To Accomplish More in Life, Love, and Your Career, Adopt This Simple Belief.

Are you a human who lives a life in this world?

What is the question your life is trying to answer? It’s not always obvious, because it’s often not even conscious, which makes it all the more interesting to ponder. While I’ve always been fascinated by the questions we spend our lives trying to answer, what I find even more interesting is what inspired the pursuit. Some of us can’t pinpoint that moment, some of us never even think about it.

Carol Dweck, an American psychologist who pioneered the study of human motivation, has spent her career trying to answer this question—researching the origins of people’s self-conceptions, learning how their beliefs influence their motivation, guiding their behavior and sense of self. Dweck can even pinpoint the exact moment the seed of this interest was planted.

Born in 1946, and raised in Brooklyn, Dweck recalls that when she entered Mrs. Wilson’s sixth-grade class at PS 153 in the late 1950s, the seats were arranged not by the students’ names, but by their IQs. Mrs. Wilson believed that a person’s IQ is a fixed trait—a carefully calibrated measure of a person’s intelligence and character. Therefore, as Mrs. Wilson’s spurious logic went, the kids with high IQs should be rewarded by having the best seats.

But that’s not all! The kids with the highest IQs were also afforded the privilege of erasing and cleaning the blackboard. Only the smartest kids could carry the flag during assembly, or bring a note to the principal. (Not for nothing, but if I were a low-IQ kid, I’d consider these perks.) So what of the students with low IQs? Well, Mrs. Wilson thought they were dumb, and must have believed that people should be punished for their “stupidity.”

Dweck was, not surprisingly, a high-IQ kid and had the best seat: seat one, row one. But good seats came with a price; if she did poorly on a state test, her seat assignment would change. Yet, within Mrs. Wilson’s eugenics-leaning framework, Dweck was quite successful. Positioning IQ as the defining marker of intelligence cast a strong impression on the sixth-grader. When we benefit from something, regardless of whether we buy into it or not, it can’t help but shape our worldview. For Dweck, it went even further, becoming the focal point of her academic and professional life.

The experience of being in Mrs. Wilson’s sixth-grade class planted the seed that germinated Dweck’s interest in intelligence and people’s ability to cope with failure and setbacks. Yet, due to Mrs. Wilson’s influence, she also carried the belief that intelligence is fixed and that the IQ’s role is to capture that fixed intelligence by grading it on a scale. Not only is that a warped misconception of IQ, it’s in direct opposition to its original intention, which was to identify and help struggling students—Big Ups, Alfred Binet!)

After high school, where she excelled, Dweck went on to study psychology at Barnard. She got her Master’s at Columbia and then went to Yale to get a Ph.D. in social and developmental psychology.

It was the late 1960s and the trending theory in psychology at Yale was “learned helplessness,” a concept developed by Martin Seligman (one of the leading authorities in Positive Psychology) that saw people falling back on maladaptive childlike behavior during stressful situations. Instead of relying on their problem-solving skills, they simply dissolved and waited to be saved by others. Learned helplessness is anchored in self-limiting beliefs about one’s ability to control what happens to them—because they believe they are helpless, they act helpless.

Learned helplessness called to Dweck. She wanted to know how our beliefs about our own intelligence impact our performance—whether there was a relationship between learned helplessness and poor academic performance. And do people’s beliefs influence the way they deal with failure? It was during her research on this issue that she landed upon the theory about human behavior that would define her career.

While at Yale, she studied fifth-grade students to see how they dealt with failure. She gave them a series of puzzles that were purposefully a bit too difficult. As the kids struggled to solve the puzzles, she was surprised by their responses. The kids were not daunted by the challenge because they did not view it through the lens of success vs. failure, which is how Dweck had seen it. Instead, the students were focused on learning. These kids seemed to understand something she didn’t—that abilities could grow through hard work.

There was no evidence that the students believed—as Dweck had—that failure was a confirmation of low intelligence. They didn’t buy into the notion that if you could avoid failing and ensure success, you could remain smart. All the ideas that Dweck had been carrying around with her since her sixth-grade year with Mrs. Wilson were being proven wrong by 10-year-olds.

Dweck had to wonder: Why do some kids thrive when faced with the possibility of failure, while others fear failure and convince themselves that performance and self-worth are synonymous?

