Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Later, I’ll describe the project in which we taught junior high students the growth mindset. What I want to tell you now is how teaching them this mindset unleashed their effort. One day, we were introducing the growth mindset to a new group of students. All at once Jimmy—the most hard-core turned-off low-effort kid in the group—looked up with tears in his eyes and said, “You mean I don’t have to be dumb?” From that day on, he worked. He started staying up late to do his homework, which he never used to bother with at all. He started handing in assignments early so he could get feedback and revise them. He now believed that working hard was not something that made you vulnerable, but something that made you smarter.

Finding Your Brain

A close friend of mine recently handed me something he’d written, a poem-story that reminded me of Jimmy and his unleashed effort. My friend’s second-grade teacher, Mrs. Beer, had had each student draw and cut out a paper horse. She then lined up all the horses above the blackboard and delivered her growth-mindset message: “Your horse is only as fast as your brain. Every time you learn something, your horse will move ahead.”

My friend wasn’t so sure about the “brain” thing. His father had always told him, “You have too much mouth and too little brains for your own good.” Plus, his horse seemed to just sit at the starting gate while “everyone else’s brain joined the learning chase,” especially the brains of Hank and Billy, the class geniuses, whose horses jumped way ahead of everyone else’s. But my friend kept at it. To improve his skills, he kept reading the comics with his mother and he kept adding up the points when he played gin rummy with his grandmother.

And soon my sleek stallion

bolted forward like Whirlaway,

and there was no one

who was going to stop him.

Over the weeks and months

he flew forward overtaking

the others one by one.

In the late spring homestretch

Hank’sand Billy’s mounts were ahead

by just a few subtraction exercises, and

when the last bell of school rang,

my horse won—“By a nose!”

Then I knew I had a brain:

I had the horse to prove it.

—PAUL WORTMAN

Of course, learning shouldn’t really be a race. But this race helped my friend discover his brain and connect it up to his schooling.

The College Transition

Another transition, another crisis. College is when all the students who were the brains in high school are thrown together. Like our graduate students, yesterday they were king of the hill, but today who are they?

Nowhere is the anxiety of being dethroned more palpable than in pre-med classes. In the last chapter, I mentioned our study of tense but hopeful undergraduates taking their first college chemistry course. This is the course that would give them—or deny them—entrée to the premed curriculum, and it’s well known that students will go to almost any lengths to do well in this course.

At the beginning of the semester, we measured students’ mindsets, and then we followed them through the course, watching their grades and asking about their study strategies. Once again we found that the students with the growth mindset earned better grades in the course. Even when they did poorly on a particular test, they bounced back on the next ones. When students with the fixed mindset did poorly, they often didn’t make a comeback.

In this course, everybody studied. But there are different ways to study. Many students study like this: They read the textbook and their class notes. If the material is really hard, they read them again. Or they might try to memorize everything they can, like a vacuum cleaner. That’s how the students with the fixed mindset studied. If they did poorly on the test, they concluded that chemistry was not their subject. After all, “I did everything possible, didn’t I?”

Far from it. They would be shocked to find out what students with the growth mindset do. Even I find it remarkable.

The students with growth mindset completely took charge of their learning and motivation. Instead of plunging into unthinking memorization of the course material, they said: “I looked for themes and underlying principles across lectures,” and “I went over mistakes until I was certain I understood them.” They were studying to learn, not just to ace the test. And, actually, this was why they got higher grades—not because they were smarter or had a better background in science.

Instead of losing their motivation when the course got dry or difficult, they said: “I maintained my interest in the material.” “I stayed positive about taking chemistry.” “I kept myself motivated to study.” Even if they thought the textbook was boring or the instructor was a stiff, they didn’t let their motivation evaporate. That just made it all the more important to motivate themselves.