Mindset by Carol Dweck Summary

January 2012
in Bookshelf, Notes, Self-awareness
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For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt of yourself profoundly
affects the way you lead your life. Carol Dweck1
That is the central message in Carol Dwecks book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
Dweck and her colleagues research has found a very simple belief about ourselves that guides
and permeates nearly every part of our lives.

This belief limits our potential or enables our success. It often marks the difference between
excellence and mediocrity. It influences our self-awareness, our self-esteem, our creativity,
our ability to face challenges, our resilience to setbacks, our levels of depression, and our
tendency to stereotype, among other things.
What is this powerful, yet simple belief?

The Fixed and Growth Mindsets

Much of who you are on a day-to-day basis comes from your mindset. Your mindset is the
view you have of your qualities and characteristics where they come from and whether they
can change.
These following two mindsets represent the extreme ends on either side of a spectrum.
A fixed mindset comes from the belief that your qualities are carved in stone who you
are is who you are, period. Characteristics such as intelligence, personality, and creativity are
fixed traits, rather than something that can be developed.
A growth mindset comes from the belief that your basic qualities are things you can
cultivate through effort. Yes, people differ greatly in aptitude, talents, interests,
or temperaments but everyone can change and grow through application and experience.
Its very possible to be somewhere in the middle, and to lean a certain way in one area of life,
and a different way in other areas. Dweck writes about them as a simple either-or throughout
the book for the sake of simplicity. Your mindset likely varies from area to area. Your views
may be different for artistic talent, intelligence, personality, or creativity. Whatever mindset
you have in a particular area will guide you in that area.
How does this simple mindset change your behavior? Having a fixed mindset creates an
urgency to prove yourself over and over criticism is seen as an attack on your character, and
to be avoided. Having a growth mindset encourages learning and effort. If you truly believe
you can improve at something, you will be much more driven to learn and practice. Criticism
is seen as valuable feedback and openly embraced. The hallmark of the growth mindset is the
passion for sticking with it, especially when things are not going well.
The following example helps illustrate the two mindsets. After you read this short vignette of
an imaginary situation, ask yourself how you would respond to this situation.
One day, you go to a class that is really important to you and that you like a lot. The professor
returns the midterm papers to the class. You got a C+. Youve very disappointed. That evening
on the way back to your home, you find that youve gotten a parking ticket. Being
really frustrated, you call your best friend to share your experience but are sort of brushed
off.2
How would you respond? What would you think? If you thought, What a crummy day. I
would feel like a failure. I would be frustrated. I wouldnt feel motivated to study for the final
exam. Maybe Im just bad at that class. then you may tend towards the fixed mindset. If you
thought, Well, I probably shouldnt have parked there. And maybe my friend had a bad day?
Ill have to study harder for the final. then you may tend towards the growth mindset.

You dont have to be of one mindset or the other to get upset. But those with the growth
mindset dont label themselves and throw up their hands in defeat. They confront challenges
and keep working. The growth mindset enables the converting of lifes setbacks into future
successes. The fixed mindset, however, often results in little or no effort; Dweck mentions the
many times she is outright startled by how much the people with a fixed mindset do not
believe in effort.
You may be thinking this whole idea of a mindset seems a little simplistic. Surely were more
complicated than that? Surely such a simple belief cant have that much impact on our lives?

