How does personal growth and development fit into determinism?

Implicit in this question is the all-too-common error of fatalism, or the feeling of being on the receiving end of deterministic events like a hapless puppet on strings. A disguised dualism whereby one thing - the deterministic universe - is "out there" seizing control of another thing - me - "inside here". The error is laid bare when we notice that there are not two things to interact in this manner. There is only one thing - the deterministic universe - of which we are a feature. And determinism is necessary for human volition (however conceived), not a threat. How would anything make sense in the absence of cause and effect?

That this is the case seems to hold as the only coherent account. If we were somehow removed from the deterministic universe one wonders what we would want and why. How this is the case - how first person experience manifests in the natural world - remains deeply mysterious.

Edit: spelling and wording

Well, determinism only says that everything is determined. That doesn't mean that you as a person can't be part of that determination, however. I've not read the book you mention, but if a person wants to change, it is still within their capabilities to do so. Change doesn't go against determinism. It is instead explained by, the structure of your brain, reading of the book, and etc, all lead you to make the decision to change. For example, you can still have the growth mindset in determinism. It would only be recognized that the growth mindset you have is one that was caused by other factors and such. Someone might argue that, "because everything we do is determined, we should therefore conclude that we all have fixed mindsets," however the growth mindset would not be one that says you can change your future away from what ever is determined, only that the determined future for you is what ever you 'want' it to be. A person who has a stuck mindset could say "because I can not do this now, I will never be able to, it is determined for me," while a person with a growth mindset would say, "just because I can't do this now doesn't mean I never will be able to. My future is determined, but it is still unknown to me, and with the unknown future I can create what is in my desires by using this knowledge to influence what determines me." It is a hard thing to explain, because everything is determined, and to 'change' in that sense is not possible, but to change from point X to point Y in the future is possible. A person still grows, and still changes, it is only that the growth and changes is determined, if I'm making any sense.

A commitment to determinism of some form, such as soft determinism does not require such a pervasive reduction of decision and self-alteration to causality independent of the agent (which itself doesn't make much sense). While one might not be able to choose whether one was born to X and Y parents, for instance, one can choose between reading a book and lighting one on fire. Or, perhaps more pertinent, one's genetics might lend one certain talents that, if left uncultivated, may remain unrealized capabilities. One does not choose one's genetic makeup (yet?), but making choices can lead to the epigenetic realization (or actualization) of these potentials as traits of oneself. For instance, straining one's cognition through difficult conceptual tasks leads to neurological changes and intellectual growth. These are often not entirely pleasant and the strain may conflict with an inclination or proclivity toward quick satisfaction with little effort. But the inclination is not a hard determinant on an individual's actions, since said individual can still overcome their own inclinations.

Concerning motivations: individual are constantly a concatenation of competing motives. The motive to take shots and to study for a test are occurring at once thereby pressuring a decision that might win out one way or the other for whichever motive the individual finds most convincing. Character might play into this, upbringing, genetic dispositions, personal history, experiences, etc. might all factor into this outcome, but to isolate any one of these as the single determinant of the decision not only fails to grasp the shear breadth of considerations and influences, but might as well reduce the concept of the agent merely to meat acted upon by said determinant. Since there is ambiguity in these influences and just how they influence an agent, reducing agency to being determined by previous states does not make sense. We cannot adequately disentangle the whole causal web of influences to point to something at the end and say "your choice to improve yourself wasn't a choice at all. look this event made you do it!" We engage a process of deliberation that is not merely our influences competing with each other as if they were the autonomous agents and we are an illusion calling ourselves individuals, but rather a subject weighing the significance of these influences and the instrumentality of various actions with regard to different outcomes. We engage in our own process of predicting our future states in order to decide upon the current action, and these modalities can significantly influence our behavior, sometimes more than previous experiences alone. So the hard brand of determinism ignores the cognitive process of an agent that can evaluate alternative possibilities and be influenced by these abstractions over and above conditioning and disposition.

Influences on the decisional process can be taken into consideration without reducing an autonomous agent to a calculable deterministic causal chain; and when some individuals describe determinism, they mean hard pre-determination rather than predictability (which is compatible with indeterminate outcomes).

Oftentimes choices cannot be understood outside of a narrow field of contexts as well, so hard determinism is difficult to formulate in a coherent fashion with respect to individual humans' choices and the relations in which they might be conceived. Is there, for instance, a meaningful way to describe intentional behavior with a reduction to physical interactions at an atomic level or smaller? And supposing one could, does it lend us understanding of sociological and psychological implications of said behavior that will inform both our own and said individual's behavior in the absence of any non-physically reductive account of this state of affairs?

I highly recommend reading about indeterminacy in the field of psychology.

I have not read Dweck, but you might want to look into "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which posits a rigorous approach to cultivating intellectual ability and actualization.

Another interesting position is autopoiesis and enactivism, and there is even a whole debate on how this explanation of how cognition arises in an organism situated in an environment relates to the topic of free will:

http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue15_CompletePDF.pdf

Personally, I think the whole determinism debate is actually self-refuting from the start, since it adopts a stance of limited contextual variables to explain a deterministic causal chain when the variables (including abstractions) are, in actuality, unnumerable and, ironically, indeterminate. In other words, determinism is a confusion that arises in analyzing agents when one mistakenly supposes a finite set of possible determinants.

The simple way to illustrate this to a determinist is to ask them to explain a coherent possible state of affairs that is serves as an example. Show me the illusion of an agent's choice. They can't. For every example there is an exception, leading to an imprecise rule for predicting behavior with necessary indeterminacy.