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This is a book which the administrators in my organization are reading. I am reading it as well, though I'm not an administrator.

I am only on page 43 but I already have dismissed the ideas and the author as superficial. Written in a casual style (the author states in the introduction: "A little note about grammar. I know it and I love it, but I haven't always followed it in this book. I start sentences with ands and buts. I end sentences with prepositions. I use the plural they in contexts that require the singular he or she. I've done this for imformality and immediacy, and I hope that the sticklers will forgive me."

Well, I have a hard time forgiving that when this had to pass through professional copy editors (it's published by Ballentine). But even worse is the informality of the anecdotes and conclusions.

Her thesis is that there are two types of people in the world, those with a "fixed mindset" and those with a "growth mindset." The former believe that their intelligence and ability are "fixed" and there is no opportunity to become smarter or more able. So why try. Do what you are already good at and avoid situations where you might possibly fail or do worse than expected. Growth-minded people believe that failure is an opportunity to grow.

That's it. There's the book. Fluffed up with superficial renderings of true life stories and supposed quotes from the author's research subjects.

While the author has 239 footnotes at the back of the book, backing up her statements, her stories come off as simplistic to the extreme. The most disturbing example so far is that of the late chef, Bernard Loiseau. The author claims he committed suicide because he had a fixed mindset and could not accept that his restaurant lost a "star" in the leading restaurant guide in Europe.

"...the director of the GaultMillau (the restaurant guide) said it was unimaginable that their rating could have taken his life. But in the fixed mindset, it is imaginable. The lower rating gave him a new definition of himself: Failure. Has-been.

"It's striking what counts as failure in the fixed mindset. So, on a lighter note..."

Here the author has taken a complex situation and reduced it to "guy killed himself because he was one of my two types of people in the world." And then blythely moves on to "a lighter note."

A quick look at Wikipedia shows that there was more to the story than that. There were known factors such as debt. And any thinking person would tell you there are other underlying factors that could have been involved such as clinical depression, bi-polar disorder, possibly drug or alcohol abuse, childhood abuse or neglect issues, the list goes on. The point is, the author chose to simplify in a way that simply makes her point.

I'm still reading this book because it makes me actually angry and I feel I need to review it for my administrators to let them know my thoughts.