Mindset

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Author: Carol S. Dweck Published: 2006 (updated 2017) Summary length: ~45 minutes

A four year old at a table

A small girl sits at a low table in a research room at Columbia University. In front of her are puzzles. The first few are easy and she breezes through them. Then the puzzles get harder. The researcher watches what she does next.

Carol Dweck and her team had been running this study for years, in different forms, with different ages. The pattern was almost spooky in its consistency. Some children, faced with the harder puzzles, pulled their chairs closer, rubbed their hands together, and lit up. One ten year old smacked his lips and announced, "I love a challenge." Another, sweating through a problem, looked up brightly and said, "You know, I was hoping this would be informative." These kids did not yet have the words for it, but they were treating the difficult puzzle as a chance to grow.

Other children, given the same puzzle, grew quiet. They asked if they could do an easier one instead. When researchers offered four year olds a choice between redoing an easy jigsaw puzzle or trying a harder one, kids with what Dweck would later call the fixed mindset chose the safe puzzle every time. As one of them explained with the certainty only a preschooler can muster, "Kids who are born smart don't do mistakes." Kids with the growth mindset thought the question was odd. Why repeat a puzzle you have already solved? "I'm dying to figure them out," one little girl exclaimed, reaching for the hardest one on the pile.

Same children. Same age. Same room. Two completely different responses to the same situation. That gap, between the kid who runs toward difficulty and the kid who runs away from it, became the central question of Dweck's career. It was not about IQ. It was not about background. It was about a quiet belief, formed early, that ran underneath everything else: is who you are fixed, or is it something you build?