I recently had several different conversations about Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset, and found that I never wrote a blog about it. The conversations led me to review my notes and it brought back all the reasons why I enjoyed the book. It also made me realize that I had forgotten several important concepts. For this post, I want to focus on the three items that stood out to me when I first read the book. I will save a full review for another post. I would absolutely recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the topics of leadership and change.

• Low-Effort Syndrome: Out of all the topics and ideas covered in the book, this one stood out as the most specifically impactful one to me. I absolutely suffer from this syndrome. This is the concept that we tend to take care of the generally less important and easy actions first in order to avoid the hard stuff. As soon as I read this it hit me like a ton of bricks. While I know and am confident that I am a hard worker, I also know that – when I am lacking motivation for almost any reason – I will start working on the easy action items to prevent myself from having to address the tough ones. I am in what is probably the busiest time in my life and I regularly see myself caught in this situation. Since I reread my notes, I have made an effort to keep track of this and take a moment for a deep breath to refocus my efforts on what is most urgent and important.
• Groupthink: In the book’s discussion of groupthink, I began thinking of it as a funnel where – simply based on ideas that may be mentioned first – dissent diminishes and the team stops thinking critically. I have always tried to take the “devil’s advocate” approach to make sure and always look at things from another side. More recently, I have also advocated for a “Red Team” type of approach to make sure every side is looked at.
• Talent Mindset: From the book, a talent mindset is when talent is worshipped as a set skill. Enron is used as the example – they would select the best “talent” and fire whoever was at the bottom when it came time to review performance. While I do believe we have some natural strengths, talent is something that can be generated based on hard work. By assuming talent is static, we will likely overlook the excellent potential in those around us. As a leader, I always try to push the skills and abilities of those on my team, while also monitoring their own mindset to see if they believe they can improve.

While these were the three topics that stood out to me right now, the book is full of so many excellent ideas that I will likely end up writing another blog post with additional important topics.

What things do you do to avoid the low-effort syndrome?

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