We're finding that many parents endorse a growth mindset, but they still respond to their children's errors, setbacks or failures as though they're damaging and harmful. If they show anxiety or overconcern, those kids are going toward a more fixed mindset.
Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. You could have a predominant growth mindset in an area, but there can still be things that trigger you into a fixed mindset trait.
People with a growth mindset believe that they can improve with effort. They outperform those with a fixed mindset, even when they have a lower IQ, because they embrace challenges, treating them as opportunities to learn something new.
You try something, it doesn't work, and maybe people even criticize you. In a fixed mindset, you say, 'I tried this, it's over.' In a growth mindset, you look for what you've learned.
When someone endorses a fixed mindset, it can limit them, even if they're successful at the moment, because if they start struggling and tumbling, they can lose their confidence, but also, they may not create a growth mindset environment for others.
This point is?.?.?.?crucial,” writes Dweck. “In the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. If you fail — or if you’re not the best — it’s all been wasted. The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome.
Common sense would suggest that having ability, like being smart, inspires confidence. It does, but only while the going is easy. The deciding factor in life is how you handle setbacks and challenges. People with a growth mindset welcome setbacks with open arms.
People often confuse a growth mindset with being flexible or open-minded or with having a positive outlook - qualities they believe they've simply always had. My colleagues and I call this a false growth mindset.
I teach a freshman seminar every year, and we delve very, very deeply into their mindsets. They read scientific articles, but we also focus on what their mindset is, and they learn to recognize when they are in more of a fixed mindset, because we're all a mixture.
You can't just declare that you have a growth mindset. Growth mindset is hard.
My job, as I've said, is to break down sectionalism, vested interests and a fixed mindset of merely following precedents, so that I'm not subjected to the harmful effects of factions.
The scientific-rational mindset is as much a cosmology as the Catholic mindset was in the Middle Ages; scientists are so proud of their mindset and convinced that it's the only reality. I find that worrying.
A policy of knowing your replacement is one of the best ways to drive a growth culture. It anticipates and eliminates the most harmful politics in leadership for an expanding company and instantly sets the right tone for a high-talent, growth-mindset executive team.
Successful people do not have a part-time mindset nor a full-time mindset, but a lifetime mindset.
Having my parents be divorced, you're forced to realize, "Sooner or later I'm going to be on my own and have to figure it out." I have so many brothers that are younger than me, so I have to have that mindset of, "Okay, what am I going to do now?" I have to show them what growing up is - it's not me living at dad's house until I'm 25.
As damaging as the obsessive emphasis on testing often proves to be for kids in general, I believe that the effects are still more harmful in those schools in which the resources available to help the children learn the skills that will be measured by these tests are fewest, the scores they get are predictably the lowest, and the strategies resorted to by principals in order to escape the odium attaching to a disappointing set of numbers tend to be the most severe.
Chinese culture is already telling children to work hard. That's not growth mindset because they're working hard for the product, not for the growth or the joy of learning.