Small Belief, Big Influence

How can one belief lead to all this the love of challenge, belief in effort, resilience in the
face of setbacks, and greater (more creative!) success?3
Smart people succeed, says the fixed mindset. Therefore, if you succeed, youre a smart
person. Therefore, pick the easier problem so success is more likely, and you validate your
smartness. Pick a hard problem and you may fail, revealing your stupidity.
People can get smarter, says the growth mindset, and do so by stretching themselves and
taking on challenges. Therefore, pick the hard problem who cares if you fail!
Your mindset is the view you adopt of yourself. These mentalities can be seen as early as four
years old. In one of Dwecks studies:
We offered four-year-olds a choice: They could redo an easy jigsaw puzzle or they could try a
harder one. Even at this tender age, children with the fixed mindset the ones who believed in
fixed traits stuck with the safe one. Kids who are born smart dont make mistakes, they
told us.4
The growth-oriented kids welcomed the harder puzzle, finding a safer puzzle to be boring. But
those are just kids and toys. Does your mindset have any influence on more important life
decisions? It turns out they do. One of the many examples given by Dweck deals with
university students making decisions that will influence the rest of their lives.
Who would pass up a free opportunity to improve their life success? At the University of
Hong Kong, everything is in english. Some students are more fluent than others, and this can
have a big impact on their success. As students arrived to register for their freshman year, they
were asked if they would take a free course to improve their English skills if the university
provided one. It turned out that those with a fixed mindset were not very interested, and those
with a growth mindset were absolutely interested.5 This is a perfect example of how the fixed
mindset turns people into non-learners. As Dweck says:
The fixed mindset stands in the way of development and change. The growth mindset is a
starting point for change, but people need to decide for themselves where their efforts toward
change would be most valuable.
People with the fixed mindset are not simply lacking in confidence, though their confidence
may be more fragile and more easily undermined by setbacks and effort. Also, having a

growth mindset doesnt mean you have to be working hard all the time. It just means you can
develop whatever skills you want to put the time and effort into.
The following image, created by Nigel Holmes, and found near the end of the book, is a great
summary of the key ideas in Mindset, and how it affects your life. (My one nitpick is the use
of deterministic in the final fixed-mindset sentence, which Id say is incorrect; replace it
with unchangeable and Id be happy.) It shows the difference between the two mindsets, and
why the growth mindset is better. Remember that all of these behaviors stem from the very
simple beliefs you have about your own abilities to change and improve.

Being aware of your own mindset will be key to changing it, as well see in a future post.
For now, think about which side of this image better represents your beliefs about intelligence,
and your resulting behavior. How about for creativity, or technical skills, or speaking abilities,
or school skills, or social skills, or any other life skill and ability?

Whats coming up next:

Where our mindsets come from.

Evidence that our mindsets can change.

How to change our mindset. (Edit: I doubt Ill get around to writing this any time
soon, so here is a relevant post by Malcolm Ocean.)

15 reasons why the growth mindset is better than the fixed mindset

Followup to: Why Your Mindset is So Important

In Why Your Mindset is So Important I introduced the concept of mindsets from Carol
Dwecks book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.1
Your mindset is the view you have of your qualities and characteristics; specifically, where
they come from and whether they can change. A fixed mindset comes from the belief that your
qualities are carved in stone. A growth mindset comes from the belief that your basic qualities
are things you can cultivate through effort. Our abilities, while sometimes naturally inclined,
are largely the result of effort and hard work, which the growth mindset encourages.
Having already briefly introduced the importance of the growth mindset for dealing with
criticism, facing challenges, being resilient to setbacks, and increasing creativity, an obvious
question comes to mind: Where does our mindset come from?

Dweck notes that everyone is born with a love of learning. If babies were crushed by failure
they would never learn to walk or talk. They have to do it wrong many times before they get it
right. Why, then, would someone ever develop a fixed mindset?
Its possible the fixed mindset served a useful purpose at some point in a persons life:
It told them who they were or who they wanted to be (a smart, talented child) and it told them
how to be that (perform well). In this way, it provided a formula for self-esteem and a path to
love and respect from others.2
This is crucial for children, where the fixed mindset may offer a simple and straightforward
route to being valued and loved. Over time, however, this mindset may become the default
state. The problem is not that they desired being valued and loved, but that they found a way
to achieve this by focusing on performance and success, not growth and learning. Why
would they come to think this?

