26 Aug 2019 - Graham
previously: a guide to lazy days in dc
Here’s three reactions to the last full issue, Against the Wirecutter, pt. 2 (link in case you missed it). I love when you send me reactions! Send me more!
Anna R. asked a great question:
Austin T. added some thoughts from his life as a pilot:
Jacques C. got to thinking about privilege and place:
Alongside a new album, Chance released his first two mixtapes on Spotify. Why had I not listened to Acid Rap before!?
Unknown Mortal Orchestra (spotify) makes good, weird music.
You might already know about the fixed and growth mindsets. (If not, you can probably guess what they are because the names give a lot away.) The fixed view focuses on results and generalizes from those results to write a story about who we fundamentally are. The growth view, in contrast, focuses on effort and process; it treats our self as endlessly changeable and even seeks out failure
I set out to write this issue to describe all the things I’ve learned about the growth mindset while teaching the LSAT. But Carol Dweck’s book Mindset does a much better job of describing it than I could. (If you’re interested in a copy, it’s available from the GPD&c lending library [meaning email me and I’ll send it to you].) So then I thought to illustrate the growth mindset’s benefits with the story of my shift away from the fixed view. But writing that story surprised me, I’ve discovered that I have more ambiguous relationship to the two mindsets than I thought.
I got addicted to the fixed mind pretty early on. Being a precocious child, I decided to teach myself multiplication in the summer before the second grade. From then until the 11th grade I rode the ‘good at math’ train. I earned top marks on tests, got praise from teachers and parents, even made my best friends in our little gifted math class. No one, least of all me, would have said this, but I was good because I was good at math.
So what happened in the 11th grade? Well there was puberty with its attending confusions, rebellions, hormones, etc… and I may have rejected math to make space for a new identity, one not dependent on the Approval of the Adults or rooted in a childish past.
But the simpler story is that AP Calculus was really hard and I gave up. My fixed mindset had grown fat on praise and was of no use in the face of a real challenge. It gave me only two options: (1) risk failing and proving that I’m not good; or (2) pretend like I don’t care, half-ass it, perhaps prove that I’m lazy, but preserve to some degree the illusion of being good at math if I had wanted to be.
[I promise it’s relevant!]
Before you read on, give this puzzle a whirl.
The fixed mind commits a common logical error: it relies on weak induction. Inductive reasoning is proof by repetition. For example: all the swans I’ve ever seen were white, therefore all swans are white. This type of reasoning falls apart as soon as someone finds a black swan.
Used appropriately, induction can give us probabilistic truths (e.g., I’ve seen a lot of white swans so the next swan I see will probably be white). But our all too human brain makes three common mistakes:
This is also the pattern of the fixed mind:
Inductive reasoning is fragile. It avoids disproof because a single counter-example brings it all down.
[end of interlude]
Although the fixed mindset explains my fragile response to calculus, it would be unfair to say that I had only a fixed mindset. Something else was going on in the 11th grade: I was becoming obsessed with self-improvement. Nearly all of my writings from this period are lists of bad habits to drop and good habits to gain.
If these lists were a sign of a growth mindset, I don’t think I was doing it right. My journals from the last decade reveal that I made the same list of habits over and over again: stop biting my nails, wake up earlier, work out, spend less time on screens, stop procrastinating, etc… This repetition reveals the ineffectiveness of my whole self-improvement strategy, which went something like this:
This is not what the venture capitalists would call “failing better.” But it is closer to the sense of the whole work the quote comes fromwhich, speaking of ‘nauseam,’ is much darker:
Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good.
Was I doing the growth mindset? When I first read Dweck, I was sure that the fixed mindset had dominated my life and was the source of all of my problems. And yet, here is my past self going nowhere and causing a lot of pain doing something that sure looks a lot like a growth mindset.
Maybe the lists were the fixed mindset disguised as self-improvement? I was results oriented. While making them I imagined a perfect future in which I could do anything I wanted to do because I had trained myself such that effort would feel effortless. Or maybe it’s more fair to say I had adopted an incomplete version of growth that kept throwing me back into the fixed view? I aimed to cure inherent laziness with hard work, but I kept judging myself as fixedly lazy.
But I am making excuses for the growth mindset. The growth mindset, being the opposite of the fixed mindset, focuses on inputs, which means effort. It thereby avoids the harsh judgements of the fixed mind (I am bad at math) but it replaces these judgements with a different kind of cruelty (I am not working enough).
Dweck suggests that it’s only the fixed view that makes effort hard; if we let go of expectations about results then we will have endless reserves of energy. Even in the face of depression, she claims, the growth mindset will put you to work helping yourself. But, at least in my case, that’s just not true. Rather than moderating depression, focusing on effort spins the vicious cycle even faster.
And I don’t think I’m the only one to suffer from this version of the growth mindset. Dweck (rightly) blames the fixed mindset for many social ills. But the growth mindset can be regressive, too. You’re likely familiar with it in the guise of the participation trophy, “anyone can grow up to be president,” and Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour thesis.
