Growth mindset is a corporate cult
When you think about doing something remarkable, remember that remarkable results come from paths most people aren’t on.
Passion comes from hard work
Passion does not lead to hard work. So don’t tell yourself that you’re picking a path of hard work if you don’t know what you’re passionate about. Here are some examples in my life where this has been true:
My oldest kid didn’t choose to play violin. I chose it when they were three years old. But when they were twelve and I said they could quit, they didn’t want to. All that complaining about practice led to a passion for playing.
I didn’t choose to play volleyball. I was the tallest kid in my freshman class at college. The volleyball coach recruited me during orientation week. For the next two years I practiced on the side of the gym with a coach. No playing. By the time I graduated from college, all I wanted to do was play volleyball.
Many people who have exciting, engaging careers will tell you they “fell into it.” What that really means is that someone asked them to do something, and they decided to work hard at it. (One of the best stories of this phenomena is pro basketball player Khaman Maluach. An NBA scout in Uganda saw Maluach, age 14, and suggested he try basketball. So Maluach taught himself how to play from YouTube videos.)
Yearning for a result is not a passion
If you are not working very hard at something, you probably have a yearning (author, inventor, speaker, athlete, entrepreneur, influencer, etc.)
Passion is specific. Yearning is vague. Sometimes people say they are passionate about something so broad as to be meaningless. Like travel. Health. Writing. If you’re talking about something in such vague terms, then you have not spent a lot of time on it.
Passion is process
People who have a passion are constantly adjusting their process to get better and better at the daily tasks. Michael Jordan is famous for how he practiced. Mark Zuckerberg was writing code when he was a kid. Beyonce has been performing since childhood. When you focus on process every day, you are in the world of specifics and minutiae.
Passion and fun are not the same.
Going to a movie is fun. Taking a trip is fun. Fun people get invited to a lot of stuff. But passionate people are dangerous. They prioritize their passion before everything else. They are preoccupied. They are often a little crazy. This is why Michael Jordan wasn’t interested in his family, and Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t interested in college. And Beyonce is performing at her kid’s school fundraiser instead of just donating money.
Growth mindset is a disorder
The world is obsessed with growth mindset. We know that growth mindset is a combination of grit and passion. Which means that people with a growth mindset are the crazy, preoccupied, distracted types. Humanity would die if everyone had a growth mindset because we need most people to be caring about each other. So we’re lucky that most people don’t have a growth mindset.
Growth mindset is misogynist
The origin of growth mindset was a professor who was obsessed with her research and concluded that everyone should be like her. Twenty years later, educators and executives are beating the growth mindset drum like their lives depend on it. And they fork over millions in dollars a year to train everyone to have a growth mindset.
Men are much more likely to have a growth mindset than women. Someone who does not have a growth mindset has a fixed mindset. Both have equal levels of grit, but they apply that grit differently. How much passion you have determines if you have a fixed mindset or growth mindset.
People with a fixed mindset prioritize stability over personal growth. In fact, a fixed mindset is protective against terrible parenting. Because it’s impossible to be devoted to your kids if you’re devoted to your passion.
So why don’t we all shut up about growth mindset and passion? The people who have that type of brain already know it. And the people who have yearning and a fixed mindset are the ones who are caring, dependable, and connected.
Damn straight, P. Musical chairs, and Kenneth Cook’s Play Little Victims, teach that infinite bums don’t fit finite seats. ‘Endless’ growth kills the host. Best, P.
OMG I never thought of musical chairs that way. I played it at every birthday party as a little kid.
Our first FOMO. Worse than zero sum!
That metaphor was used by an Atlantic Magazine article about the housing shortage, saying that the less able-bodied (less income) lose out first. Our “people-growth without enough housing-growth” is a North American wide problem, not just your own unlucky city.
As you know, it’s not your boy’s fault if they can’t buy their own home. Not unless we first change our zoning, red tape, ballot propositions, government distrust of prefabricated homes and cultural nostalgia for detached single houses.
Wait. Atlantic? I can’t even find my own link. Which are you talking about?
