NASA thought so. When they were soliciting applications for astronauts, they rejected people with pure histories of success and instead selected peop… - Carol S. Dweck

important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies.

As Morgan McCall, in his book High Flyers, points out, “Unfortunately, people often like the things that work against their growth.… People like to use their strengths … to achieve quick, dramatic results, even if … they aren’t developing the new skills they will need later on. People like to believe they are as good as everyone says … and not take their weaknesses as seriously as they might. People don’t like to hear bad news or get criticism.… There is tremendous risk … in leaving what one does well to attempt to master something new.” And the fixed mindset makes it seem all that much riskier.

A few modern philosophers … assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism.… 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.