In the late 1990s, Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller, two psychologists then at Columbia University, conducted an experiment to see how the type of praise we give to children after they have completed a learning task influences their approach to future learning tasks (Mueller and Dweck 1998). Do certain types of praise have more positive effects than others? They noted in the introduction to the published essay on their experiment that many teachers and parents seem to believe that praising children for their natural talents or abilities will improve their learning and performance. “One can identify a lay theory of achievement motivation,” they write, “in which praise for intelligence makes children feel smart and feeling smart, in turn, motivates learning” (p. 33). However, Dweck and Mueller had a different and contrary hypothesis, based in part on some previous research of their own. They believed that when children were praised for their natural talents and abilities, it could actually have detrimental effects on their future learning. Such praise could lead children to believe that intelligence is a stable and unchangeable trait, which might hinder children's willingness to work hard to improve themselves or take on challenging learning tasks. The opposite of this kind of ability praise would be effort praise: lauding children for the hard work they had put into a learning task and their attempts to overcome obstacles. This kind of praise, according to Dweck and Mueller's hypothesis, would perhaps not establish debilitating beliefs about the stability of intelligence and would instead encourage children to set ambitious learning goals and work hard to achieve them.
To test their hypotheses, Dweck and Mueller gave more than 100 fifth graders, from two very different population sets (one urban and multiracial, one Midwestern and mostly white), 4 minutes to solve 10 math problems. At the end of the 4 minutes, all the children were first praised for their achievement: “Wow, you did very well on these problems” (p. 36). Then some of the children were given additional praise of two different types (a control group received no additional praise). One group of children received some additional ability praise: “You must be smart at these problems” (p. 36). A second group was given effort praise: “You must have worked hard at these problems” (p. 36). After this second praise period, all the children were given 10 additional, much more difficult problems. No matter how well they did on these problems, all were told they performed “a lot worse” this time around. This was designed to give the children a setback in their learning and to test how they would respond to failure. In the final step of the experiment, the children were given a third set of 10 problems to solve, at the same level of difficulty as the first set. Dweck and Mueller used multiple measures, throughout and after the problem-solving sessions, to measure how the children thought about intelligence, learning, and their performance on the tasks.
The types of praise that the children received turned out to have wide-ranging effects on the children and their attitudes, motivation, and performance. For example, the children who had been praised for their natural abilities “enjoyed the tasks less than did the children praised for effort” (p. 37). More disturbingly, “children praised for intelligence were less likely to want to persist on the problems than children praised for effort” (p. 37). What helps explain findings like this is a deeper lesson that the children seemed to be learning about the nature of intelligence and about the connection between their intellectual ability and their performance on the problem sets.
Children praised for intelligence appeared to learn that performance reflected their ability and thus attributed low performance to low ability. Children praised for hard work, on the other hand, did not show such a marked tendency to measure their intelligence from how well they did on the problems. (p. 37)
In other words, the ability-praised children came to believe that their performance on the problem sets reflected clearly on their natural intellectual abilities. Children praised for their efforts, by contrast, believed that their performance reflected the effort they had put into the problems. This distinction has clear and profound implications. If children tie their beliefs about intelligence to particular performances, it means that they will attribute poor performance—such as a low score on an exam—to low or deficient intelligence. In other words, rather than seeing a low exam score as the result of not enough studying, a bad day, or some other understandable reason, they will think, “I did not do a good job on this exam. I must be stupid.” The children who had been praised for intelligence thought like this. The children who had been praised for their effort did not think this way. They attributed their poor performance to their lack of effort on the second set of problems and buckled down to work harder on the third set.
These types of results confirmed Dweck and Mueller's hypothesis: praise for effort, instead of praise for ability, will motivate children to work harder and persist in the face of challenges and will even increase their enjoyment of learning-oriented tasks. However, something really astonishing appeared when the researchers compared the scores of the two differently praised groups on the third set of problems, the ones the students received after their “poor” showing on the second set, which were of the same level of difficulty as the first set of problems they had completed. The type of praise the children received seemed to impact even their performance on this third set or problems: “Scores for children receiving intelligence feedback dropped an average of .92…Children in the effort condition, however, improved their prefailure scores by 1.21” (p. 38). Dweck and Mueller pointed out that these results are especially surprising because all three sets of 10 problems were similar in nature, differing only in level of difficulty: “These results are particularly striking because they demonstrate that the scores of children praised for intelligence decreased after failure even though their increased familiarity with the tasks should have bolstered, not weakened, their skills” (p. 38). In other words, everyone's scores should have been improving somewhat, since they were practicing multiple examples of the same problem type. That didn't happen, though, for the group praised for their intelligence; their scores dropped. It makes excellent sense to me that the praise we give to learners might impact their attitudes toward learning tasks or toward their enjoyment of those tasks. That it actually decreased their performance on the problems strikes me as both profound and potentially troubling for those of us who are charged with praising (or critiquing) learners for their performances on learning tasks.
