I, on the other hand, thought human qualities were carved in stone. You were smart or you weren’t, and failure meant you weren’t. It was that simple. If you could arrange successes and avoid failures (at all costs), you could stay smart. Struggles, mistakes, perseverance were just not part of this picture.
— Carol S. Dweck in Mindset
Since the beginning of my journey in productivity with Getting Things Done (GTD), it never occurred to me to think that productivity suffers from the trap of "fixed mindset."
A quick recap on fixed mindset
When it comes to the proverbial example of fixed mindset, most people would probably say IQ scores. After all, it's rather ubiquitously used in society as a way to judge "how smart" someone is.
After all, if someone could boast an IQ score of 130 or more, they were labeled "gifted" or "genius" and showered with accolades and resources. Yet, someone with an IQ below "100" might be shunned for being "below average intelligence" and considered “not worth investing additional resources in.”
However, it might surprise you to learn that Alfred Binet, the inventor of the IQ tests, "designed the test as a way to identify children who were not benefiting from schools, so that new educational programs could be designed to get them back on track."^1
In other words, Binet believed that education and practice could bring about fundamental changes in intelligence. IQ was never meant to be used to determine someone's worth. Instead, it was meant to help identify who needed help to grow. It’s not a permanent number we’re branded with from birth.
The obsession with productivity is strong in this one...
It's funny, even though Dr. Dweck is speaking to the larger concept of how fixed mindset can impact our growth as individuals, my brain couldn't help but see this through the lens of the productivity obsessed:
I, on the other hand, thought my value was carved in todo lists. You either completed a task or not, and failure meant you didn't get that checkmark. It was that simple. If I could complete every item on my list, I could continue being successful. Incomplete tasks, partial completion, or abandoning initiatives were just not acceptable.
For anyone who has taken this path, you know as well as I do that there is safety and comfort in our productivity systems. That said, those who venture deep in the rabbit hole also often find themselves stumbling into overcommitment and burnout as well.
It'd be easy to write off productivity and hustle culture as something people should avoid, but ironically that would fall into the same trap of fixed mindset.
What if we were looking at this the wrong way?
If something like IQ is something that can ultimately be changed, why shouldn’t our views of productivity and what metrics we use as success or failures take a similar perspective?
What if instead of focusing on how many things were finished in a day, we focused on asking ourselves how much time we’re spending on the things that matter to us?
References
- Chapter 1 - Mindset by Carol S. Dweck