Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

That’s the championship mentality. It’s how people who are not as talented as their opponents win games. John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, tells one of my favorite stories. Once, while Wooden was still a high school coach, a player was unhappy because he wasn’t included in the big games. The player, Eddie Pawelski, begged Wooden to give him a chance, and Wooden relented. “All right Eddie,” he said, “I’ll give you a chance. I’ll start you against Fort Wayne Central tomorrow night.”

“Suddenly,” Wooden tells us, “I wondered where those words came from.” Three teams were locked in a battle for number one in Indiana—one was his team and another was Fort Wayne Central, tomorrow night’s team.

The next night, Wooden started Eddie. He figured that Eddie would last at most a minute or two, especially since he was up against Fort Wayne’s Armstrong, the toughest player in the state.

“Eddie literally took him apart,” Wooden reports. “Armstrong got the lowest point total of his career. Eddie scored 12, and our team showed the best balance of all season.… But in addition to his scoring, his defense, rebounding, and play-making were excellent.” Eddie never sat out again and was named most valuable player for the next two years.

All of these people had character. None of them thought they were special people, born with the right to win. They were people who worked hard, who learned how to keep their focus under pressure, and who stretched beyond their ordinary abilities when they had to.

Staying on Top

Character is what allows you to reach the top and stay there. Darryl Strawberry, Mike Tyson, and Martina Hingis reached the top, but they didn’t stay there. Isn’t that because they had all kinds of personal problems and injuries? Yes, but so have many other champions. Ben Hogan was hit by a bus and was physically destroyed, but he made it back to the top.

“I believe ability can get you to the top,” says coach John Wooden, “but it takes character to keep you there.… It’s so easy to … begin thinking you can just ‘turn it on’ automatically, without proper preparation. It takes real character to keep working as hard or even harder once you’re there. When you read about an athlete or team that wins over and over and over, remind yourself, ‘More than ability, they have character.’ ”

Let’s take an even deeper look at what character means, and how the growth mindset creates it. Stuart Biddle and his colleagues measured adolescents’ and young adults’ mindset about athletic ability. Those with the fixed mindset were the people who believed that:

“You have a certain level of ability in sports and you cannot really do much to change that level.”

“To be good at sports you need to be naturally gifted.”

In contrast, the people with the growth mindset agreed that:

“How good you are at sports will always improve if you work harder at it.”

“To be successful in sports, you need to learn techniques and skills and practice them regularly.”

Those with the growth mindset were the ones who showed the most character or heart. They were the ones who had the minds of champions. What do I mean? Let’s look at the findings from these sports researchers and see.

WHAT IS SESS?

Finding #1: Those with the growth mindset found success in doing their best, in learning and improving. And this is exactly what we find in the champions.

“For me the joy of athletics has never resided in winning,” Jackie Joyner-Kersee tells us, “… I derive just as much happiness from the process as from the results. I don’t mind losing as long as I see improvement or I feel I’ve done as well as I possibly could. If I lose, I just go back to the track and work some more.”

This idea—that personal success is when you work your hardest to become your best—was central to John Wooden’s life. In fact, he says, “there were many, many games that gave me as much pleasure as any of the ten national championship games we won, simply because we prepared fully and played near our highest level of ability.”

Tiger Woods and Mia Hamm are two of the fiercest competitors who ever lived. They love to win, but what counted most for them is the effort they made even when they didn’t win. They could be proud of that. McEnroe and Beane could not.

After the ’98 Masters tournament, Woods was disappointed that he did not repeat his win of the previous year, but he felt good about his top-ten finish: “I squeezed the towel dry this week. I’m very proud of the way I hung in there.” Or after a British Open, where he finished third: “Sometimes you get even more satisfaction out of creating a score when things aren’t completely perfect, when you’re not feeling so well about your swing.”

Tiger is a hugely ambitious man. He wants to be the best, even the best ever. “But the best me—that’s a little more important.”