This experiment, and many more like it conducted by Dweck and other colleagues, led her eventually to formulate the theory of mind-set, which can help explain what was happening in the minds of those fifth graders and also will form the focus of this chapter. She provided the most full and rich description of this theory in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2008). People have either a fixed or growth mind-set when it comes to their attitudes and beliefs about learning and intelligence. Individuals with a fixed mind-set believe that their intelligence is a fixed, stable quantity; someone or something stamped an IQ on their forehead at birth, and they are limited to that IQ for the remainder of their lives. Individuals with a growth mind-set, in contrast, believe that intelligence is malleable and can improve with hard work and effort. Perhaps they recognize that they must work within certain limitations, but they see themselves as capable of growing and improving throughout their lives. Although Dweck's early research in this area focused on how mind-set influenced children in the types of learning tasks outlined in the introduction to this chapter, she came to believe that it influenced people in many aspects of their lives: “The view you adapt 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” (p. 6, italics in original). In support of this broadening of her theory, Dweck explored in the book how the debilitating effects of the fixed mind-set and the positive effects of the growth mind-set have influenced major figures in the world of sports and business as well as people's successes and failures in teaching, parenting, and relationships.
If you need an easy confirmation that mind-set plays a role in the lives of your students, walk down the hallway or across campus and step into the office of the first math professor you see. Ask her how many times she has heard students say some variation of this sentence: “I'm not very good at math.” You will likely need a math professor to help keep track of the tally. You can probably also walk into the office of any English professor on your campus and pose the same question about this statement: “I'm not a very good writer.” These are classic examples of fixed–mind-set statements, and they absolutely infect the classrooms of math and writing instructors on college campuses, not to mention other types of courses that rely heavily on mathematical skills or writing skills. Dweck's mind-set theory would suggest that a profound gulf exists between students who make statements like this and students who might recognize that they are not very good at math right now but believe that will change over the course of the semester. If you believe you are not good at math and that you have no hope of changing that, the implications of this belief spill out generously: first, you will avoid math whenever possible; second, if confronted with a context in which you must study or learn math, you will choose the least challenging possible route; third, you will find the whole process pointless and depressing, since each time you fail at a math problem it will simply confirm your negative self-assessment of your math abilities. It seems clear enough that we should want students in our courses with growth mind-sets and that we should seek to counter fixed mind-sets wherever we find them.
Before we consider the issue of how we might address our students' mind-sets, though, it's essential to pause and note that the growth mind-set better reflects what neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists tell us about our brains and our capacities for growth and learning: we can improve our intelligence through hard work and effort, and we can make ourselves smarter. We can get better at math, or writing, or whatever else we want to learn. The potential is not unlimited; it is more likely the case that we each have an intelligence range within which we fall, but that range can be very broad and our effort and attitude help determine whether we are growing within that range or remaining stuck in the same place. Dweck describes it like this: “Scientists are learning that people have more capacity for lifelong learning and brain development than they ever thought. Of course, each person has a unique genetic endowment. People may start with different temperament and different aptitudes, but it is clear that experience, training, and personal effort take them the rest of the way” (p. 5).
So it may not be the case that I can begin studying math this summer and end up with the Fields Medal by my next birthday. However, it may certainly be the case that I could start brushing up on my rusty old math skills this summer and make some real improvements in my capabilities by the time next summer rolls around. And I'm sure almost every math teacher who has been in the business for a while has a story to tell about students who believed they weren't very good at math and ultimately ended up succeeding in their courses in spite of themselves.
