Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

We praised other students for their effort: “Wow, you got [say] eight right. That’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.” They were not made to feel that they had some special gift; they were praised for doing what it takes to succeed.

Both groups were exactly equal to begin with. But right after the praise, they began to differ. As we feared, the ability praise pushed students right into the fixed mindset, and they showed all the signs of it, too: When we gave them a choice, they rejected a challenging new task that they could learn from. They didn’t want to do anything that could expose their flaws and call into question their talent.

When Guettel was thirteen, he was all set to star in a Metropolitan Opera broadcast and TV movie of Amahl and the Night Visitors. He bowed out, saying that his voice had broken. “I kind of faked that my voice was changing.… I didn’t want to handle the pressure.”

In contrast, when students were praised for effort, 90 percent of them wanted the challenging new task that they could learn from.

Then we gave students some hard new problems, which they didn’t do so well on. Thewe ds now thought they were not smart after all. If success had meant they were intelligent, then less-than-success meant they were deficient.

Guettel echoes this. “In my family, to be good is to fail. To be very good is to fail.… The only thing not a failure is to be great.”

The effort kids simply thought the difficulty meant “Apply more effort.” They didn’t see it as a failure, and they didn’t think it reflected on their intellect.

What about the students’ enjoyment of the problems? After the success, everyone loved the problems, but after the difficult problems, the ability students said it wasn’t fun anymore. It can’t be fun when your claim to fame, your special talent, is in jeopardy.

Here’s Adam Guettel: “I wish I could just have fun and relax and not have the responsibility of that potential to be some kind of great man.” As with the kids in our study, the burden of talent was killing his enjoyment.

The effort-praised students still loved the problems, and many of them said that the hard problems were the most fun.

We then looked at the students’ performance. After the experience with difficulty, the performance of the ability-praised students plummeted, even when we gave them some more of the easier problems. Losing faith in their ability, they were doing worse than when they started. The effort kids showed better and better performance. They had used the hard problems to sharpen their skills, so that when they returned to the easier ones, they were way ahead.

Since this was a kind of IQ test, you might say that praising ability lowered the students’ IQs. And that praising their effort raised them.

Guettel was not thriving. He was riddled with obsessive-compulsive tics and bitten, bleeding fingers. “Spend a minute with him—it takes only one—and a picture of the terror behind the tics starts to emerge,” says an interviewer. Guettel has also fought serious, recurrent drug problems. Rather than empowering him, the “gift” has filled him with fear and doubt. Rather than fulfilling his talent, this brilliant composer has spent most of his life running from it.

One thing is hopeful—his recognition that he has his own life course to follow that is not dictated by other people and their view of his talent. One night he had a dream about his grandfather. “I was walking him to an elevator. I asked him if I was any good. He said, rather kindly, ‘You have your own voice.’ ”

Is that voice finally emerging? For the score of The Light in the Piazza

, an intensely romantic musical, Guettel won the 2005 Tony Award. Will he take it as praise for talent or praise for effort? I hope it’s the latter.

There was one more finding in our study that was striking and depressing at the same time. We said to each student: “You know, we’re going to go to other schools, and I bet the kids in those schools would like to know about the problems.” So we gave students a page to write out their thoughts, but we also left a space for them to write the scores they had received on the problems.

Would you believe that almost 40 percent of the ability-praised students lied about their scores? And always in one direction. In the fixed mindset, imperfections are shameful—especially if you’re talented—so they lied them away.

What’s so alarming is that we took ordinary children and made them into liars, simply by telling em they were smart.

Right after I wrote these paragraphs, I met with a young man who tutors students for their College Board exams. He had come to consult with me about one of his students. This student takes practice tests and then lies to him about her score. He is supposed to tutor her on what she doesn’t know, but she can’t tell him the truth about what she doesn’t know! And she is paying money for this.