Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures.… I divide the world into the learners and nonlearners

Mindsets are just beliefs. They’re powerful beliefs, but they’re just something in your mind, and you can change your mind.

In the other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented.

one world—the world of fixed traits—success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other—the world of changing qualities—it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.

everything is either good news or bad news about your precious traits—as it is with fixed-mindset people—distortion almost inevitably enters the picture

fact, studies show that people are terrible at estimating their abilities. Recently, we set out to see who is most likely to do this. Sure, we found that people greatly misestimated their performance and their ability. But it was those with the fixed mindset who accounted for almost all the inaccuracy. The people with the growth mindset were amazingly accurate.

The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.

Did you know that Darwin and Tolstoy were considered ordinary children? That Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time, was completely uncoordinated and graceless as a child? That the photographer Cindy Sherman, who has been on virtually every list of the most important artists of the twentieth century, failed her first photography course? That Geraldine Page, one of our greatest actresses, was advised to give it up for lack of talent?

couldn’t find any agreed-upon way of measuring social ability.

Sometimes we’re not even sure it’s an ability. When we see people with outstanding interpersonal skills, we don’t really think of them as gifted. We think of them as cool people or charming people. When we see a great marriage relationship, we don’t say these people are brilliant relationship makers. We say they’re fine people. Or they have chemistry. Meaning what?

Meaning that as a society, we don’t understand relationship skills.

Those with the fixed mindset believed that: “People have a certain fixed amount of management ability and they cannot do much to change it.” In contrast, those with the growth mindset believed: “People can always substantially change their basic skills for managing other people.” So one group thought that you have it or you don’t; the other thought your skills could grow with experience.