Thanks everybody for being here. Um I'm Sasha Rosenbaum and my presentation today is about mindset. And so we're gonna dive right in into what it is in a second. Um But first, let me just introduce myself, super, super quickly.So I've been in the tech industry for about 15 years. Um And I've held various, I started off as a developer. I did ops uh for a while I did product manager really briefly and I've spent quite a bit of time in technical sales um across various different companies. And I currently work for Red Hat. Um I'm a team lead on a managed openshift Black Belts team, which is a technical sales team. So let's jump in into the topic of conversation um which is mindset and what are we talking about? I usually give technical talks, but this talk is not technical and this is a passion project. I've been wanting to do this for quite a while and I'm finally doing this. Uh So because I think that everybody should learn more about this topic because it's so influential in career development in school, in parenting, all of these things. So um before I start talking about things. I, I just want to ask you first a question.

So if you look at this statement, you can learn new things, but you can't change how intelligent you are and you think about how much you agree with it from 0 to 100 you completely agree that you can't change how intelligent you are or you completely disagree with it. Um Just give me a number, just throw it a number. I don't have to even put it in chat. Thank it to yourself, but also can put it in chat. OK? So the second question and I know this is an eye chart. So I'm gonna read it for you. So it says a few modern philosophers assert that an individual intelligence is a fixed qua quantity. Oops, sorry, sorry, I just had the the other stage, just go live, sorry in my headphones, which was uh a little distracting anyway. So if you want philosophers assert that in individuals, intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism with practice training and above all method, we managed to increase our attention, our memory and our judgment and literally become more intelligent than we were before. So this is a trickier question. Who do you think said that? Right?

And again, you don't even have to offer me a guess, but like just kind of think to yourself for one second. Um So the topic is mindset and it's a little bit way vague. It comes from a book published by Carol Weck. Um, that's called mindset and it, it is about growth mindset. So there are two concepts in psychology, one is growth mindset and the like, and then there's fixed mindset. So what they are really is that the fixed mindset says that you can learn new things, but you can't change your level of intelligence. And then the growth mindset says that you can always substantially change how intelligent you are, right? And usually people fail uh feel somewhere in between on, on this scale, right? They're not completely fixed mindset, they're not completely growth mindset. There's somewhere in between of these two and also mindset can pertain not just to intelligence, but also to physical ability, creative ability, personality, and so on. So basically, I could think that I could change my intelligence, but I could never become a better artist for instance.

And these could be two separate um fields. So if we talk about this quote, actually, who said it is Alfred Bet, who is the inventor of the IQ test? So I know IQ test has a very bad name for being sort of a classification tool, right? A discrimination tool. And a lot of people use it to just basically put people in back buckets and prevent them from advancing. Um But really the designer of the IQ test meant it as a learning tool, right? So we can assess our intelligence and then keep reassessing it as we develop, develop because this is something that humans can do. So why is mindset important? Why did I want to come here and talk about this? Because adopting gross mindset will make you a happier human being.

So I read the book when I was 30 I wish I read the book when I was 13 because this was missing from my life. And I would have had a better life experience if I read it earlier. And so like I'm going on this um tour or trying to tell people about it because they think people should learn about it. And it also plugs it into all sorts of things like how you learn new things and how you can advance and how, how much investment and work you can put and stuff and how um how your career grows. But it is like the, if you take anything away from this talk is that adoption growth mindset will make you a happier human being. So, and I'm gonna go super, super fast through this because I could talk about this for an hour. And unfortunately, I have 15 more minutes. Um So it starts with school, right? And, and school is very good at kind of propagating fixed mindset in people. So there's lots of stories in the book. I will tell you a personal story because it's close to home. So I grew up as a kid who loved learning and loved books. I spent all my free time in books. I just absolutely enjoyed learning every single thing that I could lay my hands on.

Um, no, I went, so I lived in Israel at the time I went to study in, uh, Dion, which is like the mit of Israel. And I originally LA in biology. I didn't particularly like it. So I transferred to computer science. Transferring to computer science was a great idea because it turns out I really love computers and I really loved writing code. But another thing happened, which was my grade average went from 94 out of 100 to 68 out of 100 which was a quite an unpleasant experience. Right. And so I basically had this face when I looked at my first semester in computer science grades and I was literally in shock and I was like, where do we go from here? Now? I shouldn't have been surprised because if you believe in university grading, uh, tech at the time was a top 20 in the world for computer science. Right. This is a school that was really, really hard to get into and this is a school that grades you really, really harsh. And computer science was one of the top departments. So, you know, I have great competition. Um, so obviously I didn't study very much. I was spending a lot of time partying so I need to study hard. So I opened the books and I, you know, got things from the library and whatever. But this was my experience. Right.

