I do not think that means what you think it means. (1, #35)
On a growth mindset — Estimated Read Time: 50 seconds.
Have you noticed how big ideas can become distorted over time?
Bold new frameworks often get so popular that they’re misrepresented and misused.
For instance: Not every startup is actually disruptive (in the Clayton Christensen sense). Launching a product before it’s ready doesn’t make you a Lean Startup. And the original meaning of growth hacker was essentially a marketing engineer (think Facebook’s The Hacker Way), not someone who expands a business through get-rich-quick tricks they learned on the Internet.
This week, the term that brought this to mind was growth mindset. While I thought I understood this concept, I was challenged by an article by Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who popularized the term with her 2006 book, Mindset.
In this article, Dweck pointed out that a growth mindset is not a permanent personality or a general optimistic outlook—everyone is a mixture of growth & fixed mindsets. It’s not about just praising & rewarding effort—actual progress matters, too. And having a growth mindset, alone, is not sufficient to create improvements—you have to have policies to back it up.
While I had most of the pieces right, going back to the source was still helpful.
How about you?
Are there any popular concepts that you’ve noticed that others—or maybe you!—have distorted from their original meaning?
Insight inspired by Carol Dweck and her article, What Having a “Growth Mindset” Actually Means.