Teachers, Parents, and Learning Environments

Education has a big influence on mindsets. If a teacher or parent promotes a growth mindset
over a fixed mindset such as by encouraging learning and improvement rather than praising
talent and discouraging failure this will have a lasting influence on how the kids view
themselves.
As an example, Dweck performed a study whereby students, mostly early adolescents, were
given ten difficult problems from an IQ test. Some students were praised for their ability
Thats a really good score. You must be smart at this. while others were praised for their
efforts Thats a really good score. You must have worked really hard.
Right after the praise, the two groups began to differ in striking ways. The ability-praised
students rejected a followup challenging task that they could learn from. The effort-praised
students did not.
Theres more. When the students were told by researchers that these tests were going to be
performed at other schools, the students were asked to write their thoughts about the test, as
well as their test score, for other students. The ability-praised students lied about their test
results almost 40% of the time!
So telling children theyre smart, in the end, made them feel dumber and act dumber, but
claim they were smarter.3
They turned ordinary children into liars, simply by telling them they were smart! Clearly
thats not what we (teachers, parents, friends) intend when we praise kids as gifted or
talented, but nonetheless that is what happens.
How much do the teachers and environment and resulting mindset that surround children
affect their future abilities? Benjamin Bloom, an eminent educational researcher, has this to
say:
After forty years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as
abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons
can learn, if provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.4
Thats an important if. The takeaway message is this: learning conditions and
environment have a huge impact on future abilities, skills, and attitude.
Differences Within A Single Person

We can also extrapolate why our mindset may vary from one personal area to another, such as
intelligence and creative skills.
For example, if we were praised for our hard work and effort in sports, but praised for our
natural talent in mathematics, we may come to measure our self-worth by our performance
in math (resulting in little effort or motivation to try harder things and risk failure), while
seeing sports as an opportunity to improve skills and have fun.

Can you think about your own schooling and upbringing? What sort of feedback or praise was
typical of your teachers and parents? Has this impacted your current views regarding your
skills and talents?
What We Can Do About It

For starters, be aware of how you talk to children. Ask yourself: how do you praise your child,
a niece or nephew, a young cousin, a sibling, or a random stranger? Do you complement them
for their natural abilities or their hard work and effort? The simple framing of your praise may
be having much more impact on their personal development than you realize!
How about your workplace? Or your home life? Are people generally rewarded for their hard
work and effort, or for their natural talents? Are the environments you spend your time in
encouraging growth mindsets or fixed mindsets? Is there anything you can do to change that?
This is just a start. Coming up soon will be a survey of the evidence showing that our
mindsets can indeed change, and how we can change them.

Changing Mindsets: Can it be done?

February 2012
in Self-awareness
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Followup to: Mindsets: Where Do They Come From?

In Why Your Mindset is So Important I introduced the concept of fixed (we cant change) and
growth (we can improve through effort) mindsets detailed in Carol Dwecks book Mindset:

The New Psychology of Success.1 The benefits of a growth mindset are plenty: increased
creativity, greater success, love of challenge, belief in effort, resilience in the face of setbacks,
and more.
Then in my previous mindset post I explained the primary origins of our mindsets: our
teachers, parents, and learning environments. A fixed mindset comes from praise for our
accomplishments, whereas a growth mindset comes from praise for our hard work and effort.
Given the benefits of a growth mindset and the origin of a fixed mindset, the question
remains: Can we change our mindsets?

