Carol Dweck
Mindset is the key to success
Intro
American psychologist Carol Dweck is primarily interested in the influence of mindset on motivation and self-regulation. She believes that the right mindset can be the key to our success. She specifically focuses on fixed and growth mindsets, which she believes are two ends of a spectrum of how people view their abilities. Those towards the fixed end believe their abilities are innate and unchangeable, whereas those who lie towards the growth end of the continuum believe that their abilities are malleable, and success can be achieved through hard work.
Dweck promotes a growth mindset as more adaptive than a fixed mindset and encourages parents and teachers to guide children in developing a growth mindset. Her ultimate goal is to reduce stress and encourage people to persevere when faced with challenges. Individuals with a fixed mindset tend to stay down when they fall. Dweck stresses the importance of getting back up and trying again, reminding us that, with dedication and hard work, we are all capable of achieving great things.
Test scores and measures of achievement tell you where a student is, but they don’t tell you where a student could end up.
– Carol Dweck in her 2006 book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
