Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Jack Welch, the growth-minded CEO, had a completely different reaction to one of General Electric’s fiascos. In 1986, General Electric bought Kidder, Peabody, a Wall Street investment banking firm. Soon after the deal closed, Kidder, Peabody was hit with a big insider trading scandal. A few years later, calamity struck again in the form of Joseph Jett, a trader who made a bunch of fictitious trades, to the tune of hundreds of millions, to pump up his bonus. Welch phoned fourteen of his top GE colleagues to tell them the bad news and to apologize personally. “I blamed myself for the disaster,” Welch said.

Mindset and Depression

Maybe Bernard Loiseau, the French chef, was just depressed. Were you thinking that?

As a psychologist and an educator, I am vitally interested in depression. It runs wild on college campuses, especially in February and March. The winter is not over, the summer is not in sight, work has piled up, and relationships are often frayed. Yet it’s been clear to me for a long time that different students handle depression in dramatically different ways. Some let everything slide. Others, though feeling wretched, hang on. They drag themselves to class, keep up with their work, and take care of themselves—so that when they feel better, their lives are intact.

Not long ago, we decided to see whether mindsets play a role in this difference. To find out, we measured students’ mindsets and then had them keep an online “diary” for three weeks in February and March. Every day they answered questions about their mood, their activities, and how they were coping with prems. Here’s what we discovered.

First, the students with the fixed mindset had higher levels of depression. Our analyses showed that this was because they ruminated over their problems and setbacks, essentially tormenting themselves with the idea that the setbacks meant they were incompetent or unworthy: “It just kept circulating in my head: You’re a dope.” “I just couldn’t let go of the thought that this made me less of a man.” Again, failures labeled them and left them no route to success.

And the more depressed they felt, the more they let things go; the less they took action to solve their problems. For example, they didn’t study what they needed to, they didn’t hand in their assignments on time, and they didn’t keep up with their chores.

Although students with the fixed mindset showed more depression, there were still plenty of people with the growth mindset who felt pretty miserable, this being peak season for depression. And here we saw something really amazing. The more depressed people with the growth mindset felt, the more they took action to confront their problems, the more

they made sure to keep up with their schoolwork, and the more they kept up with their lives. The worse they felt, the more determined they became!

In fact, from the way they acted, it might have been hard to know how despondent they were. Here is a story a young man told me.

I was a freshman and it was the first time I had been away from home. Everyone was a stranger, the courses were hard, and as the year wore on I felt more and more depressed. Eventually, it reached a point where I could hardly get out of bed in the morning. But every day I forced myself to get up, shower, shave, and do whatever it was I needed to do. One day I really hit a low point and I decided to ask for help, so I went to the teaching assistant in my psychology course and asked for her advice.

“Are you going to your classes?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Are you keeping up with your reading?”

“Yes.”

“Are you doing okay on your exams?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” she informed me, “then you’re not depressed.”

Yes, he was depressed, but he was coping the way people in the growth mindset tend to cope—with determination.

Doesn’t temperament have a lot to do with it? Aren’t some people sensitive by nature, while others just let things roll off their backs? Temperament certainly plays a role, but mindset is the most important part of the story. When we taught people the growth mindset, it completely changed the way they reacted to their depressed mood. The worse they felt, the more motivated they became and the more they confronted the problems that faced them.

In short, when people believe in fixed traits, they are always in danger of being measured by a failure. It can define them in a permanent way. Smart or talented as they may be, this mindset seems to rob them of their coping resources.

When people believe their basic qalities can be developed, failures may still hurt, but failures don’t define them. And if abilities can be expanded—if change and growth are possible—then there are still many paths to success.

MINDSETS CHANGE THE MEANING OF EFFORT