Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Instead, Marva Collins took inner-city Chicago kids who had failed in the public schools and treated them like geniuses. Many of them had been labeled “learning disabled,” “retarded,” or “emotionally disturbed.” Virtually all of them were apathetic. No light in the eyes, no hope in the face.

Collins’s second-grade public school class started out with the lowest-level reader there was. By June, they reached the middle of the fifth-grade reader, studying Aristotle, Aesop, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Poe, Frost, and Dickinson along the way.

Later when she started her own school, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Zay Smith dropped in. He saw four-year-olds writing sentences like “See the physician” and “Aesop wrote fables,” and talking about “diphthongs” and “diacritical marks.” He observed second graders reciting passages from Shakespeare, Longfellow, and Kipling. Shortly before, he had visited a rich suburban high school where many students had never heard of Shakespeare. “Shoot,” said onef Collins’s students, “you mean those rich high school kids don’t know Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616?”

Students read huge amounts, even over the summer. One student, who had entered as a “retarded” six- year-old, now four years later had read twenty-three books over the summer, including A Tale of Two Cities and Jane Eyre. The students read deeply and thoughtfully. As the three- and four-year-olds were reading about Daedalus and Icarus, one four-year-old exclaimed, “Mrs. Collins, if we do not learn and work hard, we will take an Icarian flight to nowhere.” Heated discussions of Macbeth were common.

Alfred Binet believed you could change the quality of someone’s mind. Clearly you can. Whether you measure these children by the breadth of their knowledge or by their performance on standardized tests, their minds had been transformed.

Benjamin Bloom, an eminent educational researcher, studied 120 outstanding achievers. They were concert pianists, sculptors, Olympic swimmers, world-class tennis players, mathematicians, and research neurologists. Most were not that remarkable as children and didn’t show clear talent before their training began in earnest. Even by early adolescence, you usually couldn’t predict their future accomplishment from their current ability. Only their continued motivation and commitment, along with their network of support, took them to the top.

Bloom concludes, “After forty years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.” He’s not counting the 2 to 3 percent of children who have severe impairments, and he’s not counting the top 1 to 2 percent of children at the other extreme that include children like Michael. He is counting everybody else.

Ability Levels and Tracking

But aren’t students sorted into different ability levels for a reason? Haven’t their test scores and past achievement shown what their ability is? Remember, test scores and measures of achievement tell you where a student is, but they don’t tell you where a student could end up.

Falko Rheinberg, a researcher in Germany, studied schoolteachers with different mindsets. Some of the teachers had the fixed mindset. They believed that students entering their class with different achievement levels were deeply and permanently different:

“According to my experience students’ achievement mostly remains constant in the course of a year.”

“If I know students’ intelligence I can predict their school career quite well.”

“As a teacher I have no influence on students’ intellectual ability.”

Like my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Wilson, these teachers preached and practiced the fixed mindset. In their classrooms, the students who started the year in the high-ability group ended the year there, and those who started the year in the low-ability group ended the year there.

But some teachers preached and practiced a growth mindset. They focused on the idea that all children could develop their skills, and in their classrooms a weird thing happened. It didn’t matter whether students started the year in the high- or the low-ability group. Both groups ended the year way up high. It’s a powerful experience to see these findings. The group differences had simply disappeared under the guidance of teachers who taught for improvement, for these teachers had found a way to reach their “low-ability” students.

How teachers put a growth mindset into practice is the topic of a later chapter, but here’s a preview of how Marva Collins, the renowned teacher, did it. On the first day of class, she approached Freddie, a left-back second grader, who wanted no part of school. “Come on, peach,” she said to him, cupping his face in her hands, “we have work to do. You can’t just sit in a seat and grow smart.… I promise, you are going to do, and you are going to produce. I am not going to let you fail.”

Summary

The fixed mindset limits achievement. It fills people’s minds with interfering thoughts, it makes effort disagreeable, and it leads to inferior learning strategies. What’s more, it makes other people into judges instead of allies. Whether we’re talking about Darwin or college students, important achievements require a clear focus, all- out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies. Plus allies in learning. This is what the growth mindset gives people, and that’s why it helps their abilities grow and bear fruit.

IS ARTISTIC ABILITY A GIFT?

Despite the widespread belief that intelligence is born, not made, when we really think about it, it’s not so hard to imagine that people can develop their intellectual abilities. The intellect is so multifaceted. You can develop verbal skills or mathematical-scientific skills or logical thinking skills, and so on. But when it comes to artistic ability, it seems more like a God-given gift. For example, people seem to naturally draw well or poorly.

Even I believed this. While some of my friends seemed to draw beautifully with no effort and no training, my drawing ability was arrested in early grade school. Try as I might, my attempts were primitive and disappointing. I was artistic in other ways. I can design, I’m great with colors, I have a subtle sense of composition. Plus I have really good eye–hand coordination. Why couldn’t I draw? I must not have the gift.

I have to admit that it didn’t bother me all that much. After all, when do you really have to draw? I found out one evening as the dinner guest of a fascinating man. He was an older man, a psychiatrist, who had escaped from the Holocaust. As a ten-year-old child in Czechoslovakia, he and his younger brother came home from school one day to find their parents gone. They had been taken. Knowing there was an uncle in England, the two boys walked to London and found him.

A few years later, lying about his age, my host joined the Royal Air Force and fought for Britain in the war. When he was wounded, he married his nurse, went to medical school, and established a thriving practice in America.

Over the years, he developed a great interest in owls. He thought of them as embodying characteristics he admired, and he liked to think of himself as owlish. Besides the many owl statuettes that adorned his house, he had an owl-related guest book. It turned out that whenever he took a shine to someone, he asked them to draw an owl and write something to him in this book. As he extended this book to me and explained its significance, I felt both honored and horrified. Mostly horrified. All the more because my creation was not to be buried somewhere in the middle of the book, but was to adornI fery last page.

I won’t dwell on the intensity of my discomfort or the poor quality of my artwork, although both were painfully clear. I tell this story as a prelude to the astonishment and joy I felt when I read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. On the opposite page are the before-and-after self-portraits of people who took a short course in drawing from the author, Betty Edwards. That is, they are the self-portraits drawn by the students when they entered her course and five days later when they had completed it.

Aren’t they amazing? At the beginning, these people didn’t look as though they had much artistic ability. Most of their pictures reminded me of my owl. But only a few days later, everybody could really draw! And Edwards swears that this is a typical group. It seems impossible.

Edwards agrees that most people view drawing as a magical ability that only a select few possess, and that only a select few will ever possess. But this is because people don’t understand the components—the learnable components—of drawing. Actually, she informs us, they are not drawing skills at all, but seeing skills. They are the ability to perceive edges, spaces, relationships,