Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

• Are there situations where you get stupid—where you disengage your intelligence? Next time you’re in one of those situations, get yourself into a growth mindset—think about learning and improvement, not judgment—and hook it back up.

• Do you label your kids? This one is the artist and that one is the scientist. Next time, remember that you’re not helping them—even though you may be praising them. Remember our study where praising kids’ ability lowered their IQ scores. Find a growth-mindset way to compliment them.

• More than half of our society belongs to a negatively stereotyped group. First you have all the women, and then you have all the other groups who are not supposed to be good at something or other. Give them the gift of the growth mindset. Create an environment that teaches the growth mindset to the adults and children in your life, especially the ones who are targets of negative stereotypes. Even when the negative label comes along, they’ll remain in charge of their learning.

Chapter 4

SPORTS: THE MINDSET OF A CHAMPION

In sports, everybody believes in talent. Even—or especially—the experts. In fact, sports is where the idea of “a natural” comes from—someone who looks like an athlete, moves like an athlete, and is an athlete, all without trying. So great is the belief in natural talent that many scouts and coaches search only for naturals, and teams will vie with each other to pay exorbitant amounts to recruit them.

Billy Beane was a natural. Everyone agreed he was the next Babe Ruth.

But Billy Beane lacked one thing. The mindset of a champion.

As Michael Lewis tells us in Moneyball, by the time Beane was a sophomore in high school, he was the highest scorer on the basketball team, the quarterback of the football team, and the best hitter on the baseball team, batting .500 in one of the toughest leagues in the country. His talent was real enough.

But the minute things went wrong, Beane searched for something to break. “It wasn’t merely that he didn’t like to fail; it was as if he didn’t know how to fail.”

As he moved up in baseball from the minor leagues to the majors, things got worse and worse. Each at-bat became a nightmare, another opportunity for humiliation, and with every botched at-bat, he went to pieces. As one scout said, “Billy was of the opinion that he should never make an out.” Sound familiar?

Did Beane try to fix his problems in constructive ways? No, of course not, because this is a story of the fixed mindset. Natural talent should not need effort. Effort is for the others, the less endowed. Natural talent does not ask for help. It is an admission of weakness. In short, the natural does not analyze his deficiencies and coach or practice them away. The very idea of deficiencies is terrifying.

Being so imbued with the fixed mindset, Beane was trapped. Trapped by his huge talent. Beane the player never recovered from the fixed mindset, but Beane the incredibly successful major-league executive did. How did this happen?

There was another player who lived and played side by side with Beane in the minors and in the majors, Lenny Dykstra. Dykstra did not have a fraction of Beane’s physical endowment or “natural ability,” but Beane watched him in awe. As Beane later described, “He had no concept of failure.… And I was the opposite.”

Beane continues, “I started to get a sense of what a baseball player was and I could see it wasn’t me. It was Lenny.”

As he watched, listened, and mulled it over, it dawned on Beane that mindset was more important than talent. And not long after that, as part of a group that pioneered a radically new approach to scouting and managing, he came to believe that scoring runs—the whole point of baseball—was much more about process than about talent.

Armed with these insights, Beane, as general manager of the 2002 Oakland Athletics, led his team to a season of 103 victories—winning the division championship and almost breaking the American League record for consecutive wins. The team had the second lowest payroll in baseball! They didn’t buy talent, they bought mindset.

THE IDEA OF THE NATURAL

Now You See It, Now You Don’t