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Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Carol S. Dweck

Operating rules from Carol Dweck's distinction between believing ability is fixed and believing it is developable, and what each belief does to the tasks you take on, the feedback you accept, and how you read a setback.

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This governs what you decide to attempt, and therefore what you ever get good at. Dweck's claim is that one belief sits underneath that decision: if ability is a fixed quantity, every task is a test of whether you have it, so hard things become dangerous; if ability develops through effort, strategy and help, the same task is a way to build it. The rules below are about acting on the second belief in concrete situations, since Dweck is explicit that holding it privately is not the same as practicing it.

Do

  • Credit the process that produced the result, in yourself and in anyone you are responsible for. Across seven experiments with hundreds of children, praising intelligence gave a momentary boost and then measurably harmed motivation and performance. Effort-praised children chose the harder follow-up task about 90 percent of the time; ability-praised children avoided it, lost enjoyment, declined in performance, and about 40 percent lied about their scores. [Source: "Chapter 3: The Truth About Ability and Accomplishment"]
  • Take the remedial option when it is offered. Incoming University of Hong Kong students who were not fluent in the language of instruction were offered a remedial English course. Growth-mindset students took it; fixed-mindset students largely declined, preferring to protect the appearance of competence over closing a gap that threatened their actual degree. [Source: "Chapter 2: Inside the Mindsets"]
  • Change the study strategy, not just the amount of effort. In a college chemistry course, growth-mindset students did not simply work harder. They looked for themes running across lectures and reviewed their mistakes until they understood them, rather than rereading the textbook or memorizing, and that difference held regardless of prior science background. [Source: "Chapter 3: The Truth About Ability and Accomplishment"]
  • Go back to whoever turned you down and ask what to improve. A rejected graduate school applicant, instead of settling into a more comfortable self-assessment, phoned the admissions office to ask what she could do better next time, and was admitted on the spot. The move is to convert the verdict into information by asking the person who issued it. [Source: "Chapter 8, Part 1: Changing Mindsets, Workshops and Dilemmas"]
  • Make the plan concrete: exactly when, where and how. Citing Peter Gollwitzer, Dweck notes vague resolutions rarely produce follow-through while vivid, specific plans reliably do. Her worked example is not "I'll call the school soon" but tomorrow, during the break, get tea, close the door, make the call. [Source: "Chapter 8, Part 1: Changing Mindsets, Workshops and Dilemmas"]
  • Name your fixed-mindset persona and learn its triggers. Her four steps are to accept that everyone carries one, to identify the specific triggers (a big new challenge, hitting dead ends, a decisive failure, meeting someone better than you at the thing you take pride in), to give the persona a name, then to educate it and bring it along rather than trying to banish it. Real examples include a "Gertrude" who detests hard work and second place, and a boy's "Dumping Dan" who shouted that he could not do anything right. [Source: "Chapter 8, Part 2: Willpower, Maintaining Change, and Naming Your Fixed-Mindset Persona"]
  • Plan the lapse before it happens. Dweck's friend Nathan tried to lose weight by resolve alone, refused practical measures like asking a restaurant to box half the meal, crash dieted and regained it. Growth-minded dieters keep the dessert out of the house and decide what to order before arriving, then read a slip as a clue about the next attempt rather than a verdict on their character. [Source: "Chapter 8, Part 2: Willpower, Maintaining Change, and Naming Your Fixed-Mindset Persona"]
  • Score yourself on the effort you actually made, not on the outcome. John Wooden's standard was full preparation and full effort rather than a flawless result, and his framing was that "did I win, did I lose" are the wrong questions and "did I make my best effort" is the right one. Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Mia Hamm both locate success in playing their best and improving as much as in the trophy. [Source: "Chapter 7, Part 2: Coaches, False Growth Mindset, and Passing It On"]
  • Keep using the approach after it starts working. A father named Wes saw his son's behavior improve sharply once he switched to growth-oriented praise, stopped using the strategies because the problem looked solved, and watched the behavior collapse and his own anger get worse than before. A couple Dweck calls the Bickersons repeated the identical pattern in their marriage. Change has to be maintained or it reverses. [Source: "Chapter 8, Part 2: Willpower, Maintaining Change, and Naming Your Fixed-Mindset Persona"]
  • Change the question from "can I" to "how." Jaime Escalante got more Garfield High students through the AP Calculus exam than all but a handful of elite schools by asking how he could teach them rather than whether he could. Marva Collins had Chicago children labeled learning disabled discussing Shakespeare within a year. All the teachers Dweck profiles pair high standards with genuine warmth rather than picking one. [Source: "Chapter 7, Part 1: Parents and Teachers, Messages That Shape a Mindset"]
  • Ask, at the end of the day, what you learned and which mistake taught you something. The parents of a boy who declared himself a chess champion and then refused to play again rebuilt their whole dinner table culture around those two questions, until a family habit of visible daily growth gradually outcompeted his fixed-mindset persona. [Source: "Chapter 8, Part 1: Changing Mindsets, Workshops and Dilemmas"]