To understand how someone with such a fixed mind-set could blossom into a successful math student requires understanding a second essential point about mind-sets: mind-sets can change. In fact, as has been shown in multiple experiments by Dweck and her colleagues and a line of researchers who have taken up her work, mind-sets can change as the result of very simple and brief interventions. Knowing this will help you better understand what Dweck and Mueller were after in their experiment with those fifth-grade students. When they were praising students for their ability, they were attempting to nudge them toward a fixed mind-set. When they were praising children for their effort, they were attempting to nudge them toward a growth mind-set. We can assume that the children going into the experiment likely had been praised for their efforts or their abilities or some combination of both by well-meaning teachers throughout the first 5 years of their formal education. It seems equally likely that they would have heard effort- or ability-based praise from their parents for the previous 10 years as well. So they likely were carrying mind-sets, perhaps inchoate and unarticulated ones, into the experiment. Despite the fact that they already had certain mind-sets about learning and school, it took only a few words of carefully designed praise, either for ability or effort, to nudge them effectively into a fixed or growth mind-set. Ability praise encouraged the students to think that they were naturally smart, which discouraged additional effort; effort praise encouraged the students to think that working a little harder would make a difference in their performance on the math problems.
The power of mind-set and our ability to change it is not just for fifth graders, as multiple experiments and examples (including from higher education) from Dweck and other researchers demonstrate. (Note that in both of the next two studies, the researchers use the more technical terms for mind-set: incremental theorists for people with the growth mind-set and entity theorists for those with a fixed mind-set.) Consider, for example, a series of studies conducted by Laura Kray and Michael Haselhuhn on the mind-sets of students in an MBA course on negotiating (Kray and Haselhuhn, 2007). In one of their experiments, they measured students' mind-sets at the beginning of the course by asking them the extent to which they agreed with statements like, “Good negotiators are born that way” or “All people can change even their most basic negotiation qualities” (p. 64). During the semester, they put the pairs of students into an extremely difficult negotiating situation, one that guaranteed initial failure and required persistence and creative thinking to get beyond. As with Dweck's fifth graders, the growth–mind-set students worked better in the postfailure condition: “The more negotiators collectively endorsed an incremental view, the more likely they were to overcome initial failures and construct an agreement that led to an acceptable solution for both parties” (p. 60). The researchers also discovered, as Dweck did with her fifth graders, that student mind-set influenced learning performance more generally. At the end of the semester, they compared the students' final grades in the course with the mind-set attitudes they had expressed on the first day of the semester The result: “The more malleable students believed negotiating ability to be on the first day of class, the higher their final course grade 15 weeks later” (p. 61). The students who saw negotiating skills as something capable of improvement actually did improve their negotiating skills more substantively than those who believed them to be stable. Their attitude toward learning, at least in part, expanded or limited their actual learning.
Outside of specific courses, psychologists Richard Robins and Jennifer Pals looked at how students with different mind-sets performed and did or didn't evolve over the course of their 4 years in college. They measured the mind-sets of more than 500 students at the University of California at Berkeley, asking them to evaluate the accuracy of statements like, “I have a certain ability level, and it is something that I can't do much about,” or “I can change the way I act in academic contexts, but I can't change my true ability level.” The results of their surveys across the students' 4 years of college show dramatic differences between entity (fixed) and incremental (growth) theorists in almost every aspect of their learning attitudes and behavior. To cite just a few:
Beyond attitudes and behaviors, the researchers confirmed what Mueller and Dweck (1998) and Kray and Haselhuhn (2007) had found: mind-set affects actual academic performance. As a group, entity theorists in this particular experiment came in to college with an overall higher record of academic achievement than the incremental theorists based on measures like SAT or ACT scores. Yet, despite their weaker record of prior academic achievement, the college grades of the incremental theorists as a group reached up to match those of the entity theorists. The growth–mind-set students had improved their potential and performance over the course of their 4 years, whereas the fixed–mind-set students had remained stable.
To best understand how all of this research will allow you to foster the growth mind-set in your students, and to do so in ways that fit within the framework of small teaching, consider one final study on mind-set, this one a collaborative effort between Dweck and three other researchers (Murphy 2014a). In this case they sought to understand whether organizations, like people, could have mind-sets. To measure this, they distributed mind-set–based surveys to more than 500 employees at seven large corporations. The types of questions they used should look familiar by now: “When it comes to being successful, this company seems to believe that people have a certain amount of talent, and they can't really do much to change it.” Two major findings emerged from their analysis of the surveys, both of which are consistent with the research of mind-sets within individuals: organizations did exhibit markedly different mind-sets about natural talents and abilities versus efforts, and growth mind-sets within organizations were associated with a wide range of positive and desirable characteristics. Companies with growth mind-sets, according to one presentation of the research, (a) support more collaboration; (b) encourage innovation and creativity; (c) support employees when they try new things and take measured risk; (d) show fewer unethical behaviors (e.g., cheating, cutting corners); and (e) are overall, more supportive of their employees. In sum, they found that “employees thrive in companies that endorse a growth mindset”. This was true of both lower level employees and their supervisors. When I first encountered this research, what struck me most sharply was how the phrases used to describe these results lined up so clearly with what we want for our students: effective collaboration, innovation and creativity, a willingness to try new things and take risks, and academic integrity.
