Mark Zuckerberg's Mindset: The New Psychology Of Success

Depending on how well a startup did during the year, the entrepreneur is either seen as a “success” or a “failure”. Take for example, the comparison between Mark Zuckerberg and Ryan Heath. The young successor of Facebook generates a stunning sum of $9.32bn in revenue per year, gaining worldwide recognition. On the other hand, the owner of Pace Pictures, Ryan Heath, gains noticeably lesser recognition even though his business earns a significant amount of revenue at $3M per year. However, as Carol S. Dweck states in her book “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”, the real key to success is the view you adopt for yourself, in other words, the mindset. More specifically, she emphasizes the importance of a growth mindset because it allows entrepreneurship

People who apply the growth mindset approach in their entrepreneurial activities will embrace challenges – seeing them as valuable lessons, and recognize their mistakes as opportunities for improvement. This path will lead the entrepreneur to be the kind of leader who constantly improves and surround himself with diverse people; a kind of leader who will lead any business into greatness. But this is not easy, and not everybody does it. Some people just don’t believe they will be able to change, while others think that they are not simply capable. But the good news is: a mindset can be taught and learned.

The most valuable lesson Carol S. Dweck teaches in her book is: a person can change his mindset. Just by being aware of the type of mindset you have, you can start thinking and reacting in new ways. This opens new perspectives and causes a big shift in the way people think about themselves and their

The first one is to set short-term goals in order to keep yourself motivated and persistent. By keeping “awake” the inner impulse to act, the person will react and move towards the direction of the desired goal. A situation in which an entrepreneur could apply this could be by incorporating deadlines to ongoing projects. This way, you will have a framework within which to work. In addition, it is also important that the leaders create and measure motivational activities among employees, without impaired them into inflexible people. The second one is to acknowledge and give credit to your own efforts, not to the opportunity. Only your entrepreneurial abilities and skills will determine the outcome of your business. Entrepreneurs can practice this by giving themselves time to reflect and congratulate themselves for the achievement. Finally, the third one is to seek and enjoy working with people from different backgrounds and cultures. A homogeneous team will never succeed and therefore our strongest tool, collaboration, must be applied in order to achieve the desired goal. This process will require time. Conflict is inevitable along the way, but you will gain and learn new experiences from it. Thus, an entrepreneur could be more mindful when choosing his board of directors to run the company