Bill Gates retweeted a video this week that says people can learn anything–as long as they’re not discouraged by difficulty. Difficulty, according to Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck, is part of the solution.
Dweck talks about two mindsets, which will sound familiar to anyone who’s been alive for more than a year. The “fixed mindset” believes in natural limitations–that we can only go so far beyond where we begin. That our talents are finite. Guess how far people with a “fixed mindset” go. (Hint: they don’t work for Microsoft or Google.) The “growth mindset”–a term which, rather unbelievably, the video claims Dweck coined–says the opposite. Someone with a “growth mindset” believes that our actual limits are very hard to reach–that through struggle and continued effort we can learn anything.