Classrooms are not corporations, but they are organizations of a certain kind. Thus, the mind-set of a classroom—just like the mind-set of an organization—will depend largely on the language and actions of the “supervisor” at the front of the room. The most heartening quality about mind-set research, and the reason it occupies a chapter in this book, is that mind-sets are changeable. Lots of new research is emerging on the power of specific interventions designed to change students' mind-sets; unfortunately, most of the interventions that have been studied and measured involve providing mind-set tutorials or workshops to students outside the classroom, at orientation sessions or other events not associated with specific courses. (For an excellent recent example, see Paunesku, Walton, Romero, Smith, Yeager, & Dweck, 2015.) So I can't offer you a single solution for how to change individual students' mind-sets; that magic bullet has not yet emerged from the research. What I will focus on instead is how to make small teaching interventions to your course design, your feedback on student work, and your communication with students that will enable you to create a growth–mind-set classroom—one that encourages desirable academic qualities like creativity, risk taking, and even integrity. Just as we sought in the motivation chapter to create the conditions for internal motivation to flourish, here, too, we are seeking to create the course and classroom conditions that support and encourage students to adopt the growth mind-set—and in doing so, that contribute to their overall success in college and beyond.
Our definition of small teaching activities here expands beyond the level of specific classroom strategies to include tweaks to your course design and small changes in terms of how you communicate with your students.
To promote a growth mind-set, begin by designing an assessment system that rewards intellectual growth in your students. The very simplest way to do this is to allow students the opportunity to practice and take risks, fail and get feedback, and then try again without having their grades suffer for it. I argued in Chapter 5 that it's essential to give students in your course lots of opportunities to practice whatever skills they will need for your assessments, and we can see now that such opportunities can promote the growth mind-set by allowing students plenty of chances to try and fail and improve. However, a small teaching modification to the design of your assessment system can send this message as well: weigh later assignments in the same sequence more heavily than earlier ones. In other words, if you typically give three exams or three papers and a final (in addition to other types of assignments), don't allot the percentages like this: 15, 15, 15, 25. Work your way up to that final exam, and divide up the percentages in a more graduated fashion: 10, 15, 20, 25. The student who bombs that opening exam still can make a decent grade in the course if the stakes on it are low enough. And all students receive the message that it's OK to fail a little bit in the beginning because they will still have plenty of opportunities to make their grade later in the semester.
An equally effective but perhaps more challenging solution for instructors is to allow students to revise work or retake exams. This year, a colleague of mine instituted a policy of endless revision, which means that students can continue to revise any of their papers throughout the semester as often as they like until they get the grade they receive. I haven't seen this colleague out socially as much as I used to, I suspect because he is now stuck home with endless grading. But you don't have to take this strategy quite as far as my colleague. Start small: select an early exam or paper and offer students at least one opportunity to revise or retake it. I know full well that such a policy will increase your grading load and raise your grade distributions, and I don't make this recommendation lightly. Just note, though, that not every student will take you up on it. Some students will be happy with their grades on the first take, and at least a few others will miss the deadline or not care enough to accept the offer. The point is that making the offer sends a message about the type of classroom you run: in this course, you are communicating to them that you care more about their learning than you do about their specific performance on this particular assignment. If the performance did not match your expectations, try again. What matters is that you learn from it.
Finally, be careful about opening the course with extremely difficult assignments or exams that are designed to show students that you mean business. You certainly might convey that message if you give everyone in the class an F on the first exam. Growth–mind-set students will sit up and take notice and will double down on their studying for the next exam—just like those effort-praised fifth graders did in Dweck and Mueller's study (1998). But remember that you are likely to have both fixed– and growth–mind-set students in the room with you. An early failure in a new subject will communicate to fixed–mind-set students that they are no good at your discipline and will lead to the kind of debilitating behaviors we saw in the mind-set research. Instead, try to help all of your students along by giving them some early success opportunities. This doesn't mean you have to give a cakewalk first exam; it could mean quizzes that help them feel they are capable of succeeding on the exams, or it could mean short writing assignments that build up to the longer ones.
