Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

by Carol S. Dweck

In one world, effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you’re not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn’t need effort. In the other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented.

You have a choice. Mindsets are just beliefs. They’re powerful beliefs, but they’re just something in your mind, and you can change your mind. As you read, think about where you’d like to go and which mindset will take you there.

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.

Can I be half-and-half? I recognize both mindsets in myself. All of us have elements of both—we’re all a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. I’m talking about it as a simple either–or right now for the sake of simplicity. 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.

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 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.

What he learned was this: True self-confidence is “the courage to be open—to welcome change and new ideas regardless of their source.” Real self-confidence is not reflected in a title, an expensive suit, a fancy car, or a series of acquisitions. It is reflected in your mindset: your readiness to grow.

Alfred P. Sloan, the former CEO of General Motors, presents a nice contrast. He was leading a group of high-level policy makers who seemed to have reached a consensus. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here….Then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”

ancient Persians used a version of Sloan’s techniques to prevent groupthink. Whenever a group reached a decision while sober, they later reconsidered it while intoxicated.

In the growth mindset, there may still be that exciting initial combustion, but people in this mindset don’t expect magic. They believe that a good, lasting relationship comes from effort and from working through inevitable differences.

Says John Gottman, a foremost relationship researcher: “Every marriage demands an effort to keep it on the right track; there is a constant tension…between the forces that hold you together and those that can tear you apart.”

The second big difficulty with the fixed mindset is the belief that problems are a sign of deep-seated flaws. But just as there are no great achievements without setbacks, there are no great relationships without conflicts and problems along the way.

Relationship expert Daniel Wile says that choosing a partner is choosing a set of problems. There are no problem-free candidates. The trick is to acknowledge each other’s limitations, and build from there.

As a legacy of my fixed mindset, I still have an irresistible urge to defend myself and assign blame when something in a relationship goes wrong. “It’s not my fault!” To deal with this bad habit, my husband and I invented a third party, an imaginary man named Maurice. Whenever I start in on who’s to blame, we invoke poor Maurice and pin it on him.

What allowed me to take that first step, to choose growth and risk rejection? In the fixed mindset, I had needed my blame and bitterness. It made me feel more righteous, powerful, and whole than thinking I was at fault. The growth mindset allowed me to give up the blame and move on.

Your failures and misfortunes don’t threaten other people’s self-esteem. Ego-wise, it’s easy to be sympathetic to someone in need. It’s your assets and your successes that are problems for people who derive their self-esteem from being superior.

Beer found, first, that people with the fixed mindset were more likely to be shy. This makes sense. The fixed mindset makes you concerned about judgment, and this can make you more self-conscious and anxious.

I remember often being praised for my intelligence rather than my efforts, and slowly but surely I developed an aversion to difficult challenges. Most surprisingly, this extended beyond academic and even athletic challenges to emotional challenges. This was my greatest learning disability—this tendency to see performance as a reflection of character and, if I could not accomplish something right away, to avoid that task or treat it with contempt.

He was just a straight-ahead growth-mindset guy who lived by this rule: “You have to apply yourself each day to becoming a little better. By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better.”

Conclusion? Beware of success. It can knock you into a fixed mindset: “I won because I have talent. Therefore I will keep winning.” Success can infect a team or it can infect an individual.

The first important thing to remember here is that the process includes more than just effort. Certainly, we want children to appreciate the fruits of hard work. But we also want them to understand the importance of trying new strategies when the one they’re using isn’t working. (We don’t want them to just try harder with the same ineffective strategy.) And we want them to ask for help or input from others when it’s needed. This is the process we want them to appreciate: hard work, trying new strategies, and seeking input from others.

You don’t get a growth mindset by proclamation. You move toward it by taking a journey.

Although for simplicity I’ve talked as though some people have a growth mindset and some people have a fixed mindset, in truth we’re all a mixture of the two. There’s no point denying it. Sometimes we’re in one mindset and sometimes we’re in the other. Our task then becomes to understand what triggers our fixed mindset. What are the events or situations that take us to a place where we feel our (or other people’s) abilities are fixed? What are the events or situations that take us to a place of judgment rather than to a place of development?

We go on to point out that nobody laughs at babies and says how dumb they are because they can’t talk. They just haven’t learned yet.

The fixed mindset once offered you refuge from that very feeling, and it offers it to you again. Don’t take it. Then there’s the concern that you won’t be yourself anymore. It may feel as though the fixed mindset gave you your ambition, your edge, your individuality. Maybe you fear you’ll become a bland cog in the wheel just like everyone else. Ordinary. But opening yourself up to growth makes you more yourself, not less. The growth-oriented scientists, artists, athletes, and CEOs we’ve looked at were far from humanoids going through the motions. They were people in the full flower of their individuality and potency.

It wasn’t easy. Every day people plan to do difficult things, but they don’t do them. They think, “I’ll do it tomorrow,” and they swear to themselves that they’ll follow through the next day. Research by Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues shows that vowing, even intense vowing, is often useless. The next day comes and the next day goes. What works is making a vivid, concrete plan: “Tomorrow during my break, I’ll get a cup of tea, close the door to my office, and call the graduate school.” Or, in another case: “On Wednesday morning, right after I get up and brush my teeth, I’ll sit at my desk and start writing my report.” Or: “Tonight, right after the dinner dishes are done, I’ll sit down with my wife in the living room and have that discussion. I’ll say to her, ‘Dear, I’d like to talk about something that I think will make us happier.’ ” Think of something you need to do, something you want to learn, or a problem you have to confront. What is it? Now make a concrete plan. When will you follow through on your plan? Where will you do it? How will you do it? Think about it in vivid detail. These concrete plans—plans you can visualize—about when, where, and how you are going to do something lead to really high levels of follow-through, which, of course, ups the chances of success. So the idea is not only to make a growth-mindset plan, but also to visualize, in a concrete way, how you’re going to carry it out.

