Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

In her first chapter, Dweck focuses on setting up background information, sharing her guiding research questions, and defining key terms to set up the major premise of her work. Her thesis is that there are two mindsets that people adopt when confronting challenges and that these mindsets fundamentally shape peoples’ motivations and approaches to challenges and setbacks throughout their lives. Her book sets out to explain why people differ so drastically in their responses to challenge and failure and to answer the deeper question “What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait?” (4). She provides a brief history of the ways people such as IQ test creator Alfred Binet tried to explain human intelligence and ability in the past; they sought to understand whether nature or nurture accounts for individual variations in ability and accomplishment. She claims her work shows that humans fall into two mindsets about their own abilities: the fixed mindset, in which abilities are viewed as set, and the growth mindset that believes abilities can be developed through effort, practice, and the application of new strategies.