Don't

  • Don't praise, or fish for praise about, intelligence or talent. It is the specific intervention Dweck shows backfiring, and it backfires fast, inside a single hard problem. Telling a child they are smart teaches them that difficulty is evidence they are not, which makes avoiding difficulty the rational response. [Source: "Chapter 3: The Truth About Ability and Accomplishment"]
  • Don't take the easier version to keep the record clean. Offered a choice between redoing an easy puzzle and trying a hard one, four-year-olds who believed that children born smart do not make mistakes stayed with the easy puzzle. The cost of protecting a clean record is that you stop encountering anything that would develop you. [Source: "Chapter 2: Inside the Mindsets"]
  • Don't read needing to work hard as proof you lack the ability. In the fixed mindset, effort itself becomes dangerous, because trying your hardest and still failing removes the comfort of "I could have been." Violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg nearly quit rather than risk her prodigy identity by trying fully, until her teacher forced the question. [Source: "Chapter 2: Inside the Mindsets"]
  • Don't let one rating stand as a verdict on you. Three-star chef Bernard Loiseau took his own life after losing points in a restaurant guide. Jim Marshall ran a recovered fumble the wrong way on national television and came back to help win the second half. Same category of public failure, two different beliefs about what it meant. [Source: "Chapter 2: Inside the Mindsets"]
  • Don't treat friction in a relationship as evidence it was not meant to be. The belief that a compatible relationship should not require effort is named as destructive by both John Gottman and Aaron Beck, because it makes couples quit rather than talk. Its companion is mind reading, the assumption that real compatibility means not having to say things out loud, which leaves conflicting assumptions about money, roles and where to live undiscovered until they collide. [Source: "Chapter 6: Relationships: Mindsets in Love (or Not)"]
  • Don't hire, promote or organize around "talent." Enron's talent mindset culture, borrowed from the idea that businesses should chase naturals the way sports teams do, made admitting a deficiency unacceptable. Lee Iacocca blocked good designs he feared would let subordinates outshine him and lobbied for tariffs instead of building better cars. Dweck's own organizational research found employees at growth-mindset companies report more trust, more commitment, more support for risk-taking, and less internal cheating. [Source: "Chapter 5: Business: Mindset and Leadership"]
  • Don't say "you can do anything" and call that a growth mindset. Dweck wrote a whole section correcting this. The three misreadings she names are treating the growth mindset as mere open-mindedness, treating it as praising effort including effort that is not actually there, and treating it as empty reassurance unbacked by concrete skill building and resources. Her stated worry is that the concept gets used to make people feel good while they are not learning, the way the self-esteem movement did. [Source: "Chapter 7, Part 2: Coaches, False Growth Mindset, and Passing It On"]
  • Don't assume believing it privately is enough. Adults who hold a growth mindset do not automatically transmit it, because children read visible actions, specifically how you praise and how you react to their setbacks, rather than the belief itself. Teachers who used the phrase but taught mathematics as memorized rules produced no shift in their students; teachers who emphasized understanding and let students revise their work did. [Source: "Chapter 7, Part 2: Coaches, False Growth Mindset, and Passing It On"]
  • Don't reassure someone out of an honest assessment after they lose. When nine-year-old Elizabeth won no ribbons at her first gymnastics meet, her father did not tell her she was really the best or blame the judges. He told her the other girls had worked harder and longer and that competing seriously would mean more work. She intensified her practice and won the next meet outright. [Source: "Chapter 7, Part 1: Parents and Teachers, Messages That Shape a Mindset"]
  • Don't expect the fixed mindset to be gone. Dweck says she still catches traces of her own, and describes change as adding a new belief alongside the old one rather than surgically removing it. Her own assessment of what changing gave her is deliberately modest: not that it solved her problems, but that it made for a richer life and a more open person. Treat any claim stronger than that, including one you make about yourself, with suspicion. [Source: "Chapter 8, Part 2: Willpower, Maintaining Change, and Naming Your Fixed-Mindset Persona"]

The one line

Pick the version of the task that could actually teach you something, then judge yourself on the strategy you used rather than on what the result seemed to say about you.