Switch - Chip Heath [67]
You can do things differently, but the important parts of who you are can’t really be changed.
You can always change basic things about the kind of person you are.
If you agreed with items 1 and 3, you’re someone who has a “fixed mindset.” And if you agreed with items 2 and 4, you tend to have a “growth mindset.” (If you agreed with both 1 and 2, you’re confused.) As we’ll see, which mindset you have can help determine how easy it will be for you to handle failure, and how dogged you’ll be in pursuing change. It might even determine how successful you are in your career.
People who have a fixed mindset believe that their abilities are basically static. Maybe you believe you’re a pretty good public speaker, an average manager, and a wonderful organizer. With a fixed mindset, you believe that you may get a little bit better or worse at those skills, but basically your abilities reflect the way you’re wired. Your behavior, then, is a good representation of your natural ability, just as the swirled-and-sniffed first taste of wine is a good representation of the bottle you’ve bought.
If you are someone with a fixed mindset, you tend to avoid challenges, because if you fail, you fear that others will see your failure as an indication of your true ability and see you as a loser (just as a bad first taste of wine leads you to reject the bottle). You feel threatened by negative feedback, because it seems as if the critics are saying they’re better than you, positioning themselves at a level of natural ability higher than yours. You try not to be seen exerting too much effort. (People who are really good don’t need to try that hard, right?) Think about tennis player John McEnroe as a young star—he had great natural talent but was not keen on rigorous practice or self-improvement.
In contrast, people who have a growth mindset believe that abilities are like muscles—they can be built up with practice. That is, with concerted effort, you can make yourself better at writing or managing or listening to your spouse. With a growth mindset, you tend to accept more challenges despite the risk of failure. (After all, when you try and fail to lift more weight at the gym, you don’t worry that everybody will mock you as a “born weakling.”) You seek out “stretch” assignments at work. And you’re more inclined to accept criticism, because ultimately it makes you better. You may not be as good as others right now, but you’re thinking long-term, in a tortoise-versus-hare kind of way. Think Tiger Woods, who won eight major championships faster than anyone in history and then decided his swing needed an overhaul.
Fixed versus growth: Which are you? This isn’t one of those Cosmo Personality Quizzes in which there are no wrong answers (“Are you a Labrador retriever or a poodle?”). Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, has spent her career studying these two mindsets—she is the source of the terms. And her research results are clear: If you want to reach your full potential, you need a growth mindset.
Dweck has studied how these two mindsets influence the performance of Olympic athletes and virtuoso musicians and everyday businesspeople. In her must-read book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she makes an airtight case that a growth mindset will make you more successful at almost anything. That’s because people with a growth mindset—those who stretch themselves, take risks, accept feedback, and take the long-term view—can’t help but progress in their lives and careers.
Once you become aware of these concepts, you start to spot the fixed mindset everywhere. Look at the way we praise our children: “You’re so smart!” “You are so good at basketball!” That’s fuel for the fixed mindset. A growth mindset compliment praises effort rather than natural skill: “I’m proud of how hard you worked on that project!” “I could tell you listened to your coach’s comments—you really had your elbow under those jump shots today.”
Our salsa-dancing experience was