Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

school one day and says to you, “Some kids are smart and some kids are dumb. They have a worse brain.” You’re appalled. “Who told you that?” you ask him, gearing up to complain to the school. “I figured it out myself,” he says proudly. He saw that some children could read and write their letters and add a lot of numbers, and others couldn’t. He drew his conclusion. And he held fast to it.

Your son is precocious in all aspects of the fixed mindset, and soon the mindset is in full flower. He develops a distaste for effort—he wants his smart brain to churn things out quickly for him. And it often does.

When he takes to chess very quickly, your spouse, thinking to inspire him, rents the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, a film about a young chess champion. What your son learns from the film is that you could lose and not be a champion anymore. So he retires. “I’m a chess champion,” he announces to one and all. A champion who won’t play.

Because he now understands what losing means, he takes further steps to avoid it. He starts cheating at Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, and other games.

He talks often about all the things he can do and other children can’t. When you and your spouse tell him that other children aren’t dumb, they just haven’t practiced as much as he has, he refuses to believe it. He watches things carefully at school and then comes home and reports, “Even when the teacher shows us something new, I can do it better than them. I don’t have to practice.”

This boy is invested in his brain—not in making it grow but in singing its praises. You’ve already told him that it’s about practice and learning, not smart and dumb, but he doesn’t buy it. What else can you do? What are other ways you can get the message across?

The Growth-Mindset Step. You decide that, rather than trying to talk him out of the fixed mindset, you have to live the growth mindset. At the dinner table each evening, you and your partner structure the discussion around the growth mindset, asking each child (and each other): “What did you learn today?” “What mistake did you make that taught you something?” “What did you try hard at today?” You go around the table with each question, excitedly discussing your own and one another’s effort, strategies, setbacks, and learning.

You talk about skills you have today that you didn’t have yesterday because of the ctice you put in. You dramatize mistakes you made that held the key to the solution, telling it like a mystery story. You describe with relish things you’re struggling with and making progress on. Soon the children can’t wait each night to tell their stories. “Oh my goodness,” you say with wonder, “you certainly did get smarter today!”

When your fixed-mindset son tells stories about doing things better than other children, everyone says, “Yeah, but what did you learn?” When he talks about how easy everything is for him in school, you all say, “Oh, that’s too bad. You’re not learning. Can you find something harder to do so you could learn more?” When he boasts about being a champ, you say, “Champs are the people who work the hardest. You can become a champ. Tomorrow tell me something you’ve done to become a champ.” Poor kid, it’s a conspiracy. In the long run, he doesn’t stand a chance.

When he does his homework and calls it easy or boring, you teach him to find ways to make it more fun and challenging. If he has to write words, like boy, you ask him, “How many words can you think of that rhyme with boy? Write them on separate paper and later we can try to make a sentence that has all the words.” When he finishes his homework, you play that game: “The boy threw the toy into the soy sauce.” “The girl with the cirl [curl] ate a pirl [pearl].” Eventually, he starts coming up with his own ways to make his homework more challenging.

And it’s not just school or sports. You encourage the children to talk about ways they learned to make friends, or ways they’re learning to understand and help others. You want to communicate that feats of intellect or physical prowess are not all you care about.

For a long time, your son remains attracted to the fixed mindset. He loves the idea that he’s inherently special—case closed. He doesn’t love the idea that he has to work every day for some little gain in skill or knowledge. Stardom shouldn’t be so taxing. Yet as the value system in the family shifts toward the growth mindset, he wants to be a player. So at first he talks the talk (squawking), then he walks the walk (balking). Finally, going all the way, he becomes the mindset watchdog. When anyone in the family slips into fixed-mindset thinking, he delights in catching them. “Be careful what you wish for,” you joke to your spouse.

The fixed mindset is so very tempting. It seems to promise children a lifetime of worth, success, and admiration just for sitting there and being who they are. That’s why it can take a lot of work to make the growth mindset flourish where the fixed mindset has taken root.

Effort Gone Awry

Sometimes the problem with a child isn’t too little effort. It’s too much. And for the wrong cause. We’ve all heard about schoolchildren who stay up past midnight every night studying. Or children who are sent to tutors so they can outstrip their classmates. These children are working hard, but they’re typically not in a growth mindset. They’re not focused on love of learning. They’re usually trying to prove themselves to their parents.

And in some cases, the parents may like what comes out of this high effort: the grades, the awards, the admission to top schools. Let’s see how you would handle this one.

The Dilemma. You’re proud of your daughter. She’s at the top of her class and brging home straight A’s. She’s a flute player studying with the best teacher in the country. And you’re confident she’ll get into the top private high school in the city. But every morning before school, she gets an upset stomach, and some days she throws up. You keep feeding her a blander and blander diet to soothe her sensitive stomach, but it doesn’t help. It never occurs to you that she’s a nervous wreck.

When your daughter is diagnosed with an ulcer, it should be a wake-up call, but you and your spouse remain asleep. You continue to see it as a gastrointestinal issue. The doctor, however, insists that you consult a family counselor. He tells you it’s a mandatory part of your daughter’s treatment and hands you a card with the counselor’s name and number.

The Fixed-Mindset Reactions. The counselor tells you to ease up on your daughter: Let her know it’s okay not to work so hard. Make sure she gets more sleep. So you, dutifully following the instructions, make sure she gets to sleep by ten o’clock each night. But this only makes things worse. She now has less time to accomplish all the things that are expected of her.

Despite what the counselor has said, it doesn’t occur to you that she could possibly want your daughter to fall behind other students. Or be less accomplished at the flute. Or risk not getting into the top high school. How could that be good for her?

The counselor realizes she has a big job. Her first goal is to get you more fully in touch with the seriousness of the problem. The second goal is to get you to understand your role in the problem. You and your spouse need to see that it’s your need for perfection that has led to the problem. Your daughter wouldn’t have run herself ragged if she hadn’t been afraid of losing your approval. The third goal is to work out a concrete plan that you can all follow.

Can you think of some concrete things that can be done to help your daughter enter a growth mindset so she can ease up and get some pleasure from her life?

The Growth-Mindset Step. The plan the counselor suggests would allow your daughter to start enjoying the things she does. The flute lessons are put on hold. Your daughter is told she can practice as much or as little as she wants for the pure joy of the music and nothing else.

She is to study her school materials to learn from them, not to cram everything possible into her head. The counselor refers her to a tutor who teaches her how to study for understanding. The tutor also discusses the material with her in a way that makes it interesting and enjoyable. Studying now has a new meaning. It isn’t about getting the highest grade to prove her intelligence and worth to her parents. It’s about learning things and thinking about them in interesting ways.

Your daughter’s teachers are brought into the loop to support her in her reorientation toward growth. They’re asked to talk to her about (and praise her for) her learning process rather than how she did on tests. (“I can see