50 Lessons from “Mindset”

1. The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value.
2. A growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others.
3. Your first challenge is to know that you don’t know, that you’re not smart, you’re not as intelligent as you think, and that it is okay, and you can grow, and you can become smarter every moment, and you can be intelligent to a level that you won’t believe right now.
4. It’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.
5. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? 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.
6. There are two meanings to ability, not one: a fixed ability that needs to be proven, and a changeable ability that can be developed through learning.
7. When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In 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.
8. In one world, failure is about having a setback. Getting a bad grade. Losing a tournament. Getting fired. Getting rejected. It means you’re not smart or talented. In another world, failure is about not growing. Not reaching for the things you value. It means you’re not fulfilling your potential.
9. In one world, effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you’re not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn’t need effort. In other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented.
10. You have a choice. Mindsets are just beliefs. They’re powerful beliefs, but they’re just something in your mind, and you can change your mind. As you read, think about where you’d like to go and which mindset will take you there.
11. People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it. The bigger the challenge, the more they stretch.
12. You’re always a work in progress and there’s no limit to your growth.
13. You take the control of your abilities. You take the blame for your losses. You accept and grow.
14. “When you’re lying on your deathbed, one of the cool things to say is, ‘I really explored myself.’
15. People with the growth mindset thrive when they’re stretching themselves. When do people with the fixed mindset thrive? When things are safely within their grasp. If things get too challenging when they’re not feeling smart or talented they lose interest.
16. It’s not about immediate perfection. It’s about learning something over time: confronting a challenge and making progress.
17. People who believe in fixed traits feel an urgency to succeed, and when they do, they may feel more than pride. They may feel a sense of superiority since success means that their fixed traits are better than other people’s. However, lurking behind that self-esteem of the fixed mindset is a simple question: If you’re somebody when you’re successful, what are you when you’re unsuccessful?
18. Different people handle depression in dramatically different ways. Some let everything slide. Others, though feeling wretched, hang on. They drag themselves to class, keep up with their work, and take care of themselves so that when they feel better, their lives are intact.
19. Even geniuses have to work hard for their achievements. And what’s so heroic, they would say, about having a gift? They may appreciate endowment, but they admire effort, for no matter what your ability is, effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment.
20. You have to work hardest for the things you love most.
21. Working hard was not something that made you vulnerable, but something that made you smarter.
22. Take charge of the process to make sure it happens.
23. People believe that the “gift” is the ability itself. Yet what feeds it is that constant, endless curiosity and challenge seeking.
24. Test scores and measures of achievement tell you where a student is, but they don’t tell you where a student could end up.
25. The fixed mindset limits achievement. It fills people’s minds with interfering thoughts, makes effort disagreeable, and leads to inferior learning strategies. What’s more, it makes other people into judges instead of allies. Whether we’re talking about Darwin or college students, important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies. Plus allies in learning. This is what the growth mindset gives people, and that’s why it helps their abilities grow and bear fruit.
26. Telling children they’re smart, in the end, made them feel dumber and act dumber, but claim they were smarter.
27. The fixed mindset, both positive and negative labels can mess with your mind. When you’re given a positive label, you’re afraid of losing it, and when you’re hit with a negative label, you’re afraid of deserving it.
28. The growth mindset also makes people able to take what they can and what they need even from a threatening environment.
29. A growth mindset lets people even those who are targets of negative labels use and develop their minds fully. Their heads are not filled with limiting thoughts, a fragile sense of belonging, and a belief that other people can define them.
30. “The mental toughness and the heart are a lot stronger than some of the physical advantages you might have. I’ve always said that and I’ve always believed that.”
31. We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.
32. The thought of not being prepared to your fullest potential is scarier than the thought of failure. If you have worked to your utmost potential, there’s no failure.
33. “When you’re sitting on the changeover you think of past matches that you’ve lost the first set . . . came back and won the next three. There’s time. You reflect on your past experiences, being able to get through them.”
34. Those with the growth mindset find success in doing their best, in learning and improving. And this is exactly what we find in the champions. Those with the growth mindset found setbacks motivating. They’re informative. They’re a wake-up call.
35. “After every game or practice, if you walk off the field knowing that you gave everything you had, you will always be a winner.”
36. “There’s only a razor’s edge between self-confidence and hubris. True self-confidence is “the courage to be open to welcome change and new ideas regardless of their source.”
37. Don’t judge. Teach. It’s a learning process.
38. You don’t win because you’re talented, you win because you made efforts. Failure is not a sign of stupidity. It’s a sign of a lack of experience and skills. Both can be learned.
39. A growth mindset-by relieving people of the illusions or the burdens of fixed ability-leads to full and open discussion of the information and to enhanced decision making.
40. Choosing a partner is choosing a set of problems. There are no problem-free candidates. The trick is to acknowledge each other’s limitations and build from there.
41. A good, lasting relationship comes from effort and from working through inevitable differences.
42. Creating a culture of development should be a priority of organizations. People who work in growth-mindset organizations have far more trust in their company and a much greater sense of empowerment, ownership, and commitment.
43. As a leader with a fixed mindset, you’re likely to kill dissent. Anything that challenges your ideas to become wrong. This restricts you from knowing the truth and will lead you to destruction. You make decisions on partial information.
44. A person in a growth mindset accepts all the information, it helps them take analytical decisions and help them grow. growth mindset — by relieving people of the illusions or the burdens of fixed ability — leads to a full and open discussion of the information and to enhanced decision making.
45. If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, seek new strategies, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.
46. If a student has tried hard and made little or no progress, we can of course appreciate their effort, but we should never be content with effort that is not yielding further benefits. We need to figure out why that effort is not effective and guide kids toward other strategies and resources that can help them resume learning.
47. We can embody the growth mindset in the way we praise (conveying the processes that lead to learning), the way we treat setbacks (as opportunities for learning), and the way we focus on deepening understanding (as the goal of learning).
48. When you change, the old beliefs aren’t just removed like a worn-out hip or knee and replaced with better ones. Instead, the new beliefs take their place alongside the old ones, and as they become stronger, they give you a different way to think, feel, and act.
49. Every day people plan to do difficult things, but they don’t do them. They think, “I’ll do it tomorrow,” and they swear to themselves that they’ll follow through the next day. Vowing, even intense vowing, is often useless. The next day comes and the next day goes.
50. We’re all a mixture of growth and fixed mindset. Sometimes we’re in one mindset and sometimes we’re in the other. Our task then becomes to understand what triggers our fixed mindset. What are the events or situations that take us to a place where we feel our (or other people’s) abilities are fixed? What are the events or situations that take us to a place of judgment rather than to a place of development?

