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This tradition also shows how changing people’s beliefs—even the simplest beliefs—can have profound effects.
What did they know? They knew that human qualities, such as intellectual skills, could be cultivated. And that’s what they were doing—getting smarter. Not only weren’t they discouraged by failure, they didn’t even think they were failing. They thought they were learning.
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?
It may surprise you to know that a big champion of this view was Alfred Binet, the inventor of the IQ test. Wasn’t the IQ test meant to summarize children’s unchangeable intelligence? In fact, no. Binet, a Frenchman working in Paris in the early twentieth century, designed this test to identify children who were not profiting from the Paris public schools, so that new educational programs could be designed to get them back on track.
Who’s right? Today most experts agree that it’s not either–or. It’s not nature or nurture, genes or environment. From conception on, there’s a constant give-and-take between the two.
not only do genes and environment cooperate as we develop, but genes require input from the environment to work properly.
Robert Sternberg, the present-day guru of intelligence, writes that the major factor in whether people achieve expertise “is not some fixed prior ability, but purposeful engagement.” Or, as his forerunner Binet recognized, it’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest.
For thirty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.
stance, she was creating a mindset in which everyone in the class had one consuming goal—look smart, don’t look dumb. Who cared about or enjoyed learning when our whole being was at stake every time she gave us a test or called on us in class?
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.
Did you know that Darwin and Tolstoy were considered ordinary children?
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.
In other words, they’d see what happened as a direct measure of their competence and worth.
What is truly amazing is that people with the fixed mindset would not agree. For them, it’s “Nothing ventured, nothing lost.” “If at first you don’t succeed, you probably don’t have the ability.” “If Rome wasn’t built in a day, maybe it wasn’t meant to be.”
In fact, studies show that people are terrible at estimating their abilities.
Sure, we found that people greatly misestimated their performance and their ability. But it was those with the fixed mindset who accounted for almost all the inaccuracy. The people with the growth mindset were amazingly accurate.
What’s more, if you’re oriented toward learning, as they are, you need accurate information about your current abilities in order to learn effectively.
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.
Creativity researchers concur. In a poll of 143 creativity researchers, there was wide agreement about the number one ingredient in creative achievement. And it was exactly the kind of perseverance and resilience produced by the growth mindset.
are. The fixed mindset makes you concerned with how you’ll be judged; the growth mindset makes you concerned with improving.
The message is: You can change your mindset.
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.
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.”
What could put an end to this exuberant learning? The fixed mindset. As soon as children become able to evaluate themselves, some of them become afraid of challenges. They become afraid of not being smart.
Why are you asking me this, lady? Why would anyone want to keep doing the same puzzle over and over? They chose one hard one after another. “I’m dying to figure them out!” exclaimed one little girl.
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.
met me. People with the growth mindset hoped for a different kind of partner. They said their ideal mate was someone who would: See their faults and help them to work on them. Challenge them to become a better person. Encourage them to learn new things.
So the husband’s idea of a successful relationship—total, uncritical acceptance—was not the wife’s. And the wife’s idea of a successful relationship—confronting problems—was not the husband’s. One person’s growth was the other person’s nightmare. CEO Disease
CEOs face this choice all the time. Should they confront their shortcomings or should they create a world where they have none?
People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it.
star of her time, says it straight out. “All my life I’ve been playing up, meaning I’ve challenged myself with players older, bigger, more skillful, more experienced—in short, better than me.”
Miranda was raised in a life devoid of challenge. But when her mother died of an aneurysm at age forty, ten-year-old Miranda came up with a principle. “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.” So when wrestling presented a challenge, she was ready to take it on.
People urged her to stay where she was already on top, but Miranda felt it was more exciting to start at the bottom again and see what she could grow into this time.
Most students started out pretty interested in chemistry. Yet over the semester, something happened. Students with the fixed mindset stayed interested only when they did well right away. Those who found it difficult showed a big drop in their interest and enjoyment. If it wasn’t a testimony to their intelligence, they couldn’t enjoy it.
I’ll never forget the first time I heard myself say, “This is hard. This is fun.” That’s the moment I knew I was changing mindsets.
For them it’s not about immediate perfection. It’s about learning something over time: confronting a challenge and making progress.
It took one day for some of them to feel like complete imposters. Yesterday they were hotshots; today they’re failures.
They know how to take tests and get A’s but they don’t know how to do this—yet. They forget the yet.
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.
But the students with the fixed mindset didn’t simply believe the test could measure an important ability. They also believed—just as strongly—that it could measure how smart they were. And how smart they’d be when they grew up.
They gave this test the power to define them. That’s why every success is so important.
People with the growth mindset know that it takes time for potential to flower.
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….
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. Jack Welch, the celebrated CEO of General Electric, chose executives on the basis of “runway,” their capacity for growth.
The scariest thought, which I rarely entertained, was the possibility of being ordinary. This kind of thinking led me to need constant validation. Every comment, every look was meaningful—it registered on my intelligence scorecard, my attractiveness scorecard, my likability scorecard. If a day went well, I could bask in my high numbers.
Of course, the mirror is harmless enough. The problem is when special begins to mean better than others. A more valuable human being. A superior person. An entitled person.
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?
As a New York Times article points out, failure has been transformed from an action (I failed) to an identity (I am a failure). This is especially true in the fixed mindset.
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.
