Mindset

Key Concepts

The mindsets, defined

• “Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over.” (p. 6)

• “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.” (p. 7)

“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.” (p. 25)

“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.” (p. 217)

“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.” (p. 254)

One’s mindset influences leadership behaviors

“From a growth mindset, it’s not only the select few that have something to offer. ‘Hierarchy means very little to me. Let’s put together in meetings the people who can help solve a problem, regardless of position.’” (p. 130)

“The members of the growth-mindset groups were much more likely to state their honest opinions and openly express their disagreements as they communicated about their management decisions. Everyone was part of the learning process. For the fixed-mindset groups—with their concern about who was smart or dumb or their anxiety about disapproval for their ideas—that open, productive discussion did not happen. Instead, it was more like groupthink.” (p. 134)

“People who work in growth-mindset organizations have far more trust in their company and a much greater sense of empowerment, ownership, and commitment.” (p. 143)

Quotables

“For thirty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.” (p. 6)

“It’s ironic: The top is where 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.” (p. 48)

“Just because some people can do something with little or no training, it doesn’t mean that others can’t do it (and sometimes do it even better) with training.” (p. 70)

“We then looked at the students’ performance. After the experience with difficulty, the performance of the ability-praised students [primed to think in a growth mindset] plummeted, even when we gave them some more of the easier problems. ...The effort kids [primed to think in a growth mindset] showed better and better performance. They had used  the hard problems to sharpen their skills, so that when they returned to the easier ones, they were way ahead.” (p. 73)

“What’s so alarming is that we took ordinary children and made them into liars, simply by telling them they were smart.” (p. 73)

“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.” (p. 90)

“When you enter the world of the growth-mindset leaders, everything changes. It brightens, it expands, it fills with energy, with possibility.” (p. 125)

“Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance.” (p. 178)

“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.)” (p. 215)

“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.” (p. 254)