Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

by Matthew Syed

‘True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.’

if we drop out when we hit problems, progress is scuppered, no matter how talented we are.

Growth Mindset: it is about being able to see failure in a clear-eyed way; not as an indictment of one’s judgement, but as a learning opportunity.

When we see failure without its related stigma, the point is not that we commit to futile tasks, but that we are more capable of meaningful adaptation: whether that means quitting and trying something else or sticking – and growing7. But now suppose that we have already made a rational decision to persevere: the Growth Mindset now has an additional significance. It helps us to deal with challenges and setbacks. It is no good spending an entire career cowering in fear of negative feedback, avoiding situations in which you might be judged, and thus scuppering any chance of improvement.

‘it is part of the greatness and beauty of science that we can learn through our own critical investigations that the world is utterly different from what we ever imagined – until our imagination was fired by the refutation of our earlier theories’.

Often it is those who are the most successful who are also the most vulnerable. They have won so many plaudits, been praised so lavishly for their flawless performances, that they haven’t learned to deal with the setbacks that confront us all.

if we edit out our mistakes, we halt our progress no matter how smart we are.

theories that claim to furnish knowledge about the world that have never failed, which have been held in place by authority alone, are a different matter. It is these ideas, and the underlying belief that they are sacrosanct, that is so destructive.

We need protection against] the tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.’

When you have top-down approaches competing with each other, with a failure test to determine which of them is working, the system starts to exhibit the properties of bottom-up.

No one can possibly give us more service than by showing us what is wrong with what we think or do; and the bigger the fault, the bigger the improvement made possible by its revelation.