Growth-minded vs fixed-minded

And 5 things to help you cultivate your growth mindset

May 26

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“What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait?”
- Carol Dweck

Knowing all the skills it takes to be an effective product manager can only get you so far.

I could list countless stories where the hero (or villain) had everything going for them — but in the end, was his own worst enemy. And on the flip side, there are just as many stories where one's mindset and self-resolve led people to great success.

Your mind is your most powerful asset. It influences everything you do, and don't do.

It would be impossible for me to cover such a deep topic of personal mindset — and I not going to go down that path as this is not a self-help newsletter.

Instead, I've been compiling some high-level themes around personal mindset that directly related to product management and your career. These have came from conversations with other PMs, and while product-centric, apply to many other things.

So far, we’ve covered Imposter Syndrome, and Ego.

And this week, I’ll be writing about growth-minded vs fixed-minded.

Cultivating a growth mindset

You can have two types of mindsets – a fixed mindset, or a growth mindset (coined by Psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University).

A fixed mindset means that you think your skills, behavior, or intelligence is fixed. Let's say you suck at data analysis, you might believe you’ll never be good at it — and just accept it the way it is. This writes off any real future progress or interest at getting better. Similarly, if you are really good at strategic thinking – you might think that's innate ability, and that you just are good. This also stops you from investing more in learning and getting better, because you believe you just have it.

With a fixed mindset – you'll stay stuck at where you are with something. This, obviously, is not what you want.

So, the next two questions then are: (1) what's a growth mindset, and (2) what can you actually do about cultivating yours?

A growth mindset means you believe your mind is malleable. You know that your skills, behavior, and intelligence can always be developed over time with effort. This isn't to be confused with air-fairy toxic positivity – with the summed-up self-help catchphrase, “You can do whatever you set your mind too!”. Nobody can guarantee that with a growth mindset and practice you can become the CPO of Google – but what is promised is improvement and “better than today”. That's a good deal.

A growth mindset creates a positive perspective on learning, where you're aware that there are choices you make with concrete payoffs. With a growth mindset, you'll acknowledge that the new approach to user interviews you just learned helped you get more actionable insights, and that by asking for feedback from the designer who sat in on the calls with you, you'll get even better at them!

Having a growth mindset means you're continuously learning. This means you will keep on investing in the work that has a meaningful impact on your career, as well as encourage intellectual humility, and signal coachability to your boss and peers.

To do a shallow dive into some of the neuroscience behind this – there is an evident link between a growth mindset and activation in two important areas our brain's:

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC): involved in learning and control
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC): involved in error-monitoring and behavioral adaptation

This suggests that with a growth mindset, people have higher motivation, better error correction, and handle negative feedback better.

Another interesting finding is that with growth-minded people the brain is most active when someone is told how they can improve, whereas with a fixed-mindset, it's most active when told about performance results. This means growth-minded values process more, rather than pure results. An important trait to develop as a growing PM.

Two important things to be aware of here: (1) Your mindset isn't so black and white – you can (and like me, probably do) have a growth mindset in some areas, and a fixed one in others. (2) Having a fixed mindset isn't “fixed” – it can be developed towards a growth mindset.

With that in mind, what actionable steps can you take to develop your growth mindset?

1. Know that mindset is malleable.

The first step towards changing and improving your mindset is realizing that your brain and your thought patterns, scientifically, are malleable and can adapt. This is an important part in setting the right optics to catching yourself in fixed mindset moments and learning to train your perceptions and reactions towards being more growth-minded.

2. Pay attention to fixed-mindset framing.

Watch out for when you hear your inner voice saying things like “I can't do this". When you do, take a moment to be aware of this fixed-mindset framing, realize that it's totally normal and nothing to beat yourself up on, and then practice framing the same thing as “I can do this if I read up more and practice". I remember several occasions when I was in my first year of formal product management (i.e actually hired to be a PM and not working on my startup) – where I'd be asked to do certain analyses, or hear some frameworks I wasn't familiar with. Sometimes, when the deadline was tight, I'd get flurried that I didn't know how to do it and think I'd fail and be busted as a fraud. I paid special attention to shifting my frame of mind – realizing that staying with a fixed view, I'd certainly fail – to being confident that anything I needed to learn was available to me and could be done. Most of the time as PMs – we're not building bridges or sending people to Mars – the stakes are not that high and you can learn whatever you need to pretty quickly with some online research. Doing this proved to myself that yes, with learning and practice I can deliver what I need to and get better, and developed more confidence in this growth-minded outlook.

3. Value process over result.

Of course, outcomes matter. If you're not by and large delivering impact/results, you're probably going to get fired. The point here is that you yourself need to acknowledge your learning process and efforts and value that over just the outputs. In my anecdote above – this translated to me taking the most pride and recognition for finding the information I needed, putting it into practice, and now knowing the basis of how to do the analysis going forward – and crucially, that I have a workable baseline to build off. Since then, I've done it a few more times and my thinking, presentation, and overall result has definitely improved.

4. Get feedback.

Asking for feedback is an important part of the learning and development process. And growth-minded is all about the process.

5. Accept setbacks.

Failing at things and facing setbacks are part of the learning and iteration loop [Build, Measure, Learn]. Progress is usually not linear, and being confused along the way or failing at times are just learning opportunities. They will happen.

Here is a handy infographic that summarizes the important differences between being growth-minded and having a fixed mindset. (By Carol Dweck)

a growth mindset poster infographic comparing the growth mindset vs fixed mindset

If you have any additional advice or thoughts around this, I’d love to hear in the comments below!

The Product Slice