure they were not upset was a top-priority for the employees. It seems obvious that in such an environment, greatness cannot ensue.

An example of that can be found in the Chase Manhattan. Bank, during the 60s and 70s. The managers in the firm lived day to day in fear of disapproval. If they made it to the end of the day without being scolded, they felt a deep sense of relief. Another can be found at Texas Instruments. Where Shepherd and Bucy would yell, bang on tables, and insult the speaker whenever they heard a bad presentation.

Jack Welch, another growth mindset leader, got rid of this kind of brutal bosses. In front of 500 managers, he explained why he had let go of 4 relevant corporate officers: because they did not practice their values. Fostering productivity could not be done through terror. Doing so could lead to a dismissal, even if the results were solid.

Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001

Development culture

Finally, the leadership’s mindset also impacts the employee development policies. Professor Dweck distinguishes between a culture of genius and a culture of development. In the former, you either “have it” or not. In the latter, though, there is a belief that everybody can grow and improve with effort, good strategies, and adequate mentoring. A leader that embodied the culture of development was Jack Welch, who chose executives on the basis of “runway”, i.e. their capacity for growth.

Having the right development milieu has an impact on the workers. Employees in growth mindset companies agreed that:

-       Their companies are more likely to support them in risk-taking and innovation
-       People in growth-mindset companies feel a greater sense of empowerment, ownership and commitment – The ones working in a fixed-mindset firm, though, expressed a greater interest in leaving for another company
-       Supervisors in growth mindset companies saw their team members as having far greater management potential than did supervisors in fixed-mindset companies

Relationships

Finally, the type of mindset we adopt will seriously affect our sentimental life. This is reflected on how you expect your partner to treat you, on how you interpret the challenges that emerge in the relationship, and on how you cope with breakup.

Fixed mindset people expect their partners to worship them, put them on a pedestal, make them feel perfect. This is due to their constant need of validation. People with the growth mindset, on the other hand, hope for a partner that challenges them to become a better person, encourages them to learn new things, points at their faults and helps them to work on them.

Aaron Beck was a psychiatrist regarded as the father of cognitive therapy

Your mindset also affects the way you see the problems that emerge in a relationship. The growth mindset types see any issue within the relationship as a surmountable obstacle. Given that they believe in our ability to improve, they regard discussions or problems as something that can be solved with work. That is not the case for the fixed mindset types, though. In fact, for this group, the ideal partner should be perfect from the onset. If that is not the case and any slight problem emerges within the couple, then it is a definitive sign that the relationship will not work. It is either perfect from the onset, or it just was not meant to be.

Every single relationship expert disagrees with the fixed mindset idea that “if you are compatible, then everything should just come naturally”. Aaron Beck, a renowned psychiatrist, says that one of the most destructive beliefs for a relationship is “if we need to work at it, there’s something seriously wrong with our relationship”. In fact, this idea might be an important reason as to why many relationships go stale. People believe that being in love means never having to do anything taxing.

One of the most destructive beliefs for a relationship: “If we need to work at it, there’s something seriously wrong with our relationship”

Finally, your mindset will also affect how you process a hard breakup. In the cases when people were left or deeply hurt by their partners, the fixed mindset types felt judged and labelled by their rejection. It was as if they had become, from that moment onwards, unlovable forever. Additionally, their mechanism for healing the wound relied mostly on revenge. They badly wanted to hurt the other person, sometimes even at the expense of their own wellbeing.

For the growth mindset types, it was more about forgiving and moving on. They were still deeply hurt by what had happened, but they wanted to learn from it instead. Also: they did not feel permanently branded. This helped them use their learnings in their upcoming relationships.

What to do about it?

Ample evidence shows that we can learn anything, and this includes the growth mindset. Going from the fixed mindset, which creates an internal monologue that is focused on judging (eg: “this means that my partner is selfish”) to the growth mindset (which tries to derive conclusions for constructive action) is possible.

Now that you know about the two mindsets, you can start thinking and reacting in new ways. Beware whenever you catch yourself in the throes of the fixed mindset. For example, when you feel labelled by a failure, get discouraged when something requires a lot of effort, or when you pass up a chance for learning. Stop labelling yourself, change the internal monologue, and embrace difficulties - these are all essential in order to go from a fixed to a growth mindset.

Change is difficult. It is not easy to let go of behaviours that have been part of yourself for years. All the more so, because you are told to embrace all the things that felt threatening to you: struggle, criticism, setbacks, challenge. But doing so is worth it; it might be the first step to reaching your full potential.

Julian’s Substack

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