Maybe I am the only one who has ever given students ability-based praise, in which case all of you can skip this paragraph and move on to the next model. When I first read Dweck's work, I thought back with horror on all of the times that I had written comments or given oral feedback to students including statements like, “You are a really talented writer!” I meant well, I promise. My intention in those cases was to encourage students whom I saw as possible English majors or even future writers with some praise that would make them feel special and would encourage them to want to write more. Now I recognize how statements like this don't do much for instilling that growth mind-set, and here would be a great place to note that fixed mind-sets hamper students with high valuations of their intelligence as much as they do for students with low valuations of their intelligence. When students believe they are naturally smart and they perceive that quality as a fixed one, they may shy away from challenging tasks because they fear that failure will prove them wrong and that everyone—including themselves—will see that they are not as smart as they thought they were.
These days, as a result of my encounters with growth–mind-set research, I have modified my feedback vocabulary considerably. Statements like “You are a really talented writer” have been excised from my vocabulary and have been replaced with, “Excellent work—you took the strategies we have been working on in class and deployed them beautifully in here,” or, “You have obviously worked very hard at your writing, and it shows in this essay.” The detailed instructions I might give my students on how to improve for the next time probably look exactly the same; I have just made small shifts in the language I use to frame those instructions. Take a look at the kinds of sentences you speak and write to your students, and note what kind of mind-set those sentences reflect. Are you telling students that they have fixed abilities? Or are you telling them that they can get better?
Mind-set talk doesn't just happen in feedback on student work; it can color any of our communications with our students, from the syllabus to casual statements in class. Mary Murphy, who did her doctoral research under Dweck and has continued to explore as part of her ongoing research agenda mind-set and its role in classrooms and organizations, asked students to help her identify fixed– and growth–mind-set statements made by professors, the results of which are fascinating (Murphy 2014b). If you had asked me to speculate about what kinds of statements instructors make that instill a fixed mind-set, I would have guessed most of us make comments like the one I made earlier—well-meaning statements of praise for student abilities. I would have been wrong. Consider just some of the following comments that the students in Murphy's research reported hearing from their professors:
In contrast to these depressing statements, the students in Murphy's study also told her about professors whose growth talk or policies were inspiring to them:
The easiest way to check your mind-set talk is to review your syllabus, assignment sheets, and other written communication with students and ensure that all of these instill the conviction that students can succeed in your course through hard work, effort, and perseverance. If you seed that talk throughout your written communication with students, eventually—if it has not already—it will appear in your more casual oral communications with students as well.
One of my teaching-in-higher-education heroes is Joe Hoyle, an accounting professor at the University of Richmond whose work I have profiled both in the Chronicle of Higher Education and in a previous book (Lang 2013). Hoyle writes a regular blog on teaching in higher education and has won more teaching awards and accolades than I would care to count. The growth mind-set shines forth in every one of Hoyle's communications with his students, from his syllabus to his feedback. Consider just one example. In the spring, after students have registered for their fall courses, Hoyle sends an e-mail to the students to prepare them for their experience together: “I think that if you will put in a good effort next semester, you will be absolutely amazed by how much you can learn about financial accounting.” When students actually arrive at the course in the fall and are handed the syllabus, that initial growth talk is echoed by many more such statements on the syllabus. “You will often hear me say: HOURS EQUAL POINTS,” begins one paragraph of the syllabus. “If you don't choose to invest time, you will not do well…You have a lot of ability; if you are willing to invest the time, you will learn an amazing amount and be extremely pleased with what you accomplish” (Hoyle 2012). Although you see the word ability in here, you can also see that he turns the notion upside down: everyone has ability, so ability alone won't get you anywhere. Successful students put that ability to work.
