Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Let’s take a closer look at why, in the fixed mindset, it’s so crucial to be perfect right now. It’s because one test—or one evaluation—can measure you forever.

Twenty years ago, at the age of five, Loretta and her family came to the United States. A few days later, her mother took her to her new school, where they promptly gave her a test. The next thing she knew, she was in her kindergarten class—but it was not the Eagles, the elite kindergarten class.

As time passed, however, Loretta was transferred to the Eagles and she remained with that group of students until the end of high school, garnering a bundle of academic prizes along the way. Yet she never felt she belonged.

That first test, she was convinced, diagnosed her fixed ability and said that she was not a true Eagle. Never mind that she had been five years old and had just made a radical change to a new country. Or that maybe there hadn’t been room in the Eagles for a while. Or that maybe the school decided she would have an easier transition in a more low-key class. There are so many ways to understand what happened and what it meant. Unfortunately, she chose the wrong one. For in the world of the fixed mindset, there is no way to become an Eagle. If you were a true Eagle, you would have aced the test and been hailed as an Eagle at once.

Is Loretta a rare case, or is this kind of thinking more common than we realize?

To find out, we showed fifth graders a closed cardboard box and told them it had a test inside. This test, we said, measured an important school ability. We told them nothing more. Then we asked them questions about the test. First, we wanted to make sure that they’d accepted our description, so we asked them: How much do you think this test measures an important school ability? All of them had taken our word for it.

Next we asked: Do you think this test measures how smart you are? And: Do you think this test measures how smart you’ll be when you grow up?

Students with the growth mindset had taken our word that the test measured an important ability, but they didn’t think it measured how smart they were. And they certainly didn’t think it would tell them how smart they’d be when they grew up. In fact, one of them told us, “No way! Ain’t no test can do that.”

But the students with the fixed mindset didn’t simply believe the test could measure an important ability. They also believed—just as strongly—that it could measure how smart they were. And how smart they’d be when they grew up.

They granted one test the power to measure their most basic intelligence now and forever. They gave this test the power to define them. That’s why every success is so important.

Another Look at Potential

This leads us back to the idea of “potential” and to the question of whether tests or experts can tell us what our potential is, what we’re capable of, what our future will be. The fixed mindset says yes. You can simply measure the fixed ability right now and project it into the future. Just give the test or ask the expert. No crystal ball needed.

So common is the belief that potential can be known right now that Joseph P. Kennedy felt confident in telling Morton Downey Jr. that he would be a failure. What had Downey—later a famous television personality and author—done? Why, he had worn red socks and brown shoes to the Stork Club.

“Morton,” Kennedy told him, “I don’t know anybody I’ve ever met in my life wearing red socks and brown shoes who ever succeeded. Young man, let me tell you now, you do stand out, but you don’t stand out in a way that people will ever admire you.”

Many of the most accomplished people of our era were considered by experts to have no future. Jackson Pollock, Marcel Proust, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Lucille Ball, and Charles Darwin were all thought to have little potential for their chosen fields. And in some of these cases, it may well have been true that they did not stand out from the crowd early on.

But isn’t potential someone’s capacity to develop their skills with effort over time? And that’s just the point. How can we know where effort and time will take someone? Who knows—maybe the experts were right about Jackson, Marcel, Elvis, Ray, Lucille, and Charles—in terms of their skills at the time. Maybe they were not yet the people they were to become.

I once went to an exhibit in London of Paul Cezanne’s early paintlling. On my way there, I wondered who Cezanne was and what his paintings were like before he was the painter we know today. I was intensely curious because Cezanne is one of my favorite artists and the man who set the stage for much of modern art. Here’s what I found: Some of the paintings were pretty bad. They were overwrought scenes, some violent, with amateurishly painted people. Although there were some paintings that foreshadowed the later Cezanne, many did not. Was the early Cezanne not talented? Or did it just take time for Cezanne to become Cezanne?

People with the growth mindset know that it takes time for potential to flower. Recently, I got an angry letter from a teacher who had taken one of our surveys. The survey portrays a hypothetical student, Jennifer, who had gotten 65 percent on a math exam. It then asks teachers to tell us how they would treat her.

Teachers with the fixed mindset were more than happy to answer our questions. They felt that by knowing Jennifer’s score, they had a good sense of who she was and what she was capable of. Their recommendations abounded. Mr. Riordan, by contrast, was fuming. Here’s what he wrote.

To Whom It May Concern:

Having completed the educator’s portion of your recent survey, I must request that my results be excluded from the study. I feel that the study itself is scientifically unsound.…

Unfortunately, the test uses a faulty premise, asking teachers to make assumptions about a given student based on nothing more than a number on a page.… Performance cannot be based on one assessment. You cannot determine the slope of a line given only one point, as there is no line to begin with. A single point in time does not show trends, improvement, lack of effort, or mathematical ability.…

Sincerely,

Michael D. Riordan

I was delighted with Mr. Riordan’s critique and couldn’t have agreed with it more. An assessment at one point in time has little value for understanding someone’s ability, let alone their potential to succeed in the future.

It was disturbing how many teachers thought otherwise, and that was the point of our study.

The idea that one evaluation can measure you forever is what creates the urgency for those with the fixed mindset. That’s why they must succeed perfectly and immediately. Who can afford the luxury of trying to grow when everything is on the line right now?

Is there another way to judge potential? NASA thought so. When they were soliciting applications for astronauts, they rejected people with pure histories of success and instead selected people who had had significant failures and bounced back from them. Jack Welch, the celebrated CEO of General Electric, chose executives on the basis of “runway,” their capacity for growth. And remember Marina Semyonova, the famed ballet teacher, who chose the students who were energized by criticism. They were all rejecting the idea of fixed ability and selecting instead for mindset.

Proving You’re Special

When people with the fixed mindset opt for success over growth, what are they really trying to prove? That they’re special. Even superior.

When we asked them, “When do you feel smart?” so many of them talked about times they felt like a special person, someone who was different frm and better than other people.

Until I discovered the mindsets and how they work, I, too, thought of myself as more talented than others, maybe even more worthy than others because of my endowments. The scariest thought, which I rarely entertained, was the possibility of being ordinary. This kind of thinking led me to need constant validation. Every comment, every look was meaningful—it registered on my intelligence scorecard, my attractiveness scorecard, my likability scorecard. If a day went well, I could bask in my high numbers.

One bitter cold winter night, I went to the opera. That night, the opera was everything you hope for, and everyone stayed until the very end—not just the end of the opera, but through all the curtain calls. Then we all