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Think of times other people outdid you and you just assumed they were smarter or more talented. Now consider the idea that they just used better strategies, taught themselves more, practiced harder, and worked their way through obstacles. You can do that, too, if you want to.
Natural talent should not need effort. Effort is for the others, the less endowed. Natural talent does not ask for help. It is an admission of weakness. In short, the natural does not analyze his deficiencies and coach or practice them away.
group that pioneered a radically new approach to scouting and managing, he came to believe that scoring runs—the whole point of baseball—was much more about process than about talent.
The team had the second-lowest payroll in baseball! They didn’t buy talent, they bought mindset.
But aside from his quickness, Ali’s brilliance was his mind. His brains, not his brawn. He sized up his opponent and went for his mental jugular.
Why did Ali appear to “go crazy” before each fight? Because, Torres says, he knew that a knockout punch is the one they don’t see coming.
his dogged practice remained legendary. Former Bulls assistant coach John Bach called him “a genius who constantly wants to upgrade his genius.”
Yet it’s almost as if they refuse to see. Perhaps it’s because, as Malcolm Gladwell suggests, people prize natural endowment over earned ability. 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. Why not? To me that is so much more amazing.
But, as Billie Jean King tells us, the mark of a champion is the ability to win when things are not quite right—when you’re not playing well and your emotions are not the right ones.
When you read about an athlete or team that wins over and over and over, remind yourself, ‘More than ability, they have character.’ ”
Finding #1: Those with the growth mindset found success in doing their best, in learning and improving.
Tiger is a hugely ambitious man. He wants to be the best, even the best ever. “But the best me—that’s a little more important.”
For those with the fixed mindset, success is about establishing their superiority, pure and simple.
Remember, in the fixed mindset, effort is not a cause for pride. It is something that casts doubt on your talent.
Finding #2: Those with the growth mindset found setbacks motivating. They’re informative. They’re a wake-up call.
In the fixed mindset, setbacks label you.
Finding #3: People with the growth mindset in sports (as in pre-med chemistry) took charge of the processes that bring success—and that maintain it.
Like Michael Jordan, Woods managed his motivation. He did this by making his practice into fun: “I love working on shots, carving them this way and that, and proving to myself that I can hit a certain shot on command.”
You are not a work in progress, you’re a finished product. And finished products have to protect themselves, lament, and blame. Everything but take charge.
You know, just about every sport is in some sense a team sport. No one does it alone. Even in individual sports, like tennis or golf, great athletes have a team—coaches, trainers, caddies, managers, mentors.
Uh-oh, it’s the somebody–nobody syndrome. If I win, I’ll be somebody; if I lose I’ll be nobody.
Somebodies are not determined by whether they won or lost. Somebodies are people who go for it with all they have.
Candace lights the same fire under herself now. Rather than being content to be a star, she looks to improve all the time.
“Whether it be in basketball or everyday life,” she says, “nothing is promised.”
Even though the finest athletes are wildly competitive and want to be the best, greatness does not come from the ego of the fixed mindset, with its somebody–nobody syndrome. Many athletes with the fixed mindset may have been “naturals”—but you know what? As John Wooden says, we can’t remember most of them.
As Gladwell writes, “This ‘talent mind-set’ is the new orthodoxy of American management.” It created the blueprint for the Enron culture—and sowed the seeds of its demise.
Students with the fixed mindset were so worried about appearing deficient that they refused to take a course that would improve their English. They did not live in a psychological world where they could take this risk.
They were self-effacing people who constantly asked questions and had the ability to confront the most brutal answers—that is, to look failures in the face, even their own, while maintaining faith that they would succeed in the end.
“You know, like a bulldog. I wouldn’t let go until I understood. Why, why, why?”
Fixed-mindset leaders, like fixed-mindset people in general, live in a world where some people are superior and some are inferior. They must repeatedly affirm that they are superior, and the company is simply a platform for this.
ended. As Collins puts it, “After all, what better testament to your own personal greatness than that the place falls apart after you leave?”
Many of these comparison companies operated on what Collins calls a “genius with a thousand helpers” model.
These great leaders said they didn’t set out to be leaders. They’d had no interest in proving themselves. They just did what they loved—with tremendous drive and enthusiasm—and it led where it led.
Dunlap deeply misunderstood Michael Jordan and Bruce Springsteen. Both of these superstars reached the pinnacle and stayed there a long time because they constantly dug down, faced challenges, and kept growing.
“Well, it’s so obvious. How can you not get it?” In most cases, the Wall Street guys, ever concerned about their own intellect, made believe they got it.
These bosses have the power to make people worse off. And when they do, they feel better about themselves.
“The minute a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse.”
When bosses become controlling and abusive, they put everyone into a fixed mindset. This means that instead of learning, growing, and moving the company forward, everyone starts worrying about being judged.
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.
went right to the workers in the assembly line to hear what they had to say. I do frequent CEO chats with front-line employees. I learned that from Jack.”
Already we see the me me me of the validation-hungry CEO becoming the we and us of the growth-minded leader.
“there’s only a razor’s edge between self-confidence and hubris.
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.
If we’re managing good people who are clearly eating themselves up over an error, our job is to help them through it.”
“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.”
There was no teamwork, only turf wars. There were deals but no follow-up. There was no concern for the customer.
but the job of this department, Jim Collins reports, was to give Churchill all the worst news. Then Churchill could sleep well at night, knowing he had not been groupthinked into a false sense of security.
Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.C., reported that the 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.
workplace? Instead of just giving employees an award for the smartest idea or praise for a brilliant performance, they would get praise for taking initiative, for seeing a difficult task through, for struggling and learning something new, for being undaunted by a setback, or for being open to and acting on criticism.
