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What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait?
For thirty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.
Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over.
This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others. Although people may differ in every which way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments—everyone can change and grow through application and experience.
Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?
The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.
Howard Gardner, in his book Extraordinary Minds, concluded that exceptional individuals have “a special talent for identifying their own strengths and weaknesses.” It’s interesting that those with the growth mindset seem to have that talent.
Benjamin Barber, an eminent political theorist, once said, “I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures….I divide the world into the learners and nonlearners.”
“Becoming is better than being.” The fixed mindset does not allow people the luxury of becoming. They have to already be.
People with the growth mindset know that it takes time for potential to flower.
Even in the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience. But it doesn’t define you. It’s a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from.
John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them.
Bloom concludes, “After forty years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.”
That’s the championship mentality. It’s how people who are not as talented as their opponents win games.
Finding #1: Those with the growth mindset found success in doing their best, in learning and improving. And this is exactly what we find in the champions.
Andrew Carnegie once said, “I wish to have as my epitaph: ‘Here lies a man who was wise enough to bring into his service men who knew more than he.’
As growth-minded leaders, they start with a belief in human potential and development—both their own and other people’s. Instead of using the company as a vehicle for their greatness, they use it as an engine of growth—for themselves, the employees, and the company as a whole.
He learned how to select people: for their mindset, not their pedigrees.
“Eventually I learned that I was really looking for people who were filled with passion and a desire to get things done. A resume didn’t tell me much about that inner hunger.”
He promised to develop. He got the job and made good on his promise.
Jack Welch was not a perfect person, but he was devoted to growth. This devotion kept his ego in check, kept him connected to reality, and kept him in touch with his humanity. In the end, it made his journey prosperous and fulfilling for thousands of people.
Groupthink can happen when the group gets carried away with its brilliance and superiority. At Enron, the executives believed that because they were brilliant, all of their ideas were brilliant. Nothing would ever go wrong. An outside consultant kept asking Enron people, “Where do you think you’re vulnerable?” Nobody answered him. Nobody even understood the question. “We got to the point,” said a top executive, “where we thought we were bullet proof.”
Groupthink can also happen when a fixed-mindset leader punishes dissent. People may not stop thinking critically, but they stop speaking up. Iacocca tried to silence (or get rid of) people who were critical of his ideas and decisions.
“They all agreed leaders are made, not born, and made more by themselves than by any external means.” Bennis concurred: “I believe…that everyone, of whatever age and circumstance, is capable of self-transformation.”
The lesson is: Create an organization that prizes the development of ability—and watch the leaders emerge.
This company genuinely values the personal development and growth of its employees (growth mindset).
Right in line with this, employees in growth-mindset companies also reported that they were much more committed to their company and more willing to go the extra mile for it: “I feel a strong sense of ownership and commitment to the future of this company.” Those who worked in fixed-mindset companies, however, expressed greater interest in leaving their company for another.
It doesn’t mean there is no “they lived happily ever after,” but it’s more like “they worked happily ever after.”
Don’t judge. Teach. It’s a learning process.
The great teachers believe in the growth of the intellect and talent, and they are fascinated with the process of learning.
One of Marva Collins’s first mentors taught her the same thing—that, above all, a good teacher is one who continues to learn along with the students. And she let her students know that right up front: “Sometimes I don’t like other grown-ups very much because they think they know everything. I don’t know everything. I can learn all the time.”
What did he give them? He gave them constant training in the basic skills, he gave them conditioning, and he gave them mindset.
Bill Walton, Hall of Famer: “Of course, the real competition he was preparing us for was life….He taught us the values and characteristics that could make us not only good players, but also good people.”
A growth mindset is about believing people can develop their abilities. It’s that simple. It can have many repercussions, but that’s what it is at its core.
Mindset change is not about picking up a few pointers here and there. It’s about seeing things in a new way. When people—couples, coaches and athletes, managers and workers, parents and children, teachers and students—change to a growth mindset, they change from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework. Their commitment is to growth, and growth takes plenty of time, effort, and mutual support to achieve and maintain.
Understand the persona’s point of view, but slowly teach it a different way of thinking, and take it with you on your journey to a growth mindset.
Understanding that everyone has a fixed-mindset persona can give us more compassion for people. It allows us to understand their struggles.