I just went and I opened the book and the books were no longer my friends, they used to be my friends before, but not anymore. Now I looked at the book and I felt like the book was judging me because I read a calculus theorem and I couldn't understand it right away and that stressed me out, right. So that really sucked. So what do you, what do you do when things suck? You just basically give up on them. Um So basically this picture is here for two reasons. One is that I actually did go and do a lot of partying instead of studying. The other is I watched all the seasons of sex in the city at some point. Uh instead of studying for an exam, it wasn't because I really liked the show. It was because I needed an excuse to actually not do anymore. So this is actually classic fixed mindset. What I just told you is a very, very representative story for what fixed mindset looks like. Um The problem is no one told me I had fixed mindset. No one ever tells you, you have fixed mindset. A lot of people, most people don't even know what it is, right? Instead of that people tell you that you are lazy, right? That, that you, you also yourself, right? You self classify as lazy and everybody else tells you like, you just need to work harder.

Why aren't you putting enough effort into this, blah, blah, blah. So, um this I really like cats. If you follow me on Twitter, you will discover that cats are a big part of uh my profile. Um, cats can sleep from like 12 to 16 hours a day. They're really, really good at sleeping, lounging and napping. Um But I have a secret for you. It is that you are actually not a cat, right? If you wanted to sit down and do nothing for a whole day, you actually literally couldn't do it. You would get an itch to do something and it wouldn't necessarily be what you paid to do. Um But it would be something creative and productive because that's how humans work. So, are you lazy? Um There's another great book that's called The Now Habit. It's really old, but it's actually worth reading if you struggle with procrastination because it has some pretty good techniques to address that. Um And basically the quote is the choice is not working or not working, but which type of work even feeling guilty because of procrastinating.

Takes some effort or as Diamon puts it, you're lazy. No, constantly stressing out about the things of putting off, doing, putting off doing actually takes quite a bit of work. OK. So if I'm saying, you know, humans are not lazy. Then what really is happening? The the truth is sometimes you just don't like the type of work you need to do and that happens to you. But like in many, many cases when you're procrastinating or avoiding something is that you're scared. But what are you scared? Was I scared of exams? I actually wasn't that the exam wasn't the problem. The problem was that I was scared of effort. How can you be scared of effort? That makes no sense. While in fixed mindset effort is a bad thing. It like failure means that you're not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn't need effort. When I read this quote, it literally like was like, oh my God, really? This is really what's happening again? I'm gonna bring out Dynam man and says I failed. It doesn't matter as long as you tried your best. Oh, I didn't do that either, right? Why do people do that? Why is this funny? It's funny because avoiding effort is an actual coping strategy that it, that gives you an excuse for failing. So instead of saying I tried my best and I got a bad grade. I could say I tried my bad, I didn't try my best. That's why I got a bad grade. So when I realized that I actually like my brain exploded and I was like, oh my God. Oh my God, why did not, why, why didn't I hear about this?

Before. Where did I spend all my life doing this? Um, so are people with fixed mindset doomed? No, I, I finished school and I actually got pretty good grades and I, you know, I graduated with like, almost honors and blah, blah, blah. And, and everything was fine. People with fixed mindset and my fixed mindset actually never improved. Right. Um, at that point, and then people with fixed mindset can still accomplish difficult things. The problem with that is that they might constantly fight this person inside them, that negative self talk, right?

Essentially ca calling them stupid all the time. Like instead of worrying about citing for that exam, I had to also worry about convincing myself that I not them like it, it's not, not a great experience. So adopting a growth mindset will make you a happy human. Now, I'm pretty sure you have this question by now. So I'm gonna do a total side note like really fast. So it doesn't tell and exist. Talent does exist like you can have natural abilities. I'm 54. So I probably never gonna make a good basketball player, right? But like talent only carries you so far broadway. We tell stories about how great Michael Jordan is. We don't tell stories about how hard he worked to get there, right? We essentially try to classify people as Superman when they're really good at something and and tell every story as in it was naturally inborn. Um So you're probably familiar with the concept of 10,000 hour rule that was popularized by Gladwell. But actually, the research came from this guy Anders Erickson, who later published the book Peak. And basically, when you have deliberate practice, which means that you have feedback, um you learn from that. So humans are really, really good at learning and improving when they have feedback.

