Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

producing amazing things.

Yet Darwin’s masterwork, The Origin of Species, took years of teamwork in the field, hundreds of discussions with colleagues and mentors, several preliminary drafts, and half a lifetime of dedication before it reached fruition.

Mozart labored for more than ten years until he produced any work that we admire today. Before then, his compositions were not that original or interesting. Actually, they were often patched-together chunks taken from other composers.

This chapter is about the real ingredients in achievement. It’s about why some people achieve less than expected and we people achieve more.

MINDSET AND SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT

Let’s step down from the celestial realm of Mozart and Darwin and come back to earth to see how mindsets create achievement in real life. It’s funny, but seeing one student blossom under the growth mindset has a greater impact on me than all the stories about Mozarts and Darwins. Maybe because it’s more about you and me—about what’s happened to us and why we are where we are now. And about children and their potential.

Back on earth, we measured students’ mindsets as they made the transition to junior high school: Did they believe their intelligence was a fixed trait or something they could develop? Then we followed them for the next two years.

The transition to junior high is a time of great challenge for many students. The work gets much harder, the grading policies toughen up, the teaching becomes less personalized. And all this happens while students are coping with their new adolescent bodies and roles. Grades suffer, but not everyone’s grades suffer equally.

No. In our study, only the students with the fixed mindset showed the decline. They showed an immediate drop-off in grades, and slowly but surely did worse and worse over the two years. The students with the growth mindset showed an increase in their grades over the two years.

When the two groups had entered junior high, their past records were indistinguishable. In the more benign environment of grade school, they’d earned the same grades and achievement test scores. Only when they hit the challenge of junior high did they begin to pull apart.

Here’s how students with the fixed mindset explained their poor grades. Many maligned their abilities: “I am the stupidest” or “I suck in math.” And many covered these feelings by blaming someone else: “[The math teacher] is a fat male slut … and [the English teacher] is a slob with a pink ass.” “Because the teacher is on crack.” These interesting analyses of the problem hardly provide a road map to future success.

With the threat of failure looming, students with the growth mindset instead mobilized their resources for learning. They told us that they, too, sometimes felt overwhelmed, but their response was to dig in and do what it takes. They were like George Danzig. Who?

George Danzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved.

The Low-Effort Syndrome

Our students with the fixed mindset who were facing the hard transition saw it as a threat. It threatened to unmask their flaws and turn them from winners into losers. In fact, in the fixed mindset, adolescence is one big test. Am I smart or dumb? Am I good-looking or ugly? Am I cool or nerdy? Am I a winner or a loser? And in the fixed mindset, a loser is forever.

It’s no wonder that many adolescents mobilize their resources, not for learning, but to protect their egos. And one of the main ways they do this (aside from providing vivid portraits of their teachers) is by not trying. This is when some of the brightest students, just like Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, simply stop working. In fact, students with the fixed mindset tell us that their main goal in school—aside from looking smart—is to exert as little effort as possible. They heartily agree with statements like this:

“In school my main goal is to do things as easily as possible so I don’t have to work very hard.”

This low-effort syndrome is often seen as a way that adolescents assert their independence from adults, but it is also a way that students with the fixed mindset protect themselves. They view the adults as saying, “Now we will measure you and see what you’ve got.” And they are answering, “No you won’t.”

John Holt, the great educator, says that these are the games all human beings play when others are sitting in judgment of them. “The worst student we had, the worst I have ever encountered, was in his life outside the classroom as mature, intelligent, and interesting a person as anyone at the school. What went wrong? … Somewhere along the line, his intelligence became disconnected from his schooling.”

For students with the growth mindset, it doesn’t make sense to stop trying. For them, adolescence is a time of opportunity: a time to learn new subjects, a time to find out what they like and what they want to become in the future.

Later, I’ll describe the project in which we taught junior high students the growth mindset. What I want to tell you now is how teaching them this mindset unleashed their effort. One day, we were introducing the growth mindset to a new group of students. All at once Jimmy—the most hard-core turned-off low-effort kid in the group— looked up with tears in his eyes and said, “You mean I don’t have to be dumb?” From that day on, he worked. He started staying up late to do his homework, which he never used to bother with at all. He started handing in assignments early so he could get feedback and revise them. He now believed that working hard was not something that made you vulnerable, but something that made you smarter.

Finding Your Brain

A close friend of mine recently handed me something he’d written, a poem-story that reminded me of Jimmy and his unleashed effort. My friend’s second-grade teacher, Mrs. Beer, had had each student draw and cut out a paper horse. She then lined up all the horses above the blackboard and delivered her growth-mindset message: “Your horse is only as fast as your brain. Every time you learn something, your horse will move ahead.”

My friend wasn’t so sure about the “brain” thing. His father had always told him, “You have too much mouth and too little brains for your own good.” Plus, his horse seemed to just sit at the starting gate while “everyone else’s brain joined the learning chase,” especially the brains of Hank and Billy, the class geniuses, whose horses jumped way ahead of everyone else’s. But my friend kept at it. To improve his skills, he kept reading the comics with his mother and he kept adding up the points when he played gin rummy with his grandmother.

And soon my sleek stallion

bolted forward like Whirlaway,

and there was no one

who was going to stop him.

Over the weeks and months

he flew forward overtaking

the others one by one.

In the late spring homestretch

Hank’sand Billy’s mounts were ahead

by just a few subtraction exercises, and

when the last bell of school rang,

my horse won—“By a nose!”

Then I knew I had a brain:

I had the horse to prove it.

—PAUL WORTMAN

Of course, learning shouldn’t really be a race. But this race helped my friend discover his brain and connect it up to his schooling.

The College Transition

Another transition, another crisis. College is when all the students who were the brains in high school are