Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

rejected.

The Fixed-Mindset Reaction. At first you tell yourself that it was extremely competitive, so it doesn’t really reflect on you. They probably had more first-rate applicants than they could accept. Then the voice in your head starts in. It tells you that you’re fooling yourself, rationalizing. It tells you that the admissions committee found your work mediocre. After a while, you tell yourself it’s probably true. The work is probably ordinary, pedestrian, and they’d seen that. They were experts. The verdict is in and you’re not worthy.

With some effort you talk yourself back into your first, reasonable, and more flattering conclusion, and you feel better. In the fixed mindset (and in most cognitive therapies), that’s the end of it. You’ve regained your self- esteem, so the job is finished. But in the growth mindset, that’s just the first step. All you’ve done is talk to yourself. Now comes the learning and self-improvement part.

The Growth-Mindset Step. Think about your goal and think about what you could do to stay on track toward achieving it. What steps could you take to help yourself succeed? What information could you gather?

Well, maybe you could apply to more schools next time. Or maybe, in the meantime, you could gather more information about what makes a good application: What are they looking for? What experiences do they value? You could seek out those experiences before the next application.

Since this is a true story, I know what step the rejected applicant took. She was given some strong growth- mindset advice and, a few days later, she called the school. When she located the relevant person and told him the situation, she said, “I don’t want to dispute your decion. I just want to know, if I decide to apply again in the future, how I can improve my application. I would be very grateful if you could give me some feedback along those lines.”

Nobody scoffs at an honest plea for helpful feedback. Several days later, he called her back and offered her admission. It had indeed been a close call and, after reconsidering her application, the department decided they could take one more person that year. Plus, they liked her initiative.

She had reached out for information that would allow her to learn from experience and improve in the future. It turned out in this case that she didn’t have to improve her application. She got to plunge right into learning in her new graduate program.

Plans That You’ll Carry Out and Ones That You Won’t

The key part of our applicant’s reaction was her call to the school to get more information. It wasn’t easy. Every day people plan to do difficult things, but they don’t do them. They think, “I’ll do it tomorrow,” and they swear to themselves that they’ll follow through the next day. Research by Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues shows that vowing, even intense vowing, is often useless. The next day comes and the next day goes.

What works is making a vivid, concrete plan: “Tomorrow during my break, I’ll get a cup of tea, close the door to my office, and call the graduate school.” Or, in another case: “On Wednesday morning, right after I get up and brush my teeth, I’ll sit at my desk and start writing my report.” Or: “Tonight, right after the dinner dishes are done, I’ll sit down with my wife in the living room and have that discussion. I’ll say to her, ‘Dear, I’d like to talk about something that I think will make us happier.’ ”

Think of something you need to do, something you want to learn, or a problem you have to confront. What is it? Now make a concrete plan. When will you follow through on your plan? Where will you do it? How will you do it? Think about it in vivid detail.

These concrete plans—plans you can visualize—about when, where, and how you are going to do something lead to really high levels of follow-through, which, of course, ups the chances of success.

So the idea is not only to make a growth-mindset plan, but also to visualize, in a concrete way, how you’re going to carry it out.

Feeling Bad, But Doing Good

Let’s go back a few paragraphs to when you were rejected by the graduate school. Suppose your attempt to make yourself feel better had failed. You could still have taken the growth-mindset step. You can feel miserable and still reach out for information that will help you improve.

Sometimes after I have a setback, I go through the process of talking to myself about what it means and how I plan to deal with it. Everything seems fine—until I sleep on it. In my sleep, I have dream after dream of loss, failure, or rejection, depending on what happened. Once when I’d experienced a loss, I went to sleep and had the following dreams: My hair fell out, my teeth fell out, I had a baby and it died, and so on. Another time when I felt rejected, my dreams generated countless rejection experiences—real and imagined. In each instance, the incident triggered a theme, and my too-active imagination gathered up all the variations on the theme to place before me. When I woke up, I felt as though I’d been through the wars.

It would be nice if this didn’t happen, but it’s irrelevant. It might be easier to mobilize for action if I felt better, but it doesn’t matter. The plan is the plan. Remember the depressed students with the growth mindset? The worse they felt, the more they did the constructive thing. The less they felt like it, the more they made themselves do it.

The critical thing is to make a concrete, growth-oriented plan, and to stick to it.

The Number One Draft Choice

The last dilemma seemed hard, but, basically, it was solved by a phone call. Now imagine you’re a promising quarterback. In fact, you’re the winner of the Heisman trophy, college football’s highest award. You’re the top draft pick of the Philadelphia Eagles, the team you’ve always dreamed of playing for. So what’s the dilemma?

The Second Dilemma. The pressure is overwhelming. You yearn for playing time in the games, but every time they put you in a game to try you out, you turn anxious and lose your focus. You were always cool under pressure, but this is the pros. Now all you see are giant guys coming toward you—twelve hundred pounds of giant guys who want to take you apart. Giant guys who move faster than you ever thought possible. You feel cornered … helpless.

The Fixed-Mindset Reaction. You torture yourself with the idea that a quarterback is a leader and you’re no leader. How could you ever inspire the confidence of your teammates when you can’t get your act together to throw a good pass or scramble for a few yards? To make things worse, the sportscasters keep asking, What happened to the boy wonder?

To minimize the humiliation you begin to keep to yourself and, to avoid the sportscasters, you disappear into the locker room right after the game.

Whoa. Is this a recipe for success? What steps could you take to make things better? Think about the resources at your disposal and how you could use them. But first, get your mindset turned around.

The Growth-Mindset Step. In the growth mindset, you tell yourself that the switch to the professionals is a huge step, one that takes a lot of adjustment and a lot of learning. There are many things you couldn’t possibly know yet and that you’d better start finding out about.

You try to spend more time with the veteran quarterbacks, asking them questions and watching tapes with them. Instead of hiding your insecurities, you talk about how different it is from college. They, in turn, tell you that’s exactly how they felt. In fact, they share their humiliating stories with you.

You ask them what they did to overcome the initial difficulties and they teach you their mental and physical techniques. As you begin to feel more integrated into the team, you realize you’re part of an organization that wants to help you grow, not judge and belittle you. Rather than worrying that they overpaid for your talent, you begin to give them their money’s worth of incredibly hard work and team spirit.