Dweck, Carol. Mindset – Updated Edition: Changing The Way You think To Fulfil Your Potential, Robinson, 2017 (pp. 16-54)
Inside the Mindsets
When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world—the world of fixed traits—success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other—the world of changing qualities—it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself. In one world, failure is about having a setback. Getting a bad grade. Losing a tournament. Getting fired. Getting rejected. It means you’re not smart or talented. In the other world, failure is about not growing. Not reaching for the things you value. It means you’re not fulfilling your potential. 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.
Is Success About Learning—Or Proving You’re Smart?
Everyone is born with an intense drive to learn. Infants stretch their skills daily.
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.
As soon as children become able to evaluate themselves, some of them become afraid of challenges. They become afraid of not being smart.
We offered four-year-olds a choice: They could redo an easy jigsaw puzzle or they could try a harder one. Even at this tender age, children with the fixed mindset—the traits—stuck with the safe one.
Kids who are born smart “don’t do mistakes,” they told us.
Children with a growth mindset chose one hard task after another.
So children with the fixed mindset want to make sure they succeed. Smart people should always succeed. But for children with the growth mindset, success is about stretching themselves. It’s about becoming smarter.
What’s Your Priority?
Loads of success and validation or lots of challenge?
People also have to decide what kinds of relationships they want: ones that bolster their egos or ones that challenge them to grow? Who is your ideal mate?
When Do You Feel Smart: When You’re Flawless or When You’re Learning?
We asked people, ranging from grade schoolers to young adults, “When do you feel smart?” The differences were striking. People with the fixed mindset said: “It’s when I don’t make any mistakes.” “When I finish something fast and it’s perfect.” “When something is easy for me, but other people can’t do it.” It’s about being perfect right now. But people with the growth mindset said: “When it’s really hard, and I try really hard, and I can do something I couldn’t do before.” Or “[When] I work on something a long time and I start to figure it out.” For them it’s not about immediate perfection. It’s about learning something over time.
A Test Score Is Forever
Why, in the fixed mindset, it’s so crucial to be perfect right now. It’s because one test—or one evaluation—can measure you forever.
This leads us back to the idea of “potential” and to the question of whether tests or experts can tell us what our potential is, what we’re capable of, what our future will be. The fixed mindset says yes. You can simply measure the fixed ability right now and project it into the future.
Proving You’re Special
When people with the fixed mindset opt for success over growth, what are they really trying to prove? That they’re special. Even superior.
The problem is when special begins to mean better than others. A more valuable human being. A superior person. An entitled person.
Special, Superior, Entitled
John McEnroe had a fixed mindset: He believed that talent was all. He did not love to learn. He did not thrive on challenges; when the going got rough, he often folded. As a result, by his own admission, he did not fulfill his potential. But his talent was so great that he was the number one tennis player in the world for four years.
As a contrast, let’s look at Michael Jordan—growth-minded athlete par excellence—whose greatness is regularly proclaimed by the world: “Superman”.
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?
Mindsets Change the Meaning of Failure
Defining Moments
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.
MINDSETS CHANGE THE MEANING OF EFFORT
As children, we were given a choice between the talented but erratic hare and the plodding but steady tortoise. The lesson was supposed to be that slow and steady wins the race. But, really, did any of us ever want to be the tortoise? No, we just wanted to be a less foolish hare. We wanted to be swift as the wind and a bit more strategic.
After all, everyone knows you have to show up in order to win. The story of the tortoise and the hare, in trying to put forward the power of effort, gave effort a bad name. It reinforced the image that effort is for the plodders and suggested that in rare instances, when talented people dropped the ball, the plodder could sneak through.
Questions and Answers
Question: With all your belief in effort, are you saying that when people fail, it’s always their fault—they didn’t try hard enough?
No! It’s true that effort is crucial—no one can succeed for long without it—but it’s certainly not the only thing. People have different resources and opportunities. For example, people with money (or rich parents) have a safety net. They can take more risks and keep going longer until they succeed. People with easy access to a good education, people with a network of influential friends, people who know how to be in the right place at the right time—all stand a better chance of having their effort pay off. Rich, educated, connected effort works better.
People with fewer resources, in spite of their best efforts, can be derailed so much more easily.
Before we judge, let’s remember that effort isn’t quite everything and that all effort is not created equal.
Question: You keep talking about how the growth mindset makes people number one, the best, the most successful. Isn’t the growth mindset about personal development, not besting others?
This point is crucial: The growth mindset does allow people to love what they’re doing—and to continue to love it in the face of difficulties.
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.
This point is also crucial. 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. Maybe they haven’t found the cure for cancer, but the search was deeply meaningful.
Question: What if I like my fixed mindset?
If you like it, by all means keep it. This book shows people they have a choice by spelling out the two mindsets and the worlds they create.
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. It’s just important to be aware of the drawbacks of this mindset. You may be robbing yourself of an opportunity by underestimating your talent in the first area.
Grow Your Mindset
- 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.
- It’s tempting to create a world in which we’re perfect. We can choose partners, make friends, hire people who make us feel faultless. But think about it—do you want to never grow? Next time you’re tempted to surround yourself with worshipers, go to church. In the rest of your life, seek constructive criticism.
- Is there something in your past that you think measured you? A test score? Being fired from a job? Being rejected? Focus on that thing. Feel all the emotions that go with it. Look honestly at your role in it, but understand that it doesn’t define your intelligence or personality. Instead, ask: What did I (or can I) learn from that experience? How can I use it as a basis for growth? Carry that with you instead.
- How do you act when you feel depressed? Do you work harder at things in your life or do you let them go? Next time you feel low, put yourself in a growth mindset—think about learning, challenge, confronting obstacles.
- Is there something you’ve always wanted to do but were afraid you weren’t good at? Make a plan to do it.