Carol S. Dweck Quotes

Skills and achievement come through commitment and effort.

Finding #2: Those with the growth mindset found setbacks motivating. They’re informative. They’re a wake-up call.

...in the fixed mindset, you don’t take control of your abilities and your motivation. You look for your talent to carry you through, and when it doesn’t, well then, what else could you have done? 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.

Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that 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.

Are there situations where you get stupid — where you disengage your intelligence? Next time you’re in one of those situations, get yourself into a growth mindset — think about learning and improvement, not judgment — and hook it back up.

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. They thought they were learning.

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.

They love to learn. And teaching is a wonderful way to learn. About people and how they tick. About what you teach. About yourself. And about life.

In fact, every word and action can send a message. It tells children — or students, or athletes — how to think about themselves. It can be a fixed-mindset message that says: You have permanent traits and I’m judging them. Or it can be a growth-mindset message that says: You are a developing person and I am committed to your development.

And what’s so heroic, they would say, about having a gift?

Think of times other people outdid you and you just assumed that 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.

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.

What's more, it's not as though the fixed mindset wants to leave gracefully. If the fixed mindset has been controlling your internal monologue, it can say some pretty strong thing to you...The fixed mindset once offered you a refuge from that very feeling, and it offers it to you again.
Don't take it.

Is there another way to judge potential? NASA thought so. When they were soliciting applications for astronauts, they rejected people with pure histories of success and instead selected people who had had significant failures and bounced back from them. Jack Welch, the celebrated CEO of General Electric, chose executives on the basis of “runway,” their capacity for growth. And remember Marina Semyonova, the famed ballet teacher, who chose the students who were energized by criticism. They were all rejecting the idea of fixed ability and selecting instead for mindset.

John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame.