Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

The self-esteem movement encourages this kind of thinking and has even invented devices to help you confirm your superiority. I recently came across an ad for such a product. Two of my friends send me an illustrated list each year of the top ten things they didn’t get me for Christmas. From January through November, they clip candidate items from catalogs or download them from the Internet. In December, they select the winners. One of my all-time favorites is the pocket toilet, which you fold up and return to your pocket after using. This year my favorite was the I LOVE ME mirror, a mirror with I LOVE ME in huge capital letters written across the bottom half. By looking into it, you can administer the message to yourself and not wait for the outside world to announce your specialness.

Of course, the mirror is harmless enough. The problem is when special begins to mean better than others. A more valuable human being. A superior person. An entitled person.

Special, Superior, Entitled

John McEnroe had a fixed mindset: He believed that talent was all. He did not love to learn. He did not thrive on challenges; when the going got rough, he often folded. As a result, by his own admission, he did not fulfill his potential.

But his talent was so great that he was the number one tennis player in the world for four years. Here he tells us what it was like to be number one.

McEnroe used sawdust to absorb the sweat on his hands during a match. This time the sawdust was not to his liking, so he went over to the can of sawdust and knocked it over with his racket. His agent, Gary, came dashing over to find out what was wrong.

“You call that sawdust?” I said. I was actually screaming at him: The sawdust was ground too fine! “This looks like rat poison. Can’t you get anything right?” So Gary ran out and, twenty minutes later, came back with a fresh can of coarser sawdust … and twenty dollars less in his pocket: He’d had to pay a union employee to grind up a two-by-four. This is what it was like to be number one.

He goes on to tell us about how he once threw up all over a dignified Japanese lady who was hosting him. The ext day she bowed, apologized to him, and presented him with a gift. “This,” McEnroe proclaims, “is also what it was like to be number one.”

“Everything was about you … ‘Did you get everything you need? Is everything okay? We’ll pay you this, we’ll do that, we’ll kiss your behind.’ You only have to do what you want; your reaction to anything else is, ‘Get the hell out of here.’ For a long time I didn’t mind it a bit. Would you?”

So let’s see. If you’re successful, you’re better than other people. You get to abuse them and have them grovel. In the fixed mindset, this is what can pass for self-esteem.

As a contrast, let’s look at Michael Jordan—growth-minded athlete par excellence—whose greatness is regularly proclaimed by the world: “Superman,” “God in person,” “Jesus in tennis shoes.” If anyone has reason to think of himself as special, it’s he. But here’s what he said when his return to basketball caused a huge commotion: “I was shocked with the level of intensity my coming back to the game created.… People were praising me like I was a religious cult or something. That was very embarrassing. I’m a human being like everyone else.”

Jordan knew how hard he had worked to develop his abilities. He was a person who had struggled and grown, not a person who was inherently better than others.

Tom Wolfe, in The Right Stuff, describes the elite military pilots who eagerly embrace the fixed mindset. Having passed one rigorous test after another, they think of themselves as special, as people who were born smarter and braver than other people. But Chuck Yeager, the hero of The Right Stuff

, begged to differ. “There is no such thing as a natural-born pilot. Whatever my aptitude or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime’s learning experience.… The best pilots fly more than the others; that’s why they’re the best.” Like Michael Jordan, he was a human being. He just stretched himself farther than most.

In summary, people who believe in fixed traits feel an urgency to succeed, and when they do, they may feel more than pride. They may feel a sense of superiority, since success means that their fixed traits are better than other people’s.

However, lurking behind that self-esteem of the fixed mindset is a simple question: If you’re somebody when you’re successful, what are you when you’re unsuccessful?

MINDSETS CHANGE THE MEANING OF FAILURE