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http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/22/growth-mindset-3-a-pox-on-growth-your-houses/

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It’s also not Fixed Mindset. Especially if you were fixing by demographic characteristics.

Who’s doing this?

You’re taking Dweck’s strawman and making it even weaker. Even the claims of phrenology (as practiced by Franz Gall and people who actually read him, as opposed to what random armchair-phrenologists who neither read nor wrote about their practices may have done) didn’t go so far as to say that the size and shape of your skull in particular locations fully determined your intellectual abilities with respect to what the brain regions behind that portion of skull were capable of doing. Merely that the two were strongly correlated. And phrenology comes a lot closer to being a theory of Fixed Mindset than any school of biodeterminism or racism today.

Nobody is looking in the mirror saying “I’m Kenyan; therefore, I have the ability to run fast” or “I’m Asian; therefore I have the ability to be good at economics.” A few people might be looking at themselves in the mirror and saying “I’m a girl; therefore I will never be good at physics” or something similarly ridiculous. More people are looking at other people and making these sorts of stereotypical judgments, but that’s irrelevant to a conversation about mindset, which is about the stories people tell to themselves about why they succeed or fail.

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I agree I think it’s a superiority complex. You don’t want to have to admit you got lucky on some level, so you just tell yourself it’s because you worked harder than everyone else.

It’s not that hard work means nothing. Ability and opportunities won’t get you very far if you just sit back and do nothing with them. But likewise, all the hard work in the world can’t get you very far either if you don’t have the opportunities and ability to work with.

Even circumstances can work against you. Like with the business example. I’ve personally worked for companies where they were running their businesses quite well and doing everything right, and then suddenly something happened that tanked the demand for their services.

For instance, the full-service moving company that got slammed by the housing crisis, since people that can’t afford to sell or buy houses obviously can’t afford full-service moving over UHauls or not moving in the first place. And the downturn in the economy also tanked businesses needing full-service moving as a part of things like expansions.

Or for an example more directly related to the question of ability: My gym classes in high school. I am a massive, massive clutz. My hand-eye coordination is terrible and my balance is wonky and my sense of direction is lacking. So I spent a LOT of time working really hard in gym class to the point of exhausting myself, only to fail repeatedly because of those physical limitations.

And what did I get from my gym teachers? You guessed it. “You’re just not trying hard enough! Put some effort into it!” Even as I was actually sweating and tired and frazzled because I was putting a metric ton of effort in already.

Finally one year I just went ahead and deliberately tanked my gym class grade. I showed up, dressed in my gym clothes, but refused to do absolutely anything unless it was really easy and non-competitive. (Which I think basically amounted to an aerobics module.) I decided to show them what “not trying” actually looked like.

In high school I actually finally found a gym teacher I absolutely adored and worshipped, because he actually understood that there were people who existed that aren’t good at athletics. He recognized that even though some of us were failing, it was because we just didn’t have the ability and not because we weren’t trying. We even actually made a little progress for a change, because he was able to notice what stuff we were doing wrong that actually was fixable within our limitations and gently suggest to us how to do so. We didn’t become masters or even honestly basic competence, but we did at least fail a little less often.

IMHO a progress mindset requires actual progress.

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I’ve also noticed that the “hard work is everything” crowd will often (but not always) claim in other contexts that success is easy, you just have to do x,y and z!

Perhaps it’s signalling of some sort, with attempts to gain superior social status depending on context for those people. Whatever the case I agree, it’s enormously annoying.

It’s also soul destroying to believe in growth theory, design yourself a dream of some sort (better job etc) and then jump into the fray with the conviction that hard work will take you there, only for everything to drop to shit once reality has it’s say.

What is it? 90% of new businesses fail in the first 2 years? Growth theory says those failures are all just being lazy!

Right.

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“The efficacy of academic-mind-set interventions has been demonstrated by small-scale, proof-of-concept interventions, generally delivered in person in one school at a time. Whether this approach could be a practical way to raise school achievement on a large scale remains unknown. We therefore delivered brief growth-mind-set and sense-of-purpose interventions through online modules to 1,594 students in 13 geographically diverse high schools. Both interventions were intended to help students persist when they experienced academic difficulty; thus, both were predicted to be most beneficial for poorly performing students. This was the case. Among students at risk of dropping out of high school (one third of the sample), each intervention raised students’ semester grade point averages in core academic courses and increased the rate at which students performed satisfactorily in core courses by 6.4 percentage points. We discuss implications for the pipeline from theory to practice and for education reform.”

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As someone who’s always put a lot of effort into trying to do things correctly only to keep running into roadblocks that have jack all to do with lack of effort on my part, I am beyond sick of being told by all and sundry that my lack of success is due to my being stupid and lazy thanks to the “hard work is everything” mindset that hard work is the only possible factor involved. It’s utterly soul-sucking not just putting in 100% and having it not work, but then having nobody believe you put in more than 0% effort and then treat you badly as such.

So why should I try at all? If I fail, I’ll get treated as if I put in 0% effort regardless of how much effort I actually put in, so I may as well go ahead and not even bother with any effort unless I know I’m virtually guaranteed to succeed. Why waste the effort for literally worse than no gain thanks to societal perception?

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