The Ultimate Advice for a More Creative Life |
“Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.” — Edward de Bono
In 2006, Carol Dweck, a Stanford University researcher, wrote a ground-breaking book: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. In it, she presents compelling evidence that each of us selects one of two mindsets to govern our lives. The first, the fixed mindset, is an internal belief that our talents and abilities are fixed and unchanging—they are carved in stone—unchangeable and unmovable. As a result, we spend much of our lives trying to prove how good we are; how well we are living up to our “assigned role.”
Those with a fixed mindset quite often believe that their talents or abilities are carved in stone. Those characteristics are something they are born with and something that will not or cannot change over their lifetimes. They are “stuck” with those features for the entirety of their lives…those are the “cards” they were dealt and they are not likely to change anytime soon. There’s no sense in looking for any kind of improvement, it would be a total waste of time, a total waste of effort. Nothing’s going to change!
On the other hand, people who embrace a growth mindset realize they are given a foundation of talents or a starting point for development. These folks believe that their basic qualities can be improved, expanded, and elaborated…they can be cultivated, not just for a single project, but rather over the entire course of their lives. That is, they believe that........