I first heard about this book from one of my grad school professors.

We were sitting around a long table one snowy January evening at our annual dinner for current and prospective doctoral students. I asked my professor about books he was reading lately and he named several including Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and Carol Dweck's Mindset.

It's been on my list since then (let's just say it's been a few years), but I finally read it last year.

Today, I want to share my four biggest takeaways from Mindset: The New Psychology of Success to give you an idea of what it's about and how we can learn from it as musicians, teachers, and leaders.

In his book, Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity, Keith Sawyer outlines 8 stages of the creative process but rather than following a clear and direct path forward, starting here and ending there, the path to greater creativity has more zigs and zags; it’s unpredictable, erratic, and yes, surprising. Here are my three biggest takeaways from this book:

The book, "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us" by Daniel H. Pink is based on scientific research by people like Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, Carol Dweck, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, among others, and provides insight into the role of motivation in our lives. Here are my three biggest takeaways: