Blandception

Grey garden.Title: “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”

Author: Carol Dweck

Rank: 80

Blurb: “Dweck explains why it’s not just our abilities and talent that bring us success — but whether we approach them with a fixed or growth mindset.”

Review: “The irony of Dweck’s book is that if the reader understands and believes what she’s saying, then after the first chapter that reader has no reason to keep reading.”

Customers Also Bought: Inevitably, something by Malcolm Gladwell.

Footnote: Our mindset prevents us from accepting poorly expressed ideas like “fixed” and “growth”, as well as notions of “success” that require measurement.

Mindset [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

25 Comments

Now wait: there is ‘fixed’. And there is ‘growth’. So if we’re talking about growers v showers – as I assume we are – then, yes, ‘measurement’ is one indickator of success.

@Benedick:
At older ages, just getting into the… game is a indicator of success.

I read her last name to be “Dreck”

Too many BO’s for me (book and obits). How ’bout some topics like why is Mitch McConnell such an asshole and why do KYers keep voting for him. Happy Labor Day for all those workers who were lucky enough to have to day off!

ISIS beheaded another American journalist–the one whose mother issued a heartbreaking plea for mercy last week.
I’m trying to remember a summer of worse news, but I can’t. Are we done?

@Mistress Cynica: At the risk of getting played like Hamas does with Netanyahu, it wouldn’t trouble me if a few of these ISIS guys got cruise missiles up their ass.

@Dodgerblue: With all the talk of British jihadis–including the one who beheaded the two journalists–I’m a little nervous about my upcoming trip to London. I’ll be there for Guy Fawkes Day (11/5) and the big 100-yr anniversary of the Great War Remembrance Day (11/11), which have “prime target” written all over them.

@Mistress Cynica: 1968 probably still wins for worst year of news.

@JNOV: Seems accurate. It’s sad that the one strategy that would be effective is the one that the US never will try: Poverty relief. Long-term desperation is the reason that most people turn to fanaticism, black market goods, and narco-state jobs. Imagine for a second if the US had flooded Iraq and Afghanistan with food, education and medical supplies instead of bombs, guns, and mass-murderers. Unfortunately, the only values for which this country really stands are psychopathic greed and sadistic violence.

@Mistress Cynica: I’ll run interference for you in Scotland later this month. We’ll be spending our last night of the trip in London, staging for a flight out of Heathrow where they will lose our luggage.

Annals of Crime Dept: so some douchebag runs up behind a woman on a jogging trail in Pittsburg, pulls down her shorts and runs away. Turns out she was a U.S. Marshall who thereupon chased him down, kicked him in the nuts and punched him in the face. Local news report is here.

@¡Andrew!: Imagine for a second if the US had flooded Iraq and Afghanistan with food, education and medical supplies

I’d settle for flooding the US with food, education and medical supplies.

RIP Joan Rivers, without whom no Sarah Silverman.

@Dodgerblue: And no TLo, no Go Fug Yourself, no making-fun-of-people’s-clothes as an Olympic level sport. She was a pioneer and a force of nature.

@Mistress Cynica: I saw her one-woman show at the Geffen a couple of years ago. Laughed my ass off.

She was heaven. What I didn’t get was that she never got to perform the show she set out to do. The one that required the little band. The one where she’d sing a few songs and tell a few jokes. Instead she came roaring onto the stage and after the fateful ‘Can we talk?’ became overwhelmed by an avalanche of gossip that she could. not. turn. off. So she never actually got to do the show. I thought it was brilliant. And plus a sweet and generous woman. After the show she’d change, fix her hair, fix her face, and go back out to meet people who’d been allowed back. She’d talk to everyone singly, have her picture taken with them, and be there 45 mins after the curtain came down. I don’t know how she did it.

@Benedick: another comic understood what it meant to have a minute with him – Carlin. As a child, his idol was Danny Kaye. A young Carlin stood outside the backstage door, wanting Kaye to sign something, and Kaye breezed by, got into his car, and left. Carlin never forgot that.

@blogenfreude: I’m told that Kaye was a notoriously nasty man who was hated by his staff. He was that strange creature, a right-wing clown. I get the herby-jeebies watching him though he is brilliant performing Tchaikovsky! from Lady in the Dark.

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