Audiobook Narration Sample - Mindset by Carol S. Dweck
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General) North American (US General American - GenAM)Transcript
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Mindset. The New Psychology of Success, by Carol S. Dweck Ph. D. Read by Eric Vestel Chapter one. The Mindsets When I was a young researcher just starting out, something happened that changed my life. I was obsessed with understanding how people cope with failures, and I decided to study it by watching how students grapple with hard problems. So I brought Children one at a time to a room in their school, made them comfortable and then gave them a series of puzzles to solve. The first ones were fairly easy. The next ones were hard. As the students grunted, perspired and toiled, I watched their strategies and probed what they were thinking and feeling. I expected differences among Children in how they coped with the difficulty, but I saw something I never expected. Confronted with the hard puzzles, 1 10 year old boy pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together and smacked his lips and cried out, I love a challenge. Another, sweating away on these puzzles, looked up with pleased expression and said with authority, You know, I was hoping this would be informative. What's wrong with them? I wondered. I always thought you coped with failure or you didn't cope with failure. I never thought anyone loved failure. Were these alien Children or were they on to something? Everyone has a role model, someone who pointed the way at a critical moment in their lives. These Children were my role models. They obviously knew something I didn't, and I was determined to figure it out, to understand the kind of mindset that could turn a failure into a gift. What did they know? They knew the human qualities, such as intellectual skills, could be cultivated. And that's what they were doing. Getting smarter. Not only weren't they discouraged by failure, they didn't even think they were failing. They thought they were learning. 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. Whether human qualities, air, things that can be cultivated or things that are carved in stone is an old issue. What the's beliefs mean for you is a new one. 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 trade. Let's first look in on the age old, fiercely wage debate about human nature and then return to the question of what the's beliefs mean for you. Why do people differ? Since the dawn of time, people have thought differently, acted differently and fared differently from each other. It was guaranteed that someone would ask the question of why people deferred why some people are smarter or more moral and whether there was something that made them permanently different. Experts lined up on both sides. Some claimed that there was a strong physical basis for these differences, making them unavoidable and unalterable through the ages. These alleged physical differences have included bumps on the skull, phrenology, the size and shape of the skull, Cranie ology and today jeans. Others pointed to the strong differences in people's backgrounds, experiences, training or ways of learning. It may surprise you to know that a big champion of this view was Alfred Binay, the inventor of the I Q test. Wasn't the I Q test meant to summarize Children's unchangeable intelligence. In fact, no been a a Frenchman who worked in Paris in the early 20th century designed this test to identify Children who were not profiting from the Paris public schools so that new educational programs could be designed to get them back on track. Without denying individual differences in Children's intellects, he believed that education and practice could bring about fundamental changes in intelligence. Here's a quote from one of his major books, Modern Ideas About Children, in which he summarizes his work with hundreds of Children with learning difficulties. A few modern philosophers assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, ah, quantity, which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism with practice, training and, above all method, we managed to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally become more intelligent than we were before