Dweck provides ample evidence throughout the book that a persons mindset can, indeed, be
changed. Take one example:
Garfield High School was one of the worst schools in Los Angeles. To say that the students
were turned off and the teachers burned out is an understatement. But without thinking twice,
Jaime Escalante (of Stand and Deliver fame) taught these inner-city Histpanic students
college-level calculus. But not only did he teach them calculus, he (and his colleague,
Benjamin Jimenez) took them to the top of the national charts in math.2
As another example, Marva Collines took a class of inner-city Chicago kids who had failed in
the public schools. This second-grade class started out reading the lowest level reader there
was. By June they were at the middle of the fifth-grade level, studying Aristotle, Tolstoy,
Shakespeare, and others.
In the previous post, I mentioned that Dweck showed how easy it was to change the mindset
of groups of children, simply by the type of praise they received. The fact that mindsets
clearly arise from our environments and educators shows that it is a malleable part of you.
Of course, all these examples only include kids. What about an adult? The only difference is
that after having lived with certain mindsets for longer, they may be more engrained in the
mind of an adult than of a child. Thus, for an adult, it will likely be harder to change, but not
impossible.
Your mindset is an important part of your personality, but it is not a permanent part. The key
takeaway is this: you can shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. In fact, just by
being aware of them you can start to think and react in new ways.
Not everyone can achieve everything. It isnt merely a little effort that could turn you into
Einstein or Beethoven. But, an essential fact is that a persons true potential is unknown and
unknowable. As Dweck says, it is impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years
of passion, toil, and training.3
Knowing your mindset can change doesnt instantly change it, or guarantee that it will be
easy. Remember, its probably buried pretty deeply in that mind of yours.
In the next post well discuss the more important topic: how to change your mindset.

///
1. Dweck (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine Books. []
2. Dweck (2006) p. 64. []
3. Dweck (2006), p. 7. []

15 Benefits of the Growth Mindset

April 2012
in Self-awareness
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Followup to: Why Your Mindset is So Important

Want to have more fun in life? Enjoy learning? Have better relationships? Improve your
business? A growth mindset is associated with all of these benefits plus more. This simple
attitude impacts your success, health, happiness, careers, and relationships.
Your mindset is the view you adopt of yourselfwhether your abilities and characteristics can
change (the growth mindset), or whether they are set in stone (the fixed mindset).
The benefits of having a growth mindset over a fixed mindset are vast. Here are just a few
benefits of the growth mindset that I extracted from Carol Dwecks book Mindset: The New
Psychology of Success.
1. Enjoy Life, Even When Youre Not Good At It
This is a wonderful feature of the growth mindset. You dont have to think youre already
great at something to want to do it and to enjoy doing it. Dweck1
Since your focus is on doing and learning cool stuff, while not caring about success or
achievements, it is much easier to enjoy doing whatever it is youre doing. Never painted in
your life? Who cares! Drink a bottle of wine with some friends, pick up a paint set at a nearby
dollar store, and give it a try. The fixed mindset would make you shun from doing this,
knowing that your painting will suck and be embarrassing. The growth mindset says who
cares? and lets you enjoy yourself.

The growth mindset does allow people to love what theyre doing and continue to love it in
the face of difficulties. The growth mindset allows people to value what theyre doing
regardless of the outcome. Dweck2
2. Improve Your Self-Insight and Self-Esteem
Many studies show that people are terrible at estimating their abilities.3 But, as additional
work performed by Dweck (and others) has shown:4
[It] was those with the fixed mindset who accounted for almost all the innaccuracy. The
people with the growth mindset were amazingly accurate. Dweck5
This result is also reflected in Extraordinary Minds by Howard Gardner (1997), who
concluded that exceptional individuals are especially talented at identifying their own strength
and weaknesses. As Dweck points out, this overlaps with the growth mindset.
3. Improve Your Relationships
Those with a fixed mindset want an ideal mate to put them on a pedestal, make them feel
perfect, and worship them. A fixed mindset can cause partners to think they should be able to
read each others mind, or that the two of them should never disagree on anything (which is
very unlikely).
Those with a growth mindset, however, want an ideal mate to see their faults and help them to
work on them, challenge them to become a better person, and encourage them to learn new
things. This makes for a *much* healthier and happier relationships.
4. Never Feel Stupid When Learning
When do you feel smart? Think about your answer for a minute.
We asked people, ranging from grade schoolers to young adults, When do you feel smart?
The differences were striking. Dweck6
People with a fixed mindset gave answers like Its when I dont make any mistakes. In other
words, youre supposed to be perfect.
People with a growth mindset, however, gave answers like When I work on something for a
long time and I start to figure it out. In other words, when youre learning.
5. Never Stress About Being Perfect
If you believe that any test, at any time, will measure you for your whole life, you will feel the
need to be perfect, all the time.
For example, Dweck and collegues told fifth graders they would be taking a test that
measured an important school ability. They were then asked two things: Does this test
measure how smart you are? Does this test measure how smart youll be when you grow up?7
The kids with a growth mindset didnt think the test measured how smart they were, or how
smart theyd be when they grew up. The kids with the fixed mindset, however, thought the