The more she studied and watched, the more she realized that the way people dealt with failure seemed to be connected to an intrinsic belief about their own intelligence. Whatever attitude they held represented the way they viewed themselves. People who savored learning felt rewarded by challenges they were asked to solve, and paid no mind to whether people thought they were smart or not. The others, however, believed that failure meant they were stupid, and so they feared any challenge that might expose their stupidity, and would quit.

This is how Dweck hit upon the idea of mindsets. Either people were like Mrs. Wilson, and believed that IQ and character is fixed and your fate is set, or they believed IQ and character were flexible—like the 10-year-olds. But it was the belief itself that Dweck recognized was the most important element. What you believe influences not just our performance, but everything we do.

Mindset, she said, creates the conditions for a person’s personal and professional accomplishments. In order to adopt a more flexible mindset, the fixed mindset contingent would need to adjust their ideas about the way things work. If you’re a person who believes that failure is bad and must be avoided, then you will never master anything.

Through relentless study, she discovered that the mindsets created a fairly predictable set of characteristics. Those with a fixed-mindset embodied one type of personality, while the growth mindset people embodied another. Those with growth mindsets react differently in personal relationships than people with fixed mindsets. People with fixed mindsets seek out spontaneity and drama. They’ll fast-forward their way into a relationship, only to find it imploding three months in. They tend to deflect blame and can be slow to forgive. People with growth mindsets take their time in relationships, they don’t rush getting to know another person, and when they hit a bump in the road, they tend to lean on their communication skills.

original art for "How to Live" by Edwina White

Your mindset is the stage and setting of your life. You either interpret events positively and feel happier more than not, or you interpret events negatively and feel chronically anxious.

So, where do you fit in?

The view that you adopt for yourself profoundly affects how you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to become or whether you accomplish the things you value.

Here’s how Dweck describes the mindsets in her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

1. You feel you have to prove your intelligence in every area of your life: work, school, relationship, friends.

2. Every situation calls for a confirmation of your intelligence, personality, or character.

3. You assume you are always being evaluated.

4. You frequently ask yourself: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser?

5. You seek out what you know, and don’t participate in experiences that will test or stretch you.

6. When a fixed mindset person is having a terrible day, they think they’re dumb, worthless and a failure. They see the result of what happened to them as a measure of their worth and competence. (This is very similar to the black-and-white thinking of cognitive distortion). They globalize and personalize thinking that the world is out to get them; they are hated and unloved. They might drink, smoke pot, or stay in bed, all because they believe what their fixed mindset is telling them. When they aren’t faced with these setbacks, they are fine.

7. People with fixed mindsets do not believe in risk and effort because these might reveal that they are not up to the task. If you promised yourself you’d run twice this week but it rains, and you don’t go for a run, then you are letting the weather derail your plans. In your mind, a setback is a roadblock.

1. You cope with a setback head on. In other words, you do not label yourself a “failure” or a “winner.”

2. You have a passion for stretching yourself outside of your comfort zone. Even when things aren’t going well, you value the challenge and consider it important.

3. You’re able to turn life’s setbacks into effort and perseverance.

4. You don’t let failure define or stop you, you allow it to motivate you.

5. You can handle negative critique, and use the feedback as an opportunity to improve. You enjoy the process of learning and becoming more productive. You savor “purposeful engagement.”

6. You don’t confuse performance with identity, or achievement with self-worth. You don’t feel jealous of other people’s success. You might see theirs as a way to set new goals for yourself, but not as a measure of your own.

7. You don’t compare yourself to others. You know their intelligence is not a threat to yours.

8. You write off a bad diet day, and get back on track the next day without excoriating yourself.

9. You believe that you can overcome obstacles. You choose to learn from the experience, work harder and try again until you reach your goals.

HOW DID WE BECOME THIS WAY?

Like most things, our present mindset was shaped during childhood. How we were raised, taught, and the influences that surrounded us shaped our beliefs about intelligence, learning, and ability.

We often label our children without realizing it’s harmful even when the meaning is positive. Being labeled “gifted” or “exceptional” can create undo stress in children. Negative labels, whether they are sexual or racial, can lead to feelings of inferiority, negative beliefs and under-performance. When we label, we inadvertently drive our kids to not realize their potential.

But something happened in the late 1980s and ’90s that exacerbated the problem, leading parents and teachers to raise and educate an entire generation of millennials inside a fixed-mindset environment, creating a fixed-mindset culture—the self-esteem craze. During this period of time, everyone was told how special and brilliant they were—not just students, but CEOs, and teachers. Everyone’s brilliance was reinforced. Instead of encouraging people to grow and flourish, it did the opposite. It created an atmosphere of complacency and mediocrity. Praising intelligence shaped a fixed mindset.