So, um you can improve it almost anything if you have feedback for what you're doing. And also even if you had like supernatural abilities and you were born with all it in the world, if you don't do deliberate practice, you're gonna reach a certain level and then you're gonna stop, not gonna be able to progress from there. And then there's another concept which is kind of wicked domains and kind domains is where you get immediate feedback and wicked domains is where you don't. So um an example of a wicked domain would be medicine. So like if I'm a doctor and I prescribe someone, a pill that may be that the pill worked and the person didn't come or the pill didn't work and the person didn't come back or they went to another doctor or they died or whatever, I never got feedback. So next time I'm going to prescribe the same pill, whether it worked or not, right? And the example of a kind domain is music, right? I hear immediately if I screwed up so I can correct myself. So, um learning is really easy in kind domain is really hard in wicked domains. All of this is completely, um side note to all of it. I just want to address the talent question because it definitely comes up.

So basically what I'm gonna say about talent is believing that you are forever defined by your indoor abilities is just a very sad thing, right? Like you're just classified into a box and you can never leave it. That's just like really, really sad. So adopting a girl with mindset is gonna make you a happier human. I literally have five minutes left and I have so much to talk about. So like this is a speed talking. Um So let's talk about work. So we could talk about the CEO disease and help people design negative feedback, vacuums around them because in fixed mindset must, you must continuously get confirmation of your greatness, right? You can't hear negative feedback because that makes you feel bad. And if you're a CEO, you can just fire anybody who gives you negative feedback. But even, and I see like even individual contributors can do that to some extent, but you can't outrun reality forever. Enron is a great example of that. Like they, they basically created phony earnings reports and they beat everyone into your submission, um saying that they were doing great. They weren't actually doing great, right? Eventually catches up with you. So I will quote Satya Nadella here um be passionate and bold, always keep learning, you stop doing useful things if you don't learn.

And Satya Nadella actually brought growth mindset as a big part of how he transformed Microsoft from a very old school company into a very new age company. And so we, we have this big um case study about how growth mindset really works. Um And then another quote is uh this is a very interesting book. It's called The Inevitable. In this era of becoming everyone becomes a newbie worse. We will be newbies forever. So what happens today as opposed to 100 years ago is that things change all the time and will continue changing all the time, right? We must learn every day and our businesses must learn every day, right? We're in tech that changes all the time. But then smart people don't learn because they have too much invested in proving that what they already know and avoiding being seen as not knowing. And that's from Chris Arris, um who's also a great person to read. But anyway, learning requires vulnerability, right? You must admit that you're not good at something to be able to, to open your mind, to learning more about it. Right? And that's something that we are all scared of, right? We're all scared of asking this silly question or admitting that we don't know something and that impedes our ability to progress. So fixed mindset gives you no to, to cope with failure, right? You just get classified as not good enough and that's it.

In growth mindset, failure doesn't define you. In growth mindset. Failure is always an opportunity to improve and in gross mindset. So this is the point I would love to go into more, especially this audience. But in growth mindset, de your demographics don't define you, right?

Because the growth mindset helps people to see the prejudice for prejudice for what it is, someone else's view of them and to confront it with their confidence and abilities intact. So there's all these studies about how women do wars on maths tests after being reminded of their gender.

So apparently that does not affect people with growth mindset. Now, unfortunately, there's not enough studies in the book for me to, to quote something, but it like this, this is definitely something that I've experienced as a woman in tech is once I adopt a growth mindset, um I'm a lot less, less dependent on what other people think of me because I'm like, well, that, that's your opinion.

That's not my opinion. I don't have to be classified into this box you put me in. So how can we get there um, in the next two minutes? So, cognitive learning about this is, is the first step and it's actually very important. Um Just really recognizing that there is the idea is, is very good. Um Of course, it's only the first step if knowledge was all it took, we'd all have six back abs obviously. So let's talk about steps. The first step. Most importantly, you read the book. Seriously, I don't get royalties, read the book like that will change your life. Um And then words matter, praise and self praise matter. So, um, there's studies on this and I could quote, I can't because I don't have time but basically praise people for effort, not ability.

Say you did really well at this, you must have worked really hard. Don't say you did really well at this, you must be really smart or talented. Say that to your kids say, say that to yourself that there's actual studies to show that this changes the whole attitude of a person, notice your fixed by the triggers, right? Whatever puts you on the spot makes you feel like you're not good enough, educate your fixed mindset persona, like literally have a dialogue internally about how, you know, you shouldn't be um stressing out about certain things because you're new to this and you're just learning and then practice, just practice.

I've been practicing for, for you for a few years and then, you know, I still have roads to go. So um why waste your energy, constantly proving yourself to everyone you meet when you could be having fun while improving yourself. And again, I'm leaving you with this adoption growth mindset will make you a happier human. And thank you