Mindset _ The New Psychology of Success - Carol S. Dweck [111]
Your son is precocious in all aspects of the fixed mindset, and soon the mindset is in full flower. He develops a distaste for effort—he wants his smart brain to churn things out quickly for him. And it often does.
When he takes to chess very quickly, your spouse, thinking to inspire him, rents the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, a film about a young chess champion. What your son learns from the film is that you could lose and not be a champion anymore. So he retires. “I’m a chess champion,” he announces to one and all. A champion who won’t play.
Because he now understands what losing means, he takes further steps to avoid it. He starts cheating at Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, and other games.
He talks often about all the things he can do and other children can’t. When you and your spouse tell him that other children aren’t dumb, they just haven’t practiced as much as he has, he refuses to believe it. He watches things carefully at school and then comes home and reports, “Even when the teacher shows us something new, I can do it better than them. I don’t have to practice.”
This boy is invested in his brain—not in making it grow but in singing its praises. You’ve already told him that it’s about practice and learning, not smart and dumb, but he doesn’t buy it. What else can you do? What are other ways you can get the message across?
THE GROWTH-MINDSET STEP. You decide that, rather than trying to talk him out of the fixed mindset, you have to live the growth mindset. At the dinner table each evening, you and your partner structure the discussion around the growth mindset, asking each child (and each other): “What did you learn today?” “What mistake did you make that taught you something?” “What did you try hard at today?” You go around the table with each question, excitedly discussing your own and one another’s effort, strategies, setbacks, and learning.
You talk about skills you have today that you didn’t have yesterday because of the practice you put in. You dramatize mistakes you made that held the key to the solution, telling it like a mystery story. You describe with relish things you’re struggling with and making progress on. Soon the children can’t wait each night to tell their stories. “Oh my goodness,” you say with wonder, “you certainly did get smarter today!”
When your fixed-mindset son tells stories about doing things better than other children, everyone says, “Yeah, but what did you learn?” When he talks about how easy everything is for him in school, you all say, “Oh, that’s too bad. You’re not learning. Can you find something harder to do so you could learn more?” When he boasts about being a champ, you say, “Champs are the people who work the hardest. You can become a champ. Tomorrow tell me something you’ve done to become a champ.” Poor kid, it’s a conspiracy. In the long run, he doesn’t stand a chance.
When he does his homework and calls it easy or boring, you teach him to find ways to make it more fun and challenging. If he has to write words, like boy, you ask him, “How many words can you think of that rhyme with boy? Write them on separate paper and later we can try to make a sentence that has all the words.” When he finishes his homework, you play that game: “The boy threw the toy into the soy sauce.” “The girl with the cirl [curl] ate a pirl [pearl].” Eventually, he starts coming up with his own ways to make his homework more challenging.
And it’s not just school or sports. You encourage the children to talk about ways they learned to make friends, or ways they’re learning to understand and help others. You want to communicate that feats of intellect or physical prowess are not all you care about.
For a long time, your son remains attracted to the fixed mindset. He loves the idea that he’s inherently special—case closed. He doesn’t love