Mindset

This tradition also shows how changing people’s beliefs—even the simplest beliefs—can have profound effects.

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They obviously knew something I didn’t and I was determined to figure it out—to understand the kind of mindset that could turn a failure into a gift.

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What did they know? They knew that human qualities, such as intellectual skills, could be cultivated through effort. 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.

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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? Let’s first look in on the age-old, fiercely waged debate about human nature and then return to the question of what these beliefs mean for you.

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With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.

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In fact, as Gilbert Gottlieb, an eminent neuroscientist, put it, not only do genes and environment cooperate as we develop, but genes require input from the environment to work properly.

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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.”

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Or, as his forerunner Binet recognized, it’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest.

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For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.

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be developed creates a passion for learning. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?

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Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? 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.

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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.

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IS SUCCESS ABOUT LEARNING—OR PROVING YOU’RE SMART?

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Benjamin Barber, an eminent sociologist, 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.”

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Babies don’t worry about making mistakes or humiliating themselves. They walk, they fall, they get up. They just barge forward.

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But for children with the growth mindset, success is about stretching themselves.

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“I never stopped trying to be qualified for the job.”

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People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on

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Mia Hamm, the greatest female soccer 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.”

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This sense of urgency was instilled when my mom died. If you only go through life doing stuff that’s easy, shame on you.”

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Sometimes people with the growth mindset stretch themselves so far that they do the impossible.

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Clearly, people with the growth mindset thrive when they’re stretching themselves.

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