exact opposite. They gave a single test in fifth grade the power to measure themselves as an
adult!
6. Strengthen Your Confidence
Those in a fixed mindset do not have less confidence than those in a growth mindset. The
problem is that their confidence is more fragile and easily undermined by setbacks and effort.
For example, in a study by Joseph Martocchio (1994), employees taking a computer training
course were either put into a fixed or a growth mindset. Before the course, confidence in their
computer skills was equal. After the course, those in the fixed mindset lost much of their
confidence in their computer skills, while those with the growth mindset gained confidence.
7. Lower Your Risk of Depression
In a study performed by Baer, Grant, and Dweck (2005), students in the fixed mindset had
higher levels of depression because they ruminated over problems and setbacks.
In another report from researchers at Duke University, there was a strong link found between
anxiety and depression among females who aspire to effortless perfection.8
8. Be Better at Taking Responsibility For Your Life
A fixed mindset tries to repair self-esteem after a failure by assigning blame and making
excuses.
John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you arent a failure until you start to
blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes
until you deny them. Dweck9
A growth mindset helps you take responsibility for your actions and decisions because you
dont blame others for them.
9. See Single Events As Just That
A fixed mindset can cause you to measure your whole self-worth on single eventsyour SAT
score, your college application, your divorce, or your IQ. This is ridiculous. A growth mindset
realizes that these are single events that do not define you.
10. Increase Your Resilience to Labels and Stereotypes
[In] the fixed mindset, both positive and negative labels can mess with your mind. When
youre given a positive label, youre afraid of losing it, and when youre hit with a negative
label, youre afraid of deserving it.
When people are in the growth mindset, the stereotype doesnt disrupt their performance. The
growth mindset takes the teeth out of the stereotype and makes people better able to fight
back. Dweck10
Work by Steele and Aronson (1995) has shown that the simple act of checking a box
indicating your race and sex can trigger stereotypes in your head and lower test scores (e.g.
Im a woman and men are better at math, so I wont do well on this test.).

Aside from hijacking peoples abilities, stereotypes also damage by making people feel they
dont belong. Many minorities drop out of college and many women drop out of math and
science because they just dont feel they fit in. -Dweck11
This problem is worse in those with a fixed mindset. With a growth mindset, stereotypes are
not seen as permanent qualities, and therefore have less negative influence on performance.
As Dweck says:
The women with the growth mindsetthose who thought math ability could be improved
felt a fairly strong and stable sense of belonging. And they were able to maintain this even
when they thought there was a lot of negative stereotyping going around.

But women with the fixed mindset, as the semester wore on, felt a shrinking sense of
belonging. And the more they felt the presence of stereotyping in their class, the more their
comfort with math withered. -Dweck11
11. See Setbacks As Useful
What? Useful?
Its easy to be frustrated by setbacks. Yet they are useful because they provide information in
the form of feedback. A setback indicates that something went wrong, and you now have the
opportunity to figure out why, learn from it, and prevent it from happening again.
The growth mindset sees setbacks as useful, whereas a fixed mindset sees them as annoying
hurdles and cause motivation and effort to drop.
12. Ditch the Stress From Constantly Trying to Prove Yourself
In a fixed mindset success is a top priority. But succeeding once isnt enough, you are always
being measure by others, and you must always be perfect. In a growth mindset you dont care
about proving yourself to others, you only care about improving and growing.
13. Enjoy Putting In Time and Effort, Rather Than Fearing Them
If youre constantly interested in learning more and improving, then putting in time and effort
to do so seems enjoyable. In a fixed mindset, effort looks like it will be fruitless or worse.
Of course, those with a fixed mindset may still put in a whole lot of effort. A workaholic with
a fixed mindset may do lots of hard work and take on a lot of challenges. It is possible to be
free of the belief that high effort equals low ability, but a workaholic may still have the other
parts of the fixed mindset.
14. Improve Your Company
CEO disease arises in situations where CEOs get stuck in their current ways and resist
change. They did things a certain way to achieve their status or to build up their company. It
made them successful. They resist changing anything, because it may take away their success.
They exile or ignore the critics, and try to surround themselves with worshippers instead.
They may choose short-term strategies over long-term gains to boost a companys stock and
their approval on Wall Street.

