21A – Reading Reflection No. 2

The book I chose for this assignment is "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success" by Carol Dweck.

1) The general theme or argument of this book is that our mindset determines the way we can change in our lives and how we can change our qualities to become better people in the entrepreneurship universe. It also touches on how our mindsets can grow, or remained fixed. Both ways describe different kinds of people, those being stuck in their ways and those who are aware that people can grow and learn.

2) Based on what we have been learning in this course, I believe that this book relates closely to what we have been studying recently, especially what we have been doing in these past few assignments involving selling ourselves and our qualities as entrepreneurs. If an entrepreneur has a mindset that is open to change and growth, then the entrepreneur themselves will be much more desirable to potential customers. If we have mindsets fluid and relatable to our customers, which is what we are learning about in class, it will be easier to appease to the market segment.

3) If I were to design an exercise in the class based on the book, I would ask students to try and describe themselves as someone completely different than who they are personally. Each student would be given a specific market segment and then be asked to describe themselves as if they were apart of that market segment. This would help the students be able to broaden how they think and also be able to put themselves in the shoes of consumers from market segments other than themselves.

4) What surprised me most about this book was that it was about the human mind and how it can be broad and complicated and change the way people think about others and the way people think about themselves. However, the book itself tries to de-complicate this concept by separating the "mindset" into two segments. Simplifying the idea of the "mindset" is somewhat contradicting of the author to do, considering that you would have to have a more fixed mindset to believe that there are only growth and fixed mindsets. This statement may be confusing, but I just thought that it was odd how talking about something so broad (the human mindset) can even be simplified into segments.