I think I mean the Jan/February print issue of 2023. The metaphor was for us not to “blame the victim.” Here’s a link https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Atlantic+magazine+February+2023+housing&t=osx&ia=web
The Atlantic is a national magazine, great for articles on understanding Washington folks. When I did a search engine, I got a number of hits, but I think it’s that one.
I took the magazine to my federal representative and he photocopied the article. Politicians keep files on relevant articles, letters to the editor and so forth. He told me the problem was continent-wide, so I guess that’s partly we have no success stories for us all to emulate yet.
Oh. Ha. I know the Atlantic. Love it, of course. Thank you for the link.
Here’s an idea: a growth mindset might mean being more serious. A blogger said he met a Swedish olympian (I forget which sport) who said, “I do not hang out.” I guess for her a conversation had to be for piling up ideas for getting somewhere, like when students are doing their “meaning of life” conversations.
(Say, that same blogger said he was too ambitious to “do nothing but go home and eat supper.”)
In contrast, when my gang is hanging around on lawn chairs, if we get interrupted by a nice dog, then nobody knows or cares what we were just talking about, and we simply start a new topic.
I think that’s a great way to frame growth mindset. Someone who is obsessed with their own area of continuous improvement is really boring to be around. I have been writing a lot about personality type lately – to groups divided by type. I have a hard time writing for ENTJs because intrinsic to ENTJs is singular focus — the intellectual version of your Olympian.
Fellow ENTJ here. That’s something I’m constantly aware of. I’m boring to the vast majority of people because of my singular focus. The people I’m not boring to either love me in spite of it, or are trying to learn from me. I’m very interested in any upcoming ENTJ content you may have.
I’m so glad you said that — this is, indeed, a very ENTJ post. I’ve been writing more post about ENTJs here. https://ptentj.substack.com/subscribe
How much of this was written by AI? All of it? What was the prompt? Perhaps
-Give me a counter-intuitive hot take and flesh it out into a 700 word blog post
I tried that in ChatGPT and it gave me a great blog post: “Mediocrity is the Secret to a Better Life.”
It’s got some statements I can well imagine coming from PT: “Excellence everywhere isn’t excellence at all—it’s exhaustion disguised as ambition.”
I’m so glad you asked! It’s actually adapted from a couple of papers I wrote while I was at Harvard. (Excerpt from one paper pasted below). An agent asked me to turn the paper into a book. But I realized it’s just a blog post. So I posted it. But the research really excites me:
The ubiquitous gender-based workplace difficulties women experience (Fornwagner 2022) do not affect autistic women. (Hayward 2018) In fact, companies pay millions of dollars a year to get employees to switch from their fixed mindset (mostly women) to have a growth mindset (a male way of thinking). (Dweck 2015) Autistic women are born with a growth mindset which makes them ill-suited for parenting but perfect for corporate life.
For example, growth mindset is linked to controlling parenting behavior (Sheffler 2022) and low reading comprehension. (Cho 2021) Fixed mindset is linked to good communication skills (Rowe, 2018), and patience with children. (Bishara 2021) Someone with a growth mindset makes decisions by looking at patterns and systems to improve the status quo. This creates a general unhappiness from constantly trying to improve things. (Moser 2011) (Parker 2007) People with a fixed mindset make decisions faster by considering less data so they feel more content.(Killingsworth 2010) (Vandoewalle 2015)
This is important because the factors that make autistic moms not very effective parents actually make autistic moms some of the most prized employees – the women who have growth mindsets. And it also explains why the workplace is like a bad boyfriend for neurotypical women: always trying to get them to change instead of appreciating everything they’re already doing.
I just realized something else, though. The phrase “mediocrity is the secret to a better life” is something I wrote about a lot in the last ten years — in terms of optimizer vs. satisficer research and Seligman’s lab at University of Pennsylvania.
It took me decades to understand the data behind the idea that mediocrity makes for a better life because I had cognitive dissonance. Chatgpt doesn’t have cognitive dissonance, so it can find compelling ideas right away.
But chatgpt can’t say anything that hasn’t been said before. The research about autistic women being the women with growth mindset is very new. So chatgpt can’t spit that out without the aid of 50 prompts. I think a better question to ask than “did chatgpt write this?” is “did I learn something new?”