It's so good to be back after a fairly long break and I thank you for giving me that leeway to take a vacation and get recharged. My daughter Krista, who just graduated with a business degree, has been after me for the past year or so, to read a book called 'Mindset: The New Psychology of Success' written by Carol Dweck, a professor at Stanford University. I bought the book but had been putting off reading it, but finally used this vacation to read it. It is such a powerful book; I would strongly recommend it to every one of you.
In this book, she talks about two mindsets that we can have – the 'fixed' mindset or the 'growth' mindset. The fixed mindset is one that we have, which defines us permanently. We think – "This is it; we cannot change." The growth mindset, on the other hand, is a mindset that says that we can always develop; that we can continue to learn from the things that happen to us. As I went through this book, I thought that this is so important for us. Sometimes we determine failure and success through the grids or the mindsets that we have. She quotes a New York Times article that says, "Failure has been transformed from an action 'I failed' to an identity 'I am a failure'. This is especially true of a fixed mindset. Instead of looking at an action that has happened as 'I failed – it's a one-off thing; it happened', we tend to let it mold our identity saying, 'I am a failure' which is detrimental to progress.
