Hustle Cult? 003 – Does Growth Mindset Really Work?

^{Growth mindset vs. Fixed mindset: Which one do you have? by pyrkias}

In the last chapter, I have used a ridiculous scenario to question about the idea of “Never Give Up” because most of such ideas has been over-simplified to point that lacks contexts and meaning, becoming a cliché, parroted by many people without putting a deeper though. Similarly, the idea of growth mindset has been promoted by many influencers and online materials, but because of my deep frustration about my study, I am really questioning about the effectiveness of this mindset used in academic field.

At the first glance, growth mindset along is not a bad idea because the original intention is to let people not limiting their own ability based on their judgement of the past, aka “I won’t able to do it (based on their (probably) bad experience from their past)”, and not to be afraid of the challenges from their favorite subject. This kind of mindset did help me achieve some of the seemly impossible tasks, but… I have to admit there are quite a lot of catches.

The idea of growth mindset always reminds me of a theory: if you put enough time and effort into a topic, you can learn anything you want. Sounds familiar? Let me rephrase that with another concepts: If you put enough time and memory into a Turing Machine, you can compute anything. Recently, I just found that the idea of growth mindset is highly similar to being Turing Complete, but because of interesting coincidence, this alerts me a question: If growth mindset and Turing Completeness has similarities, is that means… In a practical sense, the growth mindset doesn’t really work, but just a gaslight of being able to learn everything?

There is no Turing Machine in real life because it is impossible to have an infinite amount memory due to physical limitations, likewise to our brain capacity which we can only remember a number of things. Besides, Turing Completeness only requires to complete a task if the time is long enough, but… what is “long enough”? One day, One month, One Centuries, or till the heat death of the universe?

Likewise to what I have mentioned, our brain is not Turing Complete because we don’t have infinite amount of memory. We only have so much capacity to remember and learn things, and our thinking process has been hardwired during our childhood and adolescence. I don’t say our mindset can’t be changed, but from my experience, it is hard to change completely after teenager which you can only change a tiny part of your thinking process, bit by bit, or you just add an extension of your mindset, but the whole thinking map and process are still more and less retaining the same structure. This sounds a bit too abstract, so I am going to share my story of how I learn things back in the days and even now.

I have been using SunVox since 13 years ago (Time Flies, I can’t believe that has been such a long time), and for some reasons, my way to remember things are coincidentally like a tree or graph structures, with traversing different nodes forming different vectors and orders to map certain concepts. It sounds crazy, but this is how my mind works, and this gives me as advantage such that I feel comfortable learning all the signal processing, computer algorithms, software development, and manipulate modular synths; however, a tree structure is poor at traversing linearly, which also makes me feel difficult to remember sequential data like the years of a history and names. I have been taken mandatory history lessons in my middle school, and one of the optional courses in my Bachelor degree, and no matter how I try, I just can’t remember all the details well enough like others, and I usually fail or barely pass the subject, opposing to other science stuff. Thus, I would say: perhaps, a healthy amount fixed mindset is also really important because it might give you a shortcut to reach your goal.

Why am I saying that? This is because this story. As a robotic goshawk (what) (???) (cough), I want to draw some robots and characters because I want to use them in my games just for fun, or just using my creations as my blog images. I don’t say I can’t draw, and I can certainly draw some bird of preys and some basic geometric shapes and patterns; nonetheless, my consistency is horrible, to a point that I have a lot of hard time to make things looks symmetrical and precise, and I can’t draw the same models after the orientation has been changed which is important for drawing machineries. I understand this requires massive amount of time to practice, but for me, drawing is a tool for my next step, 3D modeling, rather than a hobby I would spend a long time for it. Thus, I won’t able to draw anything as good as the professionals, but I accept it because… I can now skip ahead and use blender instead, and export the images from the software which I no longer need to learn how to draw precise objects and how to shade them! If I use growth mindset here, insisting to master my drawing skill and forcing me to accepting such challenge, very likely, I am still practicing my drawing, and you won’t see the “Sometimes, Others’ PR Disaster Makes You Learn” post with my loading screen image replaced with my “bird pic”.

Hence, does growth mindset really work? I can’t really tell because it sounds encouraging for the learners, but seemingly, this mindset only works in highly idealised situations and environments where space and time is no object, which doesn’t align to our empirical universe because we only have limit amount of time and limit of memory in our brain, and even worst, there are quite a lot of scenarios limiting such thinking, including an unrealistic tight schedule of learning programs or projects, or some professors introducing unnecessary rules and unclear instructions just to frustrate students. On the other hand, except for being jealous which is completely a stupid thing to do, according to the illustration on the top of this post, some of the points in fixed mindset also works well for quite a lot of scenarios because it acts like a tree pruning algorithm to eliminate some of the worse decision, somethings you no longer care to try or learn, and sticking with the old methods have good stability which is good for some tasks that embraces reliability as long as the old methods work great and efficient.

In conclusion, because of my experience, I think we shouldn’t just promote growth mindset and demote the otherwise, and in fact, we should seek the advantages of the two mindsets and use them accordingly.