Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

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 Cézanne’s early paintlling. On my way there, I wondered who Cézanne was and what his paintings were like before he was the painter we know today. I was intensely curious because Cézanne 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 Cézanne, many did not. Was the early Cézanne not talented? Or did it just take time for Cézanne to become Cézanne?

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 poured into the street, and we all wanted taxis. I remember it clearly. It was after midnight, it was seven degrees, there was a strong wind, and, as time went on, I became more and more miserable. There I was, part of an undifferentiated crowd. What chance did I have? Suddenly, a taxi pulled up right next to me. The handle of the back door lined up perfectly with my hand, and as I entered, the driver announced, “You were different.” I lived for these moments. Not only was I special. It could be detected from a distance.