Entitlement: The World Owes You Many people with the fixed mindset think the world needs to change, not them. They feel entitled to something better—a better job, house, or spouse. The world should recognize their special qualities and treat them accordingly.

In the end, many people with the fixed mindset understand that their cloak of specialness was really a suit of armor they built to feel safe, strong, and worthy. While it may have protected them early on, later it constricted their growth, sent them into self-defeating battles, and cut them off from satisfying, mutual relationships.

Denial: My Life Is Perfect People in a fixed mindset often run away from their problems. If their life is flawed, then they’re flawed. It’s easier to make believe everything’s all right. Try this dilemma. The Dilemma. You seem to have everything. You have a fulfilling career, a loving marriage, wonderful children, and devoted friends. But one of those things isn’t true. Unbeknownst to you, your marriage is ending. It’s not that there haven’t been signs, but you chose to misinterpret them. You were fulfilling your idea of the “man’s role” or the “woman’s role,” and couldn’t hear your partner’s desire for more communication and more sharing of your lives. By the time you wake up and take notice, it’s too late. Your spouse has disengaged emotionally from the relationship.

The Fixed-Mindset Reaction. You’ve always felt sorry for divorced people, abandoned people. And now you’re one of them. You lose all sense of worth. Your partner, who knew you intimately, doesn’t want you anymore. For months, you don’t feel like going on, convinced that even your children would be better off without you. It takes you a while to get to the point where you feel at all useful or competent. Or hopeful. Now comes the hard part because, even though you now feel a little better about yourself, you’re still in the fixed mindset. You’re embarking on a lifetime of judging. With everything good that happens, your internal voice says, Maybe I’m okay after all. But with everything bad that happens, the voice says, My spouse was right. Every new person you meet is judged too—as a potential betrayer. How could you rethink your marriage, yourself, and your life from a growth-mindset perspective? Why were you afraid to listen to your spouse? What could you have done? What should you do now?

The Growth-Mindset Step. First, it’s not that the marriage, which you used to think of as inherently good, suddenly turned out to have been all bad or always bad. It was an evolving thing that had stopped developing for lack of nourishment. You need to think about how both you and your spouse contributed to this, and especially about why you weren’t able to hear the request for greater closeness and sharing. As you probe, you realize that, in your fixed mindset, you saw your partner’s request as a criticism of you that you didn’t want to hear. You also realize that at some level, you were afraid you weren’t capable of the intimacy your partner was requesting. So instead of exploring these issues with your spouse, you turned a deaf ear, hoping they would go away. When a relationship goes sour, these are the issues we all need to explore in depth, not to judge ourselves for what went wrong, but to overcome our fears and learn the communication skills we’ll need to build and maintain better relationships in the future. Ultimately, a growth mindset allows people to carry forth not judgments and bitterness, but new understanding and new skills. Is someone in your life trying to tell you something you’re refusing to hear? Step into the growth mindset and listen again.

What can be done? Several things. First, spouses can’t read your mind, so when an anger-provoking situation arises, you have to matter-of-factly tell them how it makes you feel. “I’m not sure why, but when you do that, it makes me feel unimportant. Like you can’t be bothered to do things that matter to me.” They, in turn, can reassure you that they care about how you feel and will try to be more watchful. (“Are you kidding?” you say. “My spouse would never do that.” Well, you can request it directly, as I’ve sometimes done: “Please tell me that you care how I feel and you’ll try to be more watchful.”)

Whether people change their mindset in order to further their career, heal from a loss, help their children thrive, lose weight, or control their anger, change needs to be maintained. It’s amazing—once a problem improves, people often stop doing what caused it to improve. Once you feel better, you stop taking your medicine.

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.

The Journey: Step 1 You’ll be surprised to hear me say this. The first step is to embrace your fixed mindset. Let’s face it, we all have some of it. We’re all a mixture of growth and fixed mindsets and we need to acknowledge that. It’s not a shameful admission. It’s more like, welcome to the human race. But even though we have to accept that some fixed mindset dwells within, we do not have to accept how often it shows up and how much havoc it can wreak when it does.

The Journey: Step 2 The second step is to become aware of your fixed-mindset triggers. When does your fixed-mindset “persona” come home to roost? • It could be when you’re thinking about taking on a big, new challenge. Your fixed-mindset persona might appear and whisper, “Maybe you don’t have what it takes, and everyone will find out.”

How about when you feel like you’ve failed decisively? Lost your job. Lost a cherished relationship. Messed up in a very big way. It’s a rare person who doesn’t have a fixed-mindset episode. And we all know very well what that fixed mindset says to us: “You’re not the person you thought you were—and you never will be.”

Take a moment to think carefully about your own fixed-mindset persona. Will you name it after someone in your life? A character from a book or a movie? Will you give it your middle name—it’s part of you but not the main part of you? Or perhaps you might give it a name you don’t like, to remind you that that’s not the person you want to be.

The more you become aware of your fixed-mindset triggers, the more you can be on the lookout for the arrival of your persona. If you’re on the verge of stepping out of your comfort zone, be ready to greet it when it shows up and warns you to stop.