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The Mindset Shift That Changed My Life

2021-08-01 · Book summary (Book Club) · Ali · recording, 9:43 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, His medical past, Evidence-based framing

In a Book Club episode on Carol Dweck's Mindset, Ali sets out five lessons: the growth versus the fixed mindset, valuing effort, seeing failure as a learning opportunity, progress over perfection, and the growth mindset as a gradual journey, with examples from his own life.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Carol Dweck's experiment with children given problems too hard for them

  • ★★ Carol Dweck (quoted): Carol Dweck gave 10-year-olds problems slightly too hard for them: some who failed were devastated, others said things like "I love a challenge"; she puts the difference down to mindset. — 00:00:00 · growth mindset
  • ★★★ Carol Dweck (quoted): Carol Dweck's Mindset contrasts the fixed mindset, that abilities such as intelligence are innate and hard to change, with the growth mindset, that everything is a skill that can be learned and improved. — 00:00:00 · growth mindset

00:00:39 — Growth mindset versus fixed mindset; a friend in anatomy class

  • ★★★ Ali accepts there is raw talent, as some people sing better by default, but says a growth mindset means accepting there is huge room for improvement in almost anything we put our minds to. — 00:00:47 · growth mindset
  • ★★ After Ali explained the growth mindset, a friend at medical school who feared looking dumb chose to see wrong answers in anatomy class as a learning opportunity; nobody cared, and she learned a lot more. — 00:01:46 · growth mindset

00:02:15 — How much we value effort; Isaac Newton; preparing for difficult conversations

  • ★★ Carol Dweck (quoted): Mindset says that in society, especially among people with a fixed mindset, the mark of a genius is doing things without effort, so people who must put in effort feel they are doing it wrong. — 00:02:15 · growth mindset
  • ★★ Carol Dweck (quoted): Carol Dweck cites evidence in Mindset that everything in life takes a large amount of effort, and that geniuses especially put in effort people do not hear about. — 00:02:56
  • ★ Ali says we hear the story of the apple and Isaac Newton discovering gravity, but not of the many other experiments he tried, such as dabbling in astrology. — 00:02:56
  • ★★★ Ali endorses Mindset's reframing of effort: effort is not a bad thing, and in learning and studying, the more effort the brain puts in, the more likely the information is to stick. — 00:03:25 · growth mindset
  • ★★ Ali asked the marketing director of a big software company for tips on difficult conversations with team members; his tip was to spend two or three hours preparing for each one, with copious notes. — 00:04:24
  • ★★★ Ali realised he had approached difficult conversations with his team with a fixed mindset: he was not a good manager at them because he put no effort into them, not because they did not come effortlessly. — 00:04:53 · growth mindset

00:05:12 — Seeing the opportunity in failure; journaling in Day One

  • ★★ Ali says that failing, such as a girl rejecting him, a video doing badly or a product launch going poorly, still feels pretty bad, even though he knows to reframe failure as opportunity. — 00:05:22
  • ★★ Ali has failed at lots of things over the years and says he has always been happy, in the long run, that he failed at them. — 00:05:22
  • ★★★ When he fails at something, Ali journals in Day One about what to do next time and which lesson to take away; it turns the failure into a learning opportunity and he dwells on it a lot less. — 00:05:51 · Day One
  • ★★ Ali's online course, the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, is in the middle of its third cohort, which he says is going pretty well. — 00:06:23 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

00:06:30 — Progress beats perfection; Part-Time YouTuber Academy students

  • ★★ A huge majority of Ali's Part-Time YouTuber Academy students, successful in their businesses or corporate jobs, suffer from perfectionism about YouTube, which makes progress very hard. — 00:06:52 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

  • ★★★ Ali tells his students to focus first on quantity, one or two videos a week, and only after 50 to 100 videos to worry about making them good, because quantity leads to quality. — 00:07:32 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

    “quantity leads to quality and progress is more important than perfection”

00:07:47 — Shortform book summaries

  • ★★ Shortform, Ali's favourite way to read book summaries, is no replacement for reading books: he reads a book and then its summary, or the summary first and then the book if he likes it. — 00:08:02 · Shortform
  • ★ Ali recommends Carol Dweck's book Mindset as pretty solid. — 00:08:02

00:08:28 — The growth mindset is a gradual journey

  • ★★ Carol Dweck (quoted): Mindset presents the growth mindset as a gradual, ongoing journey: we should not beat ourselves up if we cannot switch overnight to it in every area of life. — 00:08:30 · growth mindset
  • ★★ Ali says he still has a fixed mindset in some areas, such as being a manager and a leader, relationships and health, and a growth mindset in business, content and coding. (hedged) — 00:08:30 · growth mindset

00:09:17 — Pointer to his video on learning anything faster; sign-off

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Mentioned

Central: Carol Dweck · growth mindset · Mindset

Also: Book Club · Day One · Isaac Newton · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · Shortform

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