Growth-oriented businesses look for ways to improve the quality of their products and
services. Long-term growth strategies matter more than short-term achievements.
15. Avoid Feelings of Superiority
The fixed mindset creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. The very act of
succeeding requires that you show yourself to be better than others. So if you focus on
succeeding and achieving things, youre always in a frame of mind where you compare
yourself to othersoften by applauding yourself for being superior.
The growth mindset doesnt care about being superior. In fact, the success of others can be
inspiring and a source for learning, whereas a fixed mindset sees the success of others as a
threat.

To be clear, the growth mindset doesnt guarantee success or makes things effortless.
Changing your mindset isnt a magic pill for solving all your problems; but if Dwecks book
and research has shown anything, its that a growth mindset can give you a much richer and
more fulfilling life, all while improving your abilities and chances of success.
Want to be an influential painter, an effective manager at your company, or a professional
gamer? How can you say its obvious this will never happen? Who knows!?
The above 15 reasons, plus more in Dwecks book, give me a strong incentive to figure out
exactly how to change my mindset.
Im far from always having a growth mindset, though I think I have been getting better. How
about you?
///
Baer, A. R., Grant, H., & Dweck, C. S. (2005). Personal goals, dysphoria, & coping strategies.
Unpublished manuscript, Columbia University
Dunning, Heath, and Suls (2004). Flawed Self-Assessment: Implications for Health,
Education, and the Workplace. Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 5-3.
Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, & Kruger (2003). Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own
Incompetence. Current Directions in Psychological Science. June 2003 vol. 12 no. 3 83-87.
Dweck (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine Books.
Ehrlinger (2008). Skill Level, Self-Views and Self-Theories as Sources of Error in SelfAssessment. Social and Personality Psychology Compass. 382398.
Ehrlinger & Dweck (2007). If I dont see it, it must not exist: How preferential attention
allocation contributes to overconfidence. Manuscript in Preparation, Florida State University.

Gardner (1997). Extraordinary Minds. New York: Basic Books.

Gollwitzer (1999). Implementation Intentions: Strong Effects of Simple Plans. American
Psychologist 54, 493-503
Krugger & Dunning (1999). Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing
Ones Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology. 77(6), 121-1134.
Martocchio, J. (1994). Effects of Conceptions of Ability on Anxiety, Self-Efficacy, and
Learning in Training. Journal of Applied Psychology 79, 819-825.
Steele, C., & Aronson, J. (1995) Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of
African-Americans, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 68, 797-811
Stone, J., & Dweck, C. S. (1998). [Implicit theories of intelligence and the meaning of
achievement goals]. Unpublished raw data, Columbia University, New York
1. Dweck (2006), p. 53. []
2. Dweck (2006), p. 48. []
3. Research from numerous corners of psychological inquiry suggests that
self-assessments of skill and character are often awed in substantive and
systematic ways. Dunning et al. (2004); Krugger & Dunning (1999);
Dunning et al. (2003). []
4. Ehrlinger (2008), Ehrlinger & Dweck (2007). []
5. Dweck (2006), p. 11. []
6. Dweck (2006), p. 24. []
7. Dweck (2006), p. 26.; Stone & Dweck (1998). []
8. Report of the Steering Committee for the Womens Initiative at Duke
University, August 2003. []
9. Dweck (2006), p. 37. []
10.Dweck (2006), p. 75. []
11.Dweck (2006), p. 77. [] []