Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Edwards agrees that most people view drawing as a magical ability that only a select few possess, and that only a select few will ever possess. But this is because people don’t understand the components—the learnable components—of drawing. Actually, she informs us, they are not drawing skills at all, but seeing skills. They are the ability to perceive edges, spaces, relationships, lights and shadows, and the whole. Drawing requires us to learn each component skill and then combine them into one process. Some people simply pick up these skills in the natural course of their lives, whereas others have to work to learn them and put them together. But as we can see from the “after” self-portraits, everyone can do it.

Here’s what this means: Just because some people can do something with little or no training, it doesn’t mean that others can’t do it (and sometimes do it even better) with training. This is so important, because many, many people with the fixed mindset think that someone’s early performance tells you all you need to know about their talent and their future.

Jackson Pollock

It would have been a real shame if people discouraged Jackson Pollock for that reason. Experts agree that Pollock had little native talent for art, and when you look at his early products, it showed. They also agree that he became one of the greatest American painters of the twentieth century and that he revolutionized modern art. How did he go from point A to point B?

Twyla Tharp, the world-famous choreographer and dancer, wrote a book called The Creative Habit. As you can guess from the title, she argues that creativity is not a magical act of inspiration. It’s the result of hard work and dedication. Even for Mozart. Remember the movie Amadeus

? Remember how it showed Mozart easily churning out one masterpiece after another while Salieri, his rival, is dying of envy? Well, Tharp worked on that movie and she says: Hogwash! Nonsense! “There are no ‘natural’ geniuses.”

Dedication is how Jackson Pollock got from point A to point B. Pollock was wildly in love with the idea of being an artist. He thought about art all the time, and he did it all the time. Because he was so gung-ho, he got others to take him seriously and mentor him until he mastered all there was to master and began to produce startlingly original works. His “poured” paintings, each completely unique, allowed him to draw from his unconscious mind and conve a huge range of feeling. Several years ago, I was privileged to see a show of these paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I was stunned by the power and beauty of each work.

Can anyone do anything? I don’t really know. However, I think we can now agree that people can do a lot more than first meets the eye.

THE DANGER OF PRAISE AND POSITIVE LABELS

If people have such potential to achieve, how can they gain faith in their potential? How can we give them the confidence they need to go for it? How about praising their ability in order to convey that they have what it takes? In fact, more than 80 percent of parents told us it was necessary to praise children’s ability so as to foster their confidence and achievement. You know, it makes a lot of sense.

But then we began to worry. We thought about how people with the fixed mindset already focus too much on their ability: “Is it high enough?” “Will it look good?” Wouldn’t praising people’s ability focus them on it even more? Wouldn’t it be telling them that that’s what we value and, even worse, that we can read their deep, underlying ability from their performance? Isn’t that teaching them the fixed mindset?

Adam Guettel has been called the crown prince and savior of musical theater. He is the grandson of Richard Rodgers, the man who wrote the music to such classics as Oklahoma! and Carousel. Guettel’s mother gushes about her son’s genius. So does everyone else. “The talent is there and it’s major,” raved a review in The New York Times. The question is whether this kind of praise encourages people.

What’s great about research is that you can ask these kinds of questions and then go get the answers. So we conducted studies with hundreds of students, mostly early adolescents. We first gave each student a set of ten fairly difficult problems from a nonverbal IQ test. They mostly did pretty well on these, and when they finished we praised them.

We praised some of the students for their ability. They were told: “Wow, you got [say] eight right. That’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.” They were in the Adam Guettel you’re-so-talented position.