Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

by Carol S. Dweck

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.

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.

were trying to understand why some students were so caught up in proving their ability, while others could just let go and learn. Suddenly we realized that there were two meanings to ability, not one: a fixed ability that needs to be proven, and a changeable ability that can be developed through learning.

Infants stretch their skills daily. Not just ordinary skills, but the most difficult tasks of a lifetime, like learning to walk and talk. They never decide it’s too hard or not worth the effort. Babies don’t worry about making mistakes or humiliating themselves. They walk, they fall, they get up. They just barge forward.

As soon as children become able to evaluate themselves, some of them become afraid of challenges. They become afraid of not being smart.

Believing that success is about learning, students with the growth mindset seized the chance. But those with the fixed mindset didn’t want to expose their deficiencies. Instead, to feel smart in the short run, they were willing to put their college careers at risk. This is how the fixed mindset makes people into nonlearners.

Speaking of reigning from atop a pedestal and wanting to be seen as perfect, you won’t be surprised that this is often called “CEO disease.”

CEOs face this choice all the time. Should they confront their shortcomings or should they create a world where they have none? Lee Iacocca chose the latter. He surrounded himself with worshipers, exiled the critics—and quickly lost touch with where his field was going. Lee Iacocca had become a nonlearner.

Darwin Smith, looking back on his extraordinary performance at Kimberly-Clark, declared, “I never stopped trying to be qualified for the job.”

People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it. The bigger the challenge, the more they stretch.

“When you’re lying on your deathbed, one of the cool things to say is, ‘I really explored myself.’ This sense of urgency was instilled when my mom died. If you only go through life doing stuff that’s easy, shame on you.”

When do people with the fixed mindset thrive? When things are safely within their grasp. If things get too challenging—when they’re not feeling smart or talented—they lose interest.

in the fixed mindset it’s not enough just to succeed. It’s not enough just to look smart and talented. You have to be pretty much flawless. And you have to be flawless right away.

But people with the growth mindset

it’s not about immediate perfection. It’s about learning something over time: confronting a challenge and making progress.

people with the fixed mindset expect ability to show up on its own, before any learning takes place. After all, if you have it you have it, and if you don’t you don’t.

They know how to take tests and get A’s but they don’t know how to do this—yet. They forget the yet.

“We were stars—precocious stars,” wrote Stephen Glass, “and that was what mattered.” The public understands them as cheats, and cheat they did. But I understand them as talented young people—desperate young people—who succumbed to the pressures of the fixed mindset.

There was a saying in the 1960s that went: “Becoming is better than being.” The fixed mindset does not allow people the luxury of becoming. They have to already be.

They granted one test the power to measure their most basic intelligence now and forever. They gave this test the power to define them. That’s why every success is so important.

But isn’t potential someone’s capacity to develop their skills with effort and coaching over time? And that’s just the point. How can we know where effort, coaching, and time will take someone?

People with the growth mindset know that it takes time for potential to flower.

Unfortunately, the test uses a faulty premise, asking teachers to make assumptions about a given student based on nothing more than a number on a page….Performance cannot be based on one assessment. You cannot determine the slope of a line given only one point, as there is no line to begin with. A single point in time does not show trends, improvement, lack of effort, or mathematical ability….

Is there another way to judge potential? NASA thought so. When they were soliciting applications for astronauts, they rejected people with pure histories of success and instead selected people who had had significant failures and bounced back from them.

When people with the fixed mindset opt for success over growth, what are they really trying to prove? That they’re special. Even superior.

One bitter cold winter night, I went to the opera. That night, the opera was everything you hope for, and everyone stayed until the very end—not just the end of the opera, but through all the curtain calls. Then we all poured into the street, and we all wanted taxis. I remember it clearly. It was after midnight, it was seven degrees, there was a strong wind, and, as time went on, I became more and more miserable. There I was, part of an undifferentiated crowd. What chance did I have? Suddenly, a taxi pulled up right next to me. The handle of the back door lined up perfectly with my hand, and as I entered, the driver announced, “You were different.” I lived for these moments. Not only was I special. It could be detected from a distance.

The self-esteem movement encourages this kind of thinking and has even invented devices to help you confirm your superiority.

The problem is when special begins to mean better than others. A more valuable human being. A superior person. An entitled person.

Chuck Yeager, the hero of The Right Stuff, begged to differ. “There is no such thing as a natural-born pilot. Whatever my aptitude or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime’s learning experience….The best pilots fly more than the others; that’s why they’re the best.”

In short, people who believe in fixed traits feel an urgency to succeed, and when they do, they may feel more than pride. They may feel a sense of superiority, since success means that their fixed traits are better than other people’s.

However, lurking behind that self-esteem of the fixed mindset is a simple question: If you’re somebody when you’re successful, what are you when you’re unsuccessful?

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.

In the fixed mindset, however, the loss of one’s self to failure can be a permanent, haunting trauma.

Beyond how traumatic a setback can be in the fixed mindset, this mindset gives you no good recipe for overcoming it. If failure means you lack competence or potential—that you are a failure—where do you go from there?

In one study, seventh graders told us how they would respond to an academic failure—a poor test grade in a new course. Those with the growth mindset, no big surprise, said they would study harder for the next test. But those with the fixed mindset said they would study less for the next test. If you don’t have the ability, why waste your time? And, they said, they would seriously consider cheating! If you don’t have the ability, they thought, you just have to look for another way.

What’s more, instead of trying to learn from and repair their failures, people with the fixed mindset may simply try to repair their self-esteem. For example, they may go looking...

College students, after doing poorly on a test, were given a chance to look at tests of other students. Those in the growth mindset looked at the tests of people who had done far better than they had. As usual, they wanted to correct their deficiency. But students in the fixed mindset chose to look at the tests of peopl...

Another way people with the fixed mindset try to repair their self-esteem after a failure is by assigning blame or making excuses.

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.

the students with the fixed mindset had higher levels of depression. Our analyses showed that this was because they ruminated over their problems and setbacks, essentially tormenting themselves with the idea that the setbacks meant they were incompetent or unworthy:

And the more depressed they felt, the more they let things go; the less they took action to solve their problems.

The more depressed people with the growth mindset felt (short of severe depression), the more they took action to confront their problems, the more they made sure to keep up with their schoolwork, and the more they kept up with their lives. The worse they felt, the more determined they became!

Yes, he was depressed, but he was coping the way people in the growth mindset tend to cope—with determination.

when people believe in fixed traits, they are always in danger of being measured by a failure. It can define them in a permanent way. Smart or talented as they may be, this mindset seems to rob them of their coping resources. When people believe their basic qualities can be developed, failures may still hurt, but failures don’t define them. And if abilities can be expanded—if change and growth are possible—then there are still many paths to success.

Either you have ability or you expend effort. And this is part of the fixed mindset. Effort is for those who don’t have the ability.

People with the growth mindset, however, believe

even geniuses have to work hard for their achievements. And what’s so heroic, they would say, about having a gift? They may appreciate endowment, but they admire effort, for no matter what your ability is, effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment.

From the point of view of the fixed mindset, effort is only for people with deficiencies. And when people already know they’re deficient, maybe they have nothing to lose by trying. But if your claim to fame is not having any deficiencies—if you’re considered a genius, a talent, or a natural—then you have a lot to lose. Effort can reduce you.