creating a score when things aren’t completely perfect, when you’re not feeling so well about your swing.”
Tiger is a hugely ambitious man. He wants to be the best, even the best ever. “But the best me—that’s a little more important.”
Mia Hamm tells us, “After every game or practice, if you walk off the field knowing that you gave everything you had, you will always be a winner.” Why did the country fall in love with her team? “They saw that we truly love what we do and that we gave everything we had to each other and to each game.”
For those with the fixed mindset, success is about establishing their superiority, pure and simple. Being that somebody who is worthier than the nobodies. “There was a time—I’ll admit it,” McEnroe says, “when my head was so big it could barely fit through the door.” Where’s the talk about effort and personal best? There is none. “Some people don’t want to rehearse; they just want to perform. Other people want to practice a hundred times first. I’m in the former group.” Remember, in the fixed mindset, effort is not a cause for pride. It is something that casts doubt on your talent.
Finding #2: Those with the growth mindset found setbacks motivating. They’re informative. They’re a wake- up call.
Only once did Michael Jordan try to coast. It was the year he returned to the Bulls after his stint in baseball, and he learned his lesson. The Bulls were eliminated in the play-offs. “You can’t leave and think you can come back and dominate this game. I will be physically and mentally prepared from now on.” Truer words are rarely spoken. The Bulls won the NBA title the next three years.
Michael Jordan embraced his failure >ve missed more than nine thousand shots. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot, and missed.” You can be sure that each time, he went back and practiced the shot a hundred times.
Here’s how Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the great basketball player, reacted when college basketball outlawed his signature shot, the dunk (later reinstated). Many thought that would stop his ascent to greatness. Instead, he worked twice as hard on developing other shots: his bank shot off the glass, his skyhook, and his turnaround jumper. He had absorbed the growth mindset from Coach Wooden, and put it to good use.
In the fixed mindset, setbacks label you.
John McEnroe could never stand the thought of losing. Even worse was the thought of losing to someone who was a friend or relative. That would make him less special. For example, he hoped desperately for his best friend, Peter, to lose in the finals at Maui after Peter had beaten him in an earlier round. He wanted it so badly he couldn’t watch the match. Another time, he played his brother Patrick in a finals in Chicago, and said to himself, “God, if I lose to Patrick, that’s it. I’m jumping off the Sears tower.”
Here’s how failure motivated him. In 1979, he played mixed doubles at Wimbledon. He didn’t play mixed doubles again for twenty years. Why? He and his partner lost in three straight sets. Plus, McEnroe lost his serve twice, while no one else lost theirs even once. “That was the ultimate embarrassment. I said, ‘That’s it. I’m never playing again. I can’t handle this.’ ”
In 1981, McEnroe bought a beautiful black Les Paul guitar. That week, he went to see Buddy Guy play at the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago. Instead of feeling inspired to take lessons or practice, McEnroe went home and smashed his guitar to pieces.
Here’s how failure motivated Sergio Garcia, another golden boy with mindset issues. Garcia had taken the golf world by storm with his great shots and his charming, boyish ways; he seemed like a younger Tiger. But when his performance took a dive, so did his charm. He fired caddie after caddie, blaming them for everything that went wrong. He once blamed his shoe when he slipped and missed a shot. To punish the shoe, he threw it and kicked it. Unfortunately, he almost hit an official. These are the ingenious remedies for failure in the fixed mindset.
Finding #3: People with the growth mindset in sports (as in pre-med chemistry) took charge of the processes that bring success—and that maintain it.
How come Michael Jordan’s skill didn’t seem to decline with age? He did lose some stamina and agility with age, but to compensate, he worked even harder on conditioning and on his moves, like the turnaround jump shot and his celebrated fallaway jumper. He came into the league as a slam-dunker and he left as the most complete player ever to grace the game.
Woods, too, takes charge of the process. Golf is like a wayward lover. When you think you’ve conquered her, she will certainly desert you. Butch Harmon, the renowned coach, says “the golf swing is just about the farthest thing from a perfectible discipline in athletics.… The most reliable swings are only relatively repeatable. They never stop being works in progress.” Th’s why even the biggest golf star wins only a fraction of the time, and may not win for long periods of time (which happened to Woods in the 2003 and 2004 seasons). And that’s also why taking charge of the process is so crucial.
With this in mind, Tiger’s dad made sure to teach him how to manage his attention and his course strategy. Mr. Woods would make loud noises or throw things just as little Tiger was about to swing. This helped him become less distractible. (Do we know someone else who could have profited from this training?) When Tiger was three years old, his dad was already teaching him to think about course management. After Tiger drove the ball behind a big clump of trees, Mr. Woods asked the toddler what his plan was.
Woods carries on what his dad started by taking control of all parts of his game. He experiments constantly with what works and what doesn’t, but he also has a long-term plan that guides him: “I know my game. I know what I want to achieve, I know how to get there.”
Like Michael Jordan, Woods manages his motivation. He does this by making his practice into fun: “I love working on shots, carving them this way and that, and proving to myself that I can hit a certain shot on command.” And he does it by thinking of a rival out there somewhere who will challenge him: “He’s twelve. I have to give myself a reason to work so hard. He’s out there somewhere. He’s twelve.”
Mark O’Meara, Woods’s golf partner and friend, had a choice. It’s not easy to play beside someone as extraordinary as Woods. O’Meara’s choice was this: He could feel jealous of and diminished by Woods’s superior play, or he could learn from it. He chose the latter path. O’Meara was one of those talented players who never seemed to fulfill his potential. His choice—to take charge of his game—turned him around.
At the age of twenty-one, Woods had won the Masters Tournament. That night, he slept with his arms around his prize, the famous green jacket. One year later, he put a green jacket on Mark O’Meara.
From McEnroe, we hear little talk of taking control. When he was on top, we hear little mention of working on his game to stay on top. When he was doing poorly, we hear little self-reflection or analysis (except to pin the blame). For example, when he didn’t do as well as expected for part of ’82, we hear that “little things happened that kept me off my game for weeks at a time and prevented me from dominating the tour.”
Always a victim of outside forces. Why didn’t he take charge and learn how to perform well in spite of them? That’s not the way of the fixed mindset. In fact, rather than combating those forces or fixing his problems, he tells us he wished he played a team sport, so he could conceal his flaws: “If you’re not at your peak, you can hide it so much easier in a team sport.”
McEnroe also admits that his on-court temper tantrums were often a cover for choking and only made things worse. So what did he do? Nothing. He wished someone else would do it for him. “When you can’t control yourself, you want someone to do it for you—that’s where I acutely missed being part of a team sport.… People would have worked with me, coached me.”
Or: “The system let me get away with more and more … I really liked it less and less.” He got mad at the system! Hi there, John. This was
No, because 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.
Does a star have less responsibility to the team than other players? Is it just their role to be great and win games? Or does a star have
