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“Everything I was going through boiled down to fear. Fear of trying and failing….If you go to an audition and don’t really try, if you’re not really prepared, if you didn’t work as hard as you could have and you don’t win, you have an excuse….Nothing is harder than saying, ‘I gave it my all and it wasn’t good enough.’ ”
The idea of trying and still failing—of leaving yourself without excuses—is the worst fear within the fixed mindset,
Why is effort so terrifying? There are two reasons. One is that in the fixed mindset, great geniuses are not supposed to need it. So just needing it casts a shadow on your ability. The second is that, as Nadja suggests, it robs you of all your excuses. Without effort, you can always say, “I could have been [fill in the blank].” But once you try, you can’t say that anymore. Someone once said to me, “I could have been Yo-Yo Ma.” If she had really tried for it, she wouldn’t have been able to say that.
trying and failing—an honest failure—was better than the course she had been on,
You have to work hardest for the things you love most.
Billie Jean King says it’s all about what you want to look back and say. I agree with her. You can look back and say, “I could have been…,” polishing your unused endowments like trophies. Or you can look back and say, “I gave my all for the things I valued.”
Mindsets are an important part of your personality, but you can change them. Just by knowing about the two mindsets, you can start thinking and reacting in new ways.
It’s also important to realize that even if people have a fixed mindset, they’re not always in that mindset.
have elements of both—we’re
People can also have different mindsets in different areas. I might think that my artistic skills are fixed but that my intelligence can be developed. Or that my personality is fixed, but my creativity can be developed. We’ve found that whatever mindset people have in a particular area will guide them in that area.
Believing talents can be developed allows people to fulfill their potential.
Many growth-minded people didn’t even plan to go to the top. They got there as a result of doing what they love. It’s ironic: The top is where the fixed-mindset people hunger to be, but it’s where many growth-minded people arrive as a by-product of their enthusiasm for what they do.
In the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. If you fail—or if you’re not the best—it’s all been wasted. The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome. They’re tackling problems, charting new courses, working on important issues.
These people may be free of the belief that high effort equals low ability, but they have the other parts of the fixed mindset. They may constantly put their talent on display. They may feel that their talent makes them superior to other people. And they may be intolerant of mistakes, criticism, or setbacks.
The fixed mindset creates the feeling that you can really know the permanent truth about yourself. And this can be comforting: You don’t have to try for such-and-such because you don’t have the talent. You will surely succeed at thus-and-such because you do have the talent.
having a growth mindset doesn’t force you to pursue something. It just tells you that you can develop your skills. It’s still up to you whether you want to.
The growth mindset is the belief that abilities can be cultivated. But it doesn’t tell you how much change is possible or how long change will take. And it doesn’t mean that everything, like preferences or values, can be changed.
The fixed mindset stands in the way of development and change. The growth mindset is a starting point for change, but people need to decide for themselves where their efforts toward change would be most valuable.
People with the fixed mindset can have just as much confidence as people with the growth mindset—before anything happens, that is. But as you can imagine, their confidence is more fragile since setbacks and even effort can undermine it.
people with the fixed mindset have to nurse their confidence and protect it.
in the growth mindset, you don’t always need confidence.
People are all born with a love of learning, but the fixed mindset can undo it. Think of a time you were enjoying something—doing a crossword puzzle, playing a sport, learning a new dance. Then it became hard and you wanted out. Maybe you suddenly felt tired, dizzy, bored, or hungry. Next time this happens, don’t fool yourself. It’s the fixed mindset. Put yourself in a growth mindset. Picture your brain forming new connections as you meet the challenge and learn. Keep on going.
seek constructive criticism.
What did I (or can I) learn from that experience? How can I use it as a basis for growth?
Next time you feel low, put yourself in a growth mindset—think about learning, challenge, confronting obstacles. Think about effort as a positive, constructive force, not as a big drag.
With the threat of failure looming, students with the growth mindset instead mobilized their resources for learning. They told us that they, too, sometimes felt overwhelmed, but their response was to dig in and do what it takes. They were like George Dantzig. Who?
George Dantzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved.
And in the fixed mindset, a loser is forever.
This low-effort syndrome is often seen as a way that adolescents assert their independence from adults, but it is also a way that students with the fixed mindset protect themselves.
“I looked for themes and underlying principles across lectures,” and “I went over mistakes until I was certain I understood them.” They were studying to learn, not just to ace the test. And, actually, this was why they got higher grades—not because they were smarter or had a better background in science. Instead of losing their motivation when the course got dry or difficult, they said: “I maintained my interest in the material.” “I stayed positive about taking chemistry.” “I kept myself motivated to study.” Even if they thought the textbook was boring or the instructor was a stiff, they
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Because they think in terms of learning, people with the growth mindset are clued in to all the different ways to create learning.
Most often people believe that the “gift” is the ability itself. Yet what feeds it is that constant, endless curiosity and challenge seeking.
With his growth mindset, he asked, “How can I teach them?” not “Can I teach them?” and “How will they learn best?” not “Can they learn?”
Remember, test scores and measures of achievement tell you where a student is, but they don’t tell you where a student could end up.
The fixed mindset limits achievement. It fills people’s minds with interfering thoughts, it makes effort disagreeable, and it leads to inferior learning strategies. What’s more, it makes other people into judges instead of allies.
important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies. Plus allies in learning.
he and his younger brother came home from school one day to find their parents gone. They had been taken. Knowing there was an uncle in England, the two boys walked to London and found him.
the learnable components—of drawing. Actually, she informs us, they are not drawing skills at all, but seeing skills. They are the ability to perceive edges, spaces, relationships, lights and shadows, and the whole. Drawing requires us to learn each component skill and then combine them into one process. Some people simply pick up these skills in the natural course of their lives, whereas others have to work to learn them and put them together.
Just because some people can do something with little or no training, it doesn’t mean that others can’t do it (and sometimes do it even better) with training.
So in the fixed mindset, both positive and negative labels can mess with your mind. When you’re given a positive label, you’re afraid of losing it, and when you’re hit with a negative label, you’re afraid of deserving it.
As much as our culture talks about individual effort and self-improvement, deep down, he argues, we revere the naturals. We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.
When students fail tests or athletes lose games, it tells them that they’ve dropped the ball. But the power that CEOs wield allows them to create a world that caters night and day to their need for validation. It allows them to surround themselves only with the good news of their perfection and the company’s success, no matter what the warning signs may be. This, as you may recall, is CEO disease and a peril of the fixed mindset.
As Morgan McCall, in his book High Flyers, points out, “Unfortunately, people often like the things that work against their growth….People like to use their strengths…to achieve quick, dramatic results, even if…they aren’t developing the new skills they will need later on. People like to believe they are as good as everyone says…and not take their weaknesses as seriously as they might. People don’t like to hear bad news or get criticism….There is tremendous risk…in leaving what one does well to attempt to master something new.” And the fixed mindset makes it seem all that much riskier.
Gerstner’s excellent book Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?
In fact, for people with the fixed mindset, their number one goal came through loud and clear. Revenge.
“If I had to choose between me being happy and him being miserable, I would definitely want him to be miserable.”
For them, it was about understanding, forgiving, and moving on. Although they were often deeply hurt by what happened, they wanted to learn from it:
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here and feel sorry for myself!” (Perhaps this phrase should be the mantra of the growth mindset.)
When you think about how rejection wounds and inflames people with the fixed mindset, it will come as no surprise that kids with the fixed mindset are the ones who react to taunting and bullying with thoughts of violent retaliation.
It doesn’t mean there is no “they lived happily ever after,” but it’s more like “they worked happily ever after.”
