Words matter. These are the best Carol S. Dweck Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I have seen schools across the country working long and hard to embed a commitment to the unlimited development of every student into their cultures. The result, in terms of motivated learners and test scores, often is spectacular.
Males and females can both have a fixed mindset about math and science, but it hurts girls more because they are on the negative end of the stereotype.
Praise your child explicitly for how capable they are of learning rather than telling them how smart they are.
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.
When there’s a setback, someone with a fixed mindset will start thinking, ‘Maybe I don’t have what it takes?’ They may get defensive and give up. A hallmark of a successful person is that they persist in the face of obstacle, and often, these obstacles are blessings in disguise.
When you have a limited theory of willpower, you’re constantly on alert, constantly monitoring yourself. ‘Am I tired? Am I hungry? Do I need a break? How am I feeling?’ And at the first sign that something is flagging, you think, ‘I need a rest or a boost.’
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.
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.
This knowledge that you might have to really reorganize and redefine yourself and build new skills is really important.
I’ve always been interested, since graduate school, in why some children wilt and shrink back from challenges and give up in the face of obstacles, while others avidly seek challenges and become even more invested in the face of obstacles. So this has been my primary question for over 40 years.
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.
Most experts and great leaders agree that leaders are made, not born, and that they are made through their own drive for learning and self-improvement.
Children love this idea that their brain is like a muscle that gets stronger as they use it.
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.
We say women have made great strides: in biology, in many areas of chemistry, in many places, women are now the majority of medical students. But when I began my career, that wasn’t the case. There were very strong stereotypes in biology and medicine.
When I was in graduate school, I became very interested in why some kids took on challenges and were able to bounce back from setbacks whereas others shy away from difficulty and really crumble when they hit failures. I became fascinated with people who had that kind of courage to take on challenges.
What we found was that the greater proportion of process praise, the more likely the child was to have a mindset five years later that welcomed challenges and that represented traits as malleable, not a label you were stuck with.
Unproductive effort is never a good thing.
Do you think it is possible to increase your intellectual ability? For decades, I have studied the power of this belief to become reality and watched as the concept of maintaining a ‘growth mindset’ has taken root in education and parenting circles.
One very common thing is that often very brilliant children stop working because they’re praised so often that it’s what they want to live as – brilliant – not as someone who ever makes mistakes. It really stunts their motivation.
Business leaders who openly acknowledge people’s concerns about becoming obsolete and who invest resources in workers’ growth can help create a nation of learners – and perhaps resolve some of the political chaos that’s bubbling around us.
When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart; don’t risk making mistakes.
‘Hard-working’ is what gets the job done. You just see that year after year. The students who thrive are not necessarily the ones who come in with the perfect scores. It’s the ones who love what they’re doing and go at it vigorously.
I open ‘Mindset’ with examples of kids who thrive on difficult challenges.
There is a long history of research showing that people are overconfident about their abilities. But it turns out that people in general are not overconfident about their abilities; people with a fixed mindset are overconfident.