The journey of adopting a growth mindset:

The first step is to embrace your fixed mindset. Let’s face it, we all have some of it. We’re all a mixture of growth and fixed mindsets and we need to acknowledge that. It’s not shameful an admission. It’s more like, welcome to the human race. But even though we have to accept that some fixed mindset dwells within, we do not have to accept how often it shows up and how much havoc it can wreak when it does.

The second step is to become aware of your fixed- mindset triggers. When does your fixed mindset “persona” come home to roost?

Now give your fixed-mindset persona a name.

You’re in touch with your triggers and you’re excruciatingly aware of your fixed-mindset persona and what it does to you. It has a name. What happens now? Educate it. Take it on the journey with you.

Ask these questions to stay in a growth mindset.

What are the opportunities for learning and growth today? For myself? For the people around me?

As you think of opportunities, form a plan, and ask:

When, where, and how will I embark on my plan?

When, where, and how make the plan concrete. How asks you to think of all the ways to bring your plan to life and make it work.

As you encounter the inevitable obstacles and setbacks, form a new plan and ask yourself the question again:

When, where, and how will I act on my new plan?

Regardless of how bad you may feel, chat with your fixed-mindset persona and then do it! And when you succeed, don’t forget to ask yourself:

What do I have to do to maintain and continue the growth?

THE END

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