When we praise children based on the labels we’ve given them or outcomes, telling them things like, “You learn quickly because you’re so smart,” the message sent is that learning slowly is bad. When praised for their intelligence instead of for their effort, fixed-mindset kids tend to reject new challenges because they’re afraid to risk exposing a possible weakness that might negate the perception that they are smart. Often, they won’t even try doing something unless they are certain they can do it well.

On the other hand, if children receive compliments like "good job, you worked very hard," they are more likely to develop a "growth mindset." When we praise effort, strategy, perseverance and focus, we are praising challenge-seeking behavior and resilience. When we focus on the outcome, we teach kids to overvalue the thing that is fixed—the result—and undervalue the learning process that leads to results.

When we praise wisely, based on strategies, effort, and perseverance, students learn how to stick with things even when they are really hard. When they are working outside of their comfort zone, neurons in their brain form new, stronger connections, and over time, they become smarter. In one of her studies, Dweck showed that the kids who learned this lesson showed a sharp increase in their grades. Those who did not showed a decrease.

Most importantly, we should not shield our children from failing; it’s not helpful to their development. Kids need to know that it’s okay to not be the best, that failure is an integral part of life. Parents, teachers, and caretakers who focus only on being the best do not provide any alternate position for the child if they don’t win, leaving the child to blame others, devalue the activity, or turn failure into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Dweck built on the theory of neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to form new connections when it’s stimulated by new experiences. “Neurons that fire together wire together," the saying goes. What you believe, you become.

We must challenge our belief that our qualities and intelligence are unchangeable. These are limiting beliefs and they can hold us back from the life we want to be living. We must be open to the belief that our qualities can be cultivated. When we are flexible in our thinking, we are flexible in life, take risks, and don’t let failure determine our worth or our efforts to try again.

(I only list 10, but go read the remaining 15 here: OpenCollege.edu)

1. View challenges as opportunities.

Having a growth mindset means relishing opportunities for self-improvement. Learn more about how to fail well.

2. Replace the word “failing” with the word “learning.”

When you make a mistake or fall short of a goal, you haven’t failed; you’ve learned.

3. Stop seeking approval.

When you prioritize approval over learning, you sacrifice your own potential for growth.

4. Value the process over the end result.

Intelligent people enjoy the learning process, and don’t mind when it continues beyond an expected time frame.

5. Reward actions, not traits.

Tell students when they’re doing something smart, not just being smart.

6. Portray criticism as positive.

You don’t have to use that hackneyed term “constructive criticism,” but you do have to believe in the concept.

7. Abandon the image.

“Naturally smart” sounds just about as believable as “spontaneous generation.” You won’t achieve the image if you’re not ready for the work.

8. Use the word “yet.”

Dweck says “not yet” has become one of her favorite phrases. Whenever you see students struggling with a task, just tell them they haven’t mastered it yet.

9. Learn from other people’s mistakes.

It’s not always wise to compare yourself to others, but it is important to realize that humans share the same weaknesses.

10. Take risks in the company of others.

Stop trying to save face all the time and just let yourself mess up now and then. It will make it easier to take risks in the future.

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Once you develop a growth mindset, commit to it. Acknowledge yourself as someone who possesses a growth mentality and be proud to let it guide you throughout your education, personal life and career.

There is power in believing that you can improve, just as there is power in believing that you can’t. Each one of us can choose to adopt the theory behind this psychology of success.

Developing a growth mindset is a lifelong commitment. If you practice when you come up against small obstacles, you’ll see that the shift isn’t all that difficult. Once you get the hang of it, you won’t want to return to your fixed mindset. When we grow accustomed to the concept of shifting our mindset beliefs, we can begin to apply the idea in different areas of our life. It’s amazing how much is actually in our control. When you care about things differently, your sense of “control” changes, and your existence in this world feels easier. When you adopt a growth mindset, things just don’t bother you as much, which is liberating, and frees you from the invisible constraints you’ve been taught to operate within. And then, well, anything is possible.

I am a born and raised fixed-mindset child. I always knew there were other ways of being, I just didn't know what those ways were until I read this book and applied it. I urge you to check out the Mindset book, and I beg you to ignore any temptation to buy or listen to the audio book. She narrates it herself. She should perhaps not have done that.

So tell me, which mindset do you identify with?

Let me know in the comments! Until next week I am…