Beyond the talk students hear from Hoyle, though, they also get something else: concrete advice on how to learn and succeed in his courses. I'll give my two favorite examples. First, Hoyle does not limit the growth-minded advice he gives to his students to his own perspective; he also asks students who have earned As in the course to write a letter to future students outlining how they managed it. Hoyle has compiled the best of these comments into a single document that he hands out to each fresh new crop of students. When you look it over, you can see how his choice of comments continues to enforce the power of the growth mind-set in his course:
DON'T GIVE UP on this class. Don't do it after the first test, after the second test, or right before the final. Just don't do it. I went into the final thinking that I had a very slim chance of making an A, but I tried my hardest to do the best that I possibly could and it paid off! And even if you feel like there is no chance you can do well, go talk with Professor Hoyle. I always left my talks with him with a drive to do better.
Every student statement in the document speaks to the three major points you find in this comment: the importance of working hard; the importance of persevering in the face of challenges in the course; and the importance of taking advantage of the many opportunities Hoyle gives them to better their grades. Consider whether your future students could use a document like this one; getting it started entails nothing more than an e-mail to the students who have earned As in your course asking for a paragraph description of how they succeeded. Most A students will relish an assignment like this.
In addition to enlisting these successful students to give good advice to their peers, Hoyle offers some of this kind of advice himself. Beyond the growth talk, in other words, he talks to them about concrete strategies for how they can learn most effectively in the course. This one, from the syllabus, advises students to join their peers in preclass discussions to prepare themselves for the Socractic-style teaching that they encounter every day in Hoyle's classroom:
A lot of students like to gather in the atrium 30–45 minutes before my classes just to sit and discuss the handouts. I think that is wonderful. I think that really helps. They always walk into class ready to go. If I could, I would require that. Absolutely!!! However, do me a personal favor. If there are people in the atrium from our class, include everyone in the conversation. Some people are quiet and don't want to butt in. I want everyone in the class to become part of the group. Don't be snooty. You make the move to be friendly. (Hoyle 2012)
The longer you teach, the more you will notice how successful students in your course or your discipline engage in certain actions or have certain habits that enable their success. As you observe those things, why not pass them along to your students in the way Hoyle does here? You can even talk to them about what enabled you to succeed as a learner in your discipline. I have been saying to my students for many years now that my own writing in college improved when I began a practicing a very simple habit: for every paper I had to write, I set myself a personal due date 24 hours before the actual due date. This enabled me to have a full day available for reconsideration and revision. I have seen how the best essays in my classes almost always come from students who practice some version of this habit, and I tell my students that as well. Does every student take this good advice? Obviously not. But talking to them about it helps convey the message that success comes not just from ability but also from planning, strategizing, and working.
One way to brainstorm messages to your students about the growth mindset would be to consider how you have overcome setbacks and failures in your disciplinary research or your teaching. Those of us who have completed advanced degrees will have growth mindsets in our areas of specialty. When you were faced with failure in your teaching or felt stuck in your research, what enabled you to break through? How did you learn to persist? Can you pass those strategies along to your students? As you consider how to inspire your students with such growth mindset talk, keep in mind these three basic principles.
Consider your course and classroom as an organization or social space that has norms, codes of behavior, and other malleable qualities (Howard 2015). Ensure that those norms include a growth mindset through as many small modifications as you can implement.
I once presented an overview of the growth and fixed mind-sets and their implications for higher education teaching at a faculty workshop that was being videotaped for instructors on campus who could not attend. Afterward, the man operating the camera came up to me and said, “You know, I don't normally listen to the people who are giving these workshops, but something about that growth–mind-set stuff caught my attention. I've got a story I can tell you about that.”
His story went like this.
When he was in high school, his family moved across town to a two-family house. The family in the other half of the house included a young man who was widely recognized as the star athlete in their town. Everyone saw him as a natural wonder, someone who was just born to play sports. After they had lived in the house for a few weeks, the cameraman noticed that this young man spent 4 hours per day working out in the backyard, both exercising and conducting drills related to the various sports he played. The cameraman said his first thought when he observed this kind of dedication, day after day, went something like this: “Boy, people who are such naturally talented athletes sure love to practice their sports!” Then, over the course of many more weeks and months of observing this, he realized that the truth was quite different: the young man was a so-called naturally talented athlete because he spent 4 hours every day practicing his sports. “At that moment,” the cameraman said, “I realized what it meant to have a growth mind-set, even if I didn't think about it in those terms.”
I like to tell this story at my workshops now because it illustrates perfectly the two essential points of this chapter: first, that the cameraman's initial mind-set completely shaped his interpretation of what he was observing in that backyard; and second, and most important, that his interpretation of his observations changed—but only when his mind-set changed.
Mind-sets are crucial—but mind-sets can change.
We can help.