The Growth Mindset is Real, and It Will Change Your Life

What You Were Born With Is Just the Beginning

Hard to believe, right?

Take a look at this:

This graph summarizes the change in mathematics grades of 373 seventh-graders, tracked across two years.

The ones who already had the better viewpoint (top line) kept improving across the two years. The ones who didn’t (bottom line) got worse as time passed (because incomplete learning snowballs).

In addition, when the students who didn’t have the better viewpoint changed to the better one (after eight educational classes), their grades started improving.

Big deal. It’s just one study.

What about this?

Here are the results from a study of 519 at-risk high-school students:

The students’ improvements across one semester (solid lines) occurred after 90 minutes of online education.

So what? I’m not a teenager.

That’s true, but hundreds of other experiments on people of all ages have gotten similar results.

I’m a therapist, and believe me when I say: This is real, and it will work for you.

But only if you read the rest of this article.

The two mindsets

With about 200 academic papers to her name, Carol Dweck is the Energizer Bunny in the field of learning what makes people successful (and, from that, happy) in life.

That is to say, during 40 years of research, she has discovered and refined a set of ideas that hold true for everybody–at all stages of life, in both business and personal situations, and for people around the world.

Dweck discovered that, for a given area of your life, you have either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. The first greatly limits what you will get out of life, while the second greatly increases it.

And best of all, her research proves that you can change your mindset and that getting started is easy.

Bill Gates, on Dweck’s Mindset

Many people have written about Dweck’s ideas. I like the compact description that Bill Gates gave in his “book report” on Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset. Here are some of the things Gates wrote:

Here is Dweck’s thesis: Our genes influence our intelligence and talents, but these qualities are not fixed at birth.

If you mistakenly believe that your capabilities derive from DNA and destiny, rather than practice and perseverance, then you operate with what Dweck calls a “fixed mindset” rather than a “growth mindset”….

In experiment after experiment, Dweck has shown that the fixed mindset is a huge psychological roadblock–regardless of whether you feel you were blessed with talent or not.

Gates on the fixed mindset

Here’s how he describes the fixed mindset:

If you have the fixed mindset and believe you were blessed with raw talent, you tend to spend a lot of time trying to validate your “gift” rather than cultivating it…you often steer clear of tough challenges that might jeopardize that identity.

Here’s how Dweck puts it: “From the point of view of the fixed mindset, effort is only for people with deficiencies…. If you’re considered a genius, a talent, or a natural — then you have a lot to lose [because to you, failing will show that you’re not talented]….

If you have the fixed mindset and believe you lost the genetic lottery, you also have little incentive to work hard.

Gates on the growth mindset

Here’s how he summarizes the growth mindset:

In contrast, people with the growth mindset believe that basic qualities, including intelligence, can be strengthened like muscles….

[I]n Dweck’s words, “they believe a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.”

As a result, [people with the growth mindset] have every incentive to take on tough challenges and seek out opportunities to improve.

All this is what Bill Gates says. And he wouldn’t be saying it if it didn’t match his own personal history.

The image below summarizes how people with the two mindsets see themselves and how they behave.

(Here is a larger version that is easier to read or print out.)

As you can see, people with the fixed mindset (left, in blue) think and act in ways that make them defensive and prevent them from growing as people. They don’t have to work as hard, but their lives tend to be more limited and less satisfying.

On the other hand, people with the growth mindset (right, in green) decide to embrace life’s challenges and improve their skills through diligent effort. They work harder, and their lives tend to be more positive, satisfying, and successful.

Learn about the two mindsets

To show how hot a topic mindset is on the Internet, it actually has its own (purple) button on Pinterest:

Once you start looking, you could spend days looking at all the articles, blog posts, and videos on the growth mindset. (FYI, fostering this mindset in children is a major subset of these items.)

Here are some good resources:

• Get a good, short description of the two mindsets, which is on a website that Carol Dweck has put up, mindsetonline.com.
• Get Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. It’s easy reading and very motivating. Costing you about $10 from various online sources (see the “Get a copy” buttons) and the time it takes you to read it, this is the best investment in yourself you’ll ever make.
• Explore what Dweck (and others) have to say by searching for “Carol Dweck”, “growth mindset”, or “Dweck videos.”
• Read Carol Dweck’s advice on how to adopt the growth mindset.

The growth mindset is yours to claim

Positive change doesn’t happen until you decide to try something different.

But what?

You don’t want to put in a lot of work and get very little for it.

The growth mindset is easily the most powerful idea I’ve seen in over a decade of study. As Dweck once said, it produces “surprisingly large changes with seemingly modest input.”

And the best news is that extensive research by Dweck and numerous colleagues has shown that people can change to a growth mindset and that the change lasts over time.

As Dweck said in Mindset, “Mindsets are an important part of your personality, but you can change them. Just by knowing about the two mindsets, you can start thinking and reacting in new ways.”

Understanding the growth mindset is easy, but implementing it is more challenging. Most people give up because they don’t buy into seven key understanding about the following subjects:

• the growth mindset
• the fixed mindset
• choice
• effort
• failure
• engagement
• perseverance