"Failure is Success, if we learn from it." -Malcom S. Forbes

In Mindset by Carol S. Dweck we learned about the two different mindsets, a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. A growth mindset being the basic belief that basic qualities are things you can achieve through effort, and a fixed mindset being the belief that you have only a fixed amount of intelligence and cannot change that. In my opinion I think that you’re only setting yourself up to fail if you don’t have an open mind about working towards something that might take hard work, but you don’t give up and you can achieve it. Also I think that having a fixed mindset won’t let you grow as a person, and you won’t find the need to work as hard as you possibly can on something. Throughout high school I would say that I had a growth mindset up until my senior year. My junior year I told myself that at the end of the year I would have been on the honor roll all three terms, with nothing lower than an 85, and I did just that. I pushed myself as hard as I possibly could and even when I was going to physical therapy twice a week and that took up a lot of time, I was determined to find time to do my homework and study for tests and quizzes and I did achieve that. But, once I started my senior year my mindset changed completely. I was struggling in my math class, and because it’s been hard for all four years in high school, I just gave up. Even when I worked really hard in math and stayed after school to get extra help, my test scores just showed that I truly didn’t understand the material I decided that it wasn’t worth all the work I put into it to just continuously fail the tests. At the beginning of May, my principal sat me down and told me I wasn’t going to graduate if I didn’t pass my math class. I tried explaining to him that no matter what I did, I was still going to fail anyway. Finally, once I realized that I was on the fence for graduation I started making up all the homework that I chose to never hand in, and worked harder than I have ever possibly worked I ended up passing my math class. That right there just shows me that you’re setting yourself up to fail if you have a fixed mindset, and if you don’t believe that you can accomplish great things with dedication.