Mindset by Carol Dweck

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The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you live your life.

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.

Everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

A person’s true potential is unknown; it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.

Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? 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? Stretching yourself and sticking to it.

People are terrible at estimating their abilities.

You can change your mindset.

Two meanings for ability: a fixed ability that needs to be proven, and a changeable ability that can be developed through learning.

Everyone is born with an intense drive to learn.

People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it. The bigger the challenge, the more they stretch.

When you’re lying on your deathbed, one of the cool things to say is, “I really explored myself.” If you only go through life doing stuff that’s easy, shame on you.

This is hard. This is fun.

It’s about learning something over time: confronting a challenge and making progress.

“Becoming is better than being.”

People with a growth mindset know that it takes time for potential to flower.

Michael Jordan, he was a human being. He just stretched himself farther than most.

Even geniuses have to work hard for their achievements. Effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment.

You have to work hardest for the things you love most.

Success is about being your best self, not about being better than others; failure is an opportunity; effort is the key to success.

Believing talents can be developed allows people to fulfill their potential.

The growth mindset does allow people to love what they’re doing — and to continue to love it in the face of difficulties.

The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome.

Put yourself in a growth mindset. Picture your brain forming new connections as you meet the challenge and learn. Keep on going.

Seek constructive criticism.

Next time you feel low, put yourself in a growth mindset — think about learning, challenge, confronting obstacles. Think about effort as a positive, constructive force, not as a big drag. Try it out.

Adolescence is a time of opportunity: a time to learn new subjects, a time to find out what you like and what you want to become in the future.

Test scores and measures of achievement tell you where a student is, but they don’t tell you where a student could end up.

Important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies.

Creativity is not a magical act of inspiration. It’s the result of hard work and dedication.

“The way to get ahead in life is hard work.” — Bruce Jenner

Character is the ability to dig down and find the strength even when things are going against you.

All of these people had character. None of them thought they were special people, born with the right to win. They were people who worked hard, who learned how to keep their focus under pressure, and who stretched beyond their ordinary abilities when they had to.

“I believe ability can get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there… It’s so easy to begin thinking you can just ‘turn it on’ automatically, without proper preparation. It takes real character to keep working as hard or even harder once you’re there. When you read about an athlete or team that wins over and over and over, remind yourself, ‘More than ability, they have character.’” — John Wooden

“How good you are at sports will always improve if you work harder at it.”

“To be successful in sports, you need to learn techniques and skills and practice them regularly.”

Personal success is when you work your hardest to become your best.

“After every game or practice, if you walk off the field knowing that you gave everything you had, you will always be a winner.” — Mia Hamm

“I know my game. I know what I want to achieve, I know how to get there.” — Tiger Woods

Somebodies are people who go for it with all they have. If you go for it with all you have — not just in the games, but in practice too — you will already be a somebody.

“If you work hard at something, you get out what you put in.” — Candace Parker

Look to improve all the time.

A company that cannot self-correct cannot thrive.

Self-effacing people constantly ask questions and have the ability to confront the most brutal answers, look failures in the face, even their own, while maintaining faith that they will succeed in the end.

Believe in human development.

Constantly dig down, face challenges, and keep growing.

True self-confidence is “the courage to be open — to welcome change and new ideas regardless of their source.”

Genius is not enough; we need to get the job done.

Whenever a group reached a decision while sober, they later reconsidered it while intoxicated.

It’s critical to be in a growth mindset when important decisions are made. A growth mindset leads to a full and open discussion of the information and to enhanced decision making.

Taking on challenges, showing persistence, and admitting and correcting mistakes are essential.

Instead of just giving employees an award for the smartest idea or praise for a brilliant performance, they would get praise for taking initiative, for seeing a difficult task through, for struggling and learning something new, for being undaunted by a setback, or for being open to and acting on criticism.

Leaders are made, not born, and made more by themselves than by any external means. Everyone, of whatever age and circumstance, is capable of self-transformation.

Create an organization that prizes the development of ability — and watch the leaders emerge.

A culture of development: conveying that people can grow and improve with effort, good strategies, and good mentoring.

Mind reading instead of communicating inevitably backfires.

There are no great achievements without setbacks, there are no great relationships without conflicts and problems along the way.

Help partners reach their own goals and fulfill their own potential.

Use your mind to make things better.

Do not praise the person; praise their effort.

Social skills are things you can improve and social interactions are for learning and enjoyment, not judgment.

Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance.

When children hear their parent’s fixed judgments of others, it communicates a fixed mindset.

Withholding constructive criticism does not help children’s confidence, it harms their future.

Don’t judge. Teach. It’s a learning process.

Great teachers set high standards for all their students, not just the ones who are already achieving.

When teachers are judging them, students will sabotage the teacher by not trying. But when students understand that school is for them — a way for them to grow their minds — they do not insist on sabotaging themselves.

“You have to apply yourself each day to becoming a little better. By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better.” — John Wooden

Instead of asking for mistake-free games, ask for full commitment and full effort.

Nothing is better than seeing people find their way to things they value.

Go for it. Make it happen. Develop your skills. Pursue your dream.

Observe. Learn. Improve. Become a better athlete.

Nobody scoffs at an honest plea for helpful feedback.

Every day people plan to do difficult things, but they don’t do them.

What works is making a vivid, concrete plan.

Think of something you need to do, something you want to learn, a problem you have to confront. What is it? Now make a concrete plan. When will you follow through on your plan? Where will you do it? How will you do it? Think about it in vivid detail.

These concrete plans lead to really high levels of follow-through, which, of course, ups the chances of success.

Setbacks will happen. So instead of beating yourself up, ask “What can I learn from this? What will I do next time when I’m in this situation?” It’s a learning process.

Every lapse is a reminder that you’re an unfinished human being and a clue to how to do it better next time.

Change needs to be maintained. It’s amazing — once a problem improves, people stop doing what caused it to improve.

Change from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework. Commitment is to growth, and growth takes plenty of time, effort, and mutual support to achieve and maintain.

For your growth mindset to bear fruit, you need to keep setting goals — goals for growth. Every day presents you with ways to grow and to help the people you care about grow.

Keep the growth mindset in your thoughts. Then, when you bump up against obstacles, you can turn to it. It will always be there for you, showing you a path into the future.

With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment, and become more intelligent than we were before.

Scientists are learning that people have more capacity for lifelong learning and brain development than they ever thought.

The major factor in whether people achieve expertise “is not some fixed prior ability, but purposeful engagement.”

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