The concept of having a growth mindset has gotten so popular particularly among the corporate leadership, business, and HR community—not to mention avid pop psychology and self-help consumers—that I’m already picturing the anger, annoyance, and backlash that this article is bound to generate (a bit like attacking the MBTI, which another Fast Company contributor has done definitively).
My goal isn’t to provoke or be a contrarian. If this post upsets you, because you are passionate about the virtues of having a growth mindset, you should consider the possibility that your mindset may be fixed. So fixed that you cannot allow for the possibility that—just like all personality traits and psychological dispositions—it comes with both pros and cons and benefits and drawbacks will depend on the context and situation.
As decades of scientific research have shown, even human dispositions that are generally considered positive tend to come with a range of disadvantages when they are found at extreme or exacerbated levels.
So, if you are open enough to consider the facts, here are a few important data points and evidence that highlight the potential pitfalls of having a high or strong growth mindset.
Positive thinking does not always equal positive outcomes
The correlation between growth mindset and objective career success or performance outcomes is at best modest (less than 2% overlap according to meta-analyses), and at worst unproven (the construct was originally tested in school children.
There’s close to no independent, large-scale evidence linking it to objective talent or performance outcomes once you control for things like intelligence, personality, or expertise). Just because you think you can do it doesn’t mean you actually will.
Yes, we do hear inspirational, Hollywood-worthy stories of people who defied all odds and turned their self-belief into astronomic success. But these stories are trivial and meaningless because they distract from the many more (thousands) of cases of people who would have been better off if they had just given up. Just because you think you will improve at something doesn’t mean you will.
Indeed, a group, system, or society where people are overly optimistic about their potential will generally outperform a society in which they are generally self-defeating or unrealistically negative. But accurate self-insights, self-awareness, and self-knowledge, which are all more productive than being inaccurately optimistic or pessimistic, can be jeopardized if you are equivocally convinced that you can improve, get better, and upgrade yourself even if you won’t.
The optimism bias, self-serving biases, and especially false hopes syndrome, all document that the alleged advantages of positive thinking and dreaming big can backfire when you are better off giving up, pivoting, and accepting that things didn’t work and you are better off doing something else.
There can be no smart or clever failure unless you accept that things didn’t work out the way you hoped, which requires abandoning wishful thinking and perpetual optimism in exchange for realism. For instance, if you think you can be a great leader but everybody rejects your application, pitch, vision, and arguments to be selected as such, you are better off finding another career path than persisting. This isn’t cruel or mean advice, but something designed to make your life better (and happier).
Fake it ’til you make it is BS
Even if your growth mindset ends up being a successful self-fulfilling prophecy, in the sense that your self-belief in your ability translates into other people actually believing in you . . . you may be wrong, which means they will be wrong in turn.
Without getting into the polarizing and controversial specifics of current politics, the world (and history) is replete with examples of people who managed to convince others about apparent talents (including grit, curiosity, and open-mindedness) they do not possess, but can fake through simply by believing they do. It’s far easier to deceive others if you have already deceived yourself—until someone finds out, sadly too late.
Charismatic, populist, magnetic, and overconfident politicians have generally risen to the top to become inept, corrupt, psychopathic, or narcissistic dictators . . . making rational people realize that boring leaders, who are generally more conscientious, predictable, agreeable, and moral, would have been a far better option, even if there are no Hollywood movies about them.
Doesn’t always correlate to high performance
Most of the proven drivers of competence, career success, and job performance are unrelated to a growth mindset. For example, IQ, or general mental ability, is the most consistent and systematic predictor of higher job performance and is unrelated to a growth mindset. It is “anti-growth mindset” by definition because there is very little you can do to alter your level of IQ or cognitive ability, no matter how much you think you can do it.
Besides luck and random variance or unpredictability, and assuming you care about objective markers of career success (salary, title, job prestige, rank, seniority, and the value you contribute to teams and organizations), your success depends on your general learning ability (IQ rather than growth mindset), personality (conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness to new experience, self-control, impression management, political skills, even EQ), and external non-character factors such as social class, social status, and making the right choices instead of following your passions.
Nobody who cares about the evidence, understands basic statistics, or is aware of the scientific or empirical research in this area, would honestly claim that a growth mindset is marginally as important as the above factors. Among the multidetermined, multifaceted potential tools or talent weapons someone could leverage to advance their careers, a growth mindset is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Can encourage negative attitudes and prejudice
Many of the proven traits that drive high levels of performance and career success are theoretically and empirically orthogonal, or even inversely related, to a growth mindset. Believing in the growth mindset hype can also result in negative attitudes toward others.
Research shows that individuals with a growth mindset are more likely to be prejudiced and discriminate against obese individuals, as they will likely blame their obesity on their lack of growth mindset. A bit like blaming poor or unsuccessful people on their lack of drive or self-belief.
It should also be noted that very few organizations measure people’s growth mindset. Corporate wisdom suggests that if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.
Furthermore, just because someone thinks they have a growth mindset doesn’t mean they do. This is no different from the fact that most if not nearly all of the people who think they are creative, have a great sense of humor, and are extremely open-minded actually fail to come across as such by others.
It’s not how open-minded you think you are, but how open-minded other people think you are that matters—especially if they don’t agree with you. Imagine a world in which one political party celebrates how open-minded the other is or vice-versa, for example. While we may all agree that this would represent an upgrade from the current world (a pretty low bar) we are also all complicit in making that world a perpetual product of our imagination, because we are far more narrow-minded and fixed in our views than we think. Even when we love the notion of a growth mindset.