Let’s start with the trophy. The talk-radio-conservatives might have been right to criticize participation trophies, but they had the wrong reasons. It’s not that participation trophies make things too easy, it’s that they make things too hard. We might think we want to be judged for showing up and doing our best, but who among us couldn’t show up a little more or do a little better?
The vague standard of participation is impossible to meet. This impossibility gives rise to the two extremes of contemporary work: (1) the office busy-bee, endless effort, hustle culture, non-profit martyrs, and iBankers chasing bonuses by putting in face time; alongside (2) the office turd, endless boredom, resignation to the status quo, non-profit whiners, and aimless iBankers fiddling with the economy until it breaks.
Or take the optimism that anyone could be president. In the fixed view, only some inherently great people can achieve greatness. The growth mindset seems to avoid this harshness by promising that effort, not endowments, drives success. But this attitude also leads to regressive social policy. The fixed mindset fills prisons with “bad” men and the growth mindset does just as much evil when welfare “reform” denies food and shelter to “lazy” women and their “delinquent” children. Like the participation trophy, “anyone could be president” seems kinder than the fixed view but it’s just a soft grip on a hard whip.
Which brings us to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour theory of self-improvement. You know it: the Beatles did many sets in dingy clubs before they got famous, Tiger Woods golfed a lot, etc…
[last one, I promise!]
As Daniel Goleman points out, Gladwell’s 10,000 hour thesis confuses the necessary and the sufficient.
In logic, the statement “If A, then B” (aka A → B) means that A guarantees B and that B is required for A. In fancy logic words, A is the sufficient condition and B is the necessary condition. A → B means that every time A is true we know B is also true. And that also means without B, we can’t have A. So A → B implies the contrapositive ~B → ~A.
But for all the absoluteness of conditional statements, they are very limited. They tell us nothing when B is true or when A is false. To assume that B guarantees A is to confuse the necessary and sufficient.
Consider an example:
Gladwell finds a whole bunch of very excellent people who have worked 10,000 hours and concludes: 10000 → Excellent. But that can’t be right. Consider how many Americans have put 10,000 hours behind the wheel and look at how terribly we drive! 10,000 hours doesn’t guarantee excellence, it’s (at best) a requirement. The more plausible idea is Excellent → 10000.
This matters because it means you can’t just put in the time and expect to become excellent.
[end of interlude]
I suspect Gladwell saw this error but thought he was justified in telling the logically flawed but pithier story because he wanted to democratize excellence. To succeed, he says, you can simply clock in. No thought or reflection required. Anyone can do it.
By reducing excellence to sheer repetition, Gladwell does make big changes more approachable. This attitude helped me take transformative leaps. His version of the growth mindset is why I took a job as a cook with almost no experience cooking. And why I moved to Mississippi without a car.
This dramatic approach, however, only gets us over one of the two barriers to growth. The Gladwellian view can us get started. But the other difficulty is continuing to grow, and for this Gladwell is worse than useless.
At the start of a new project growth might be easy thanks to the beginner effect or natural talent, but eventually our rate of growth slows or stops. Now work is a lot less fun. On this plateaux, where time no longer transmutes into growth, the only tool the growth mindset offers us is more effort. Thus the plateaux comes to seem an endless expanse of useless effort. At this point, the reasonable thing to do is to quit. But it is very hard to see quitting as reasonable. (Especially if this plateaux talk is not really about say, tennis, but actually about, say, substance abuse and depression).
To the degree that it emphasizes changeability and effort above all, the growth mindset does not provide a useful way to improve and might even hinder growth. I suspect this is why teachers complain that the growth mindset is nice in theory but hard to put into practice.
Ironically the effort-only growth mindset fails us because doesn’t demand enough from us. Yes, the unspecified imperative to work evermore is in an insatiable monster. But, and this I suspect is what appealed to Gladwell and Dweck simplifies growth to effort, just showing up for work is a lot easier than doing the deep practice that leads to sustained growth.
In Focus, after Daniel Goleman takes down Gladwell’s 10,000 hour thesis, he briefly lays out a more specific and demanding recipe for growth. (Focus is also available from the GPD&c lending library.) Three key components of good practice stand out: specific intention, constant iteration, and excellent coaching. I want to explore this process in more depth, next issue, with a study of what it might mean to be a better man, but here’s a short preview:
You must set a specific goal before practicing. This goal forces you to target practice to an area of growth instead of just doing the same suboptimal thing over and over again. It also gives you something concrete to evaluate yourself on other than results. This is easier said than done. Setting specific intentions and following through on them is hard work.
Growth requires change and your goals should change, too. After practicing, you must assess how things went and revise your goals. If practice was too easy, then get more specific or ambitious. If practice was too hard, work on a more basic skill or break down the big skill into a component part.
It’s nearly impossible to do this process on your own. Self-observation can compromise performance. And you might not know enough to pinpoint the thing that’s getting in your way. Coaches can inspire you to take on a tougher challenge or give you a dose of humility to work on that basic skill you thought was below you.
next post: good boy