106-107 “What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait?”
122-124 “A few modern philosophers…assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism….With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.”
127-128 “as Gilbert Gottlieb, an eminent neuroscientist, put it, not only do genes and environment cooperate as we develop, but genes require input from the environment to work properly.”
139-142 “Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character—well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.”
158-159 “a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.”
164-168 “Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.”
237-239 “Recently, we set out to see who is most likely to do this. Sure, we found that people greatly misestimated their performance and their ability. But it was those with the fixed mindset who accounted for almost all the inaccuracy. The people with the growth mindset were amazingly accurate.”
319-320 ““I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures….I divide the world into the learners and nonlearners.”” !!
354-358 “People with a fixed mindset were only interested when the feedback reflected on their ability. Their brain waves showed them paying close attention when they were told whether their answers were right or wrong. But when they were presented with information that could help them learn, there was no sign of interest. Even when they’d gotten an answer wrong, they were not interested in learning what the right answer was. Only people with a growth mindset paid close attention to information that could stretch their knowledge. Only for them was learning a priority.”
482-483 ““Becoming is better than being.” The fixed mindset does not allow people the luxury of becoming. They have to already be.”
584-585 “If you’re successful, you’re better than other people. You get to abuse them and have them grovel. In the fixed mindset, this is what can pass for self-esteem.”
596-600 “people who believe in fixed traits feel an urgency to succeed, and when they do, they may feel more than pride. They may feel a sense of superiority, since success means that their fixed traits are better than other people’s. However, lurking behind that self-esteem of the fixed mindset is a simple question: If you’re somebody when you’re successful, what are you when you’re unsuccessful?”
675-676 “John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them.”
714-720 “Temperament certainly plays a role, but mindset is an important part of the story. When we taught people the growth mindset, it changed the way they reacted to their depressed mood. The worse they felt, the more motivated they became and the more they confronted the problems that faced them. In short, when people believe in fixed traits, they are always in danger of being measured by a failure. It can define them in a permanent way. Smart or talented as they may be, this mindset seems to rob them of their coping resources. When people believe their basic qualities can be developed, failures may still hurt, but failures don’t define them. And if abilities can be expanded—if change and growth are possible—then there are still many paths to success.”
728-736 “The little engine that could, the saggy, baggy elephant, and the scruffy tugboat—they were cute, they were often overmatched, and we were happy for them when they succeeded. In fact, to this day I remember how fond I was of those little creatures (or machines), but no way did I identify with them. The message was: If you’re unfortunate enough to be the runt of the litter—if you lack endowment—you don’t have to be an utter failure. You can be a sweet, adorable little slogger, and maybe (if you really work at it and withstand all the scornful onlookers) even a success. Thank you very much, I’ll take the endowment. The problem was that these stories made it into an either–or. Either you have ability or you expend effort. And this is part of the fixed mindset. Effort is for those who don’t have the ability. People with the fixed mindset tell us, “If you have to work at something, you must not be good at it.” They add, “Things come easily to people who are true geniuses.””
747-749 “as a society we value natural, effortless accomplishment over achievement through effort. We endow our heroes with superhuman abilities that led them inevitably toward their greatness. It’s as if Midori popped out of the womb fiddling, Michael Jordan dribbling, and Picasso doodling. This captures the fixed mindset perfectly. And it’s everywhere.”
768-771 “From the point of view of the fixed mindset, effort is only for people with deficiencies. And when people already know they’re deficient, maybe they have nothing to lose by trying. But if your claim to fame is not having any deficiencies—if you’re considered a genius, a talent, or a natural—then you have a lot to lose. Effort can reduce you.”
784-788 “Why is effort so terrifying? There are two reasons. One is that in the fixed mindset, great geniuses are not supposed to need it. So just needing it casts a shadow on your ability. The second is that, as Nadja suggests, it robs you of all your excuses. Without effort, you can always say, “I could have been [fill in the blank].” But once you try, you can’t say that anymore. Someone once said to me, “I could have been Yo-Yo Ma.” If she had really tried for it, she wouldn’t have been able to say that.”
907-908 “The fixed mindset creates the feeling that you can really know the permanent truth about yourself. And this can be comforting:”
996-1001 “It did not happen suddenly. The lightbulb has become the symbol of that single moment when the brilliant solution strikes, but there was no single moment of invention. In fact, the lightbulb was not one invention, but a whole network of time-consuming inventions each requiring one or more chemists, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and glassblowers. Edison was no naïve tinkerer or unworldly egghead. The “Wizard of Menlo Park” was a savvy entrepreneur, fully aware of the commercial potential of his inventions. He also knew how to cozy up to the press—sometimes beating others out as the inventor of something because he knew how to publicize himself.”
1039-1041 “in the fixed mindset, a loser is forever. It’s no wonder that many adolescents mobilize their resources, not for learning, but to protect their egos. And one of the main ways they do this (aside from providing vivid portraits of their teachers) is by not trying.”
1042-1043 “students with the fixed mindset tell us that their main goal in school—aside from looking smart—is to exert as little effort as possible.”
1145-1146 “American students passed the test at this level. This means there’s a lot of intelligence out there being wasted by underestimating students’ potential”
1145-1146 “there’s a lot of intelligence out there being wasted by underestimating students’ potential to develop.”
1170-1172 ““After forty years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.””
1194-1196 “The fixed mindset limits achievement. It fills people’s minds with interfering thoughts, it makes effort disagreeable, and it leads to inferior learning strategies. What’s more, it makes other people into judges instead of allies.”
1295-1301 “There was one more finding in our study that was striking and depressing at the same time. We said to each student: “You know, we’re going to go to other schools, and I bet the kids in those schools would like to know about the problems.” So we gave students a page to write out their thoughts, but we also left a space for them to write the scores they had received on the problems. Would you believe that almost 40 percent of the ability-praised students lied about their scores? And always in one direction. In the fixed mindset, imperfections are shameful—especially if you’re talented—so they lied them away. What’s so alarming is that we took ordinary children and made them into liars, simply by telling them they were smart.”
1305-1305 “telling children they’re smart, in the end, made them feel dumber and act dumber, but claim they were smarter.”
1326-1330 “even checking a box to indicate your race or sex can trigger the stereotype in your mind and lower your test score. Almost anything that reminds you that you’re black or female before taking a test in the subject you’re supposed to be bad at will lower your test score—a lot. In many of their studies, blacks are equal to whites in their performance, and females are equal to males, when no stereotype is evoked. But just put more males in the room with a female before a math test, and down goes the female’s score.”
1388-1394 “When they’re little, these girls are often so perfect, and they delight in everyone’s telling them so. They’re so well behaved, they’re so cute, they’re so helpful, and they’re so precocious. Girls learn to trust people’s estimates of them. “Gee, everyone’s so nice to me; if they criticize me, it must be true.” Even females at the top universities in the country say that other people’s opinions are a good way to know their abilities. Boys are constantly being scolded and punished. When we observed in grade school classrooms, we saw that boys got eight times more criticism than girls for their conduct. Boys are also constantly calling each other slobs and morons. The evaluations lose a lot of their power.”
1430-1432 “Are there situations where you get stupid—where you disengage your intelligence? Next time you’re in one of those situations, get yourself into a growth mindset—think about learning and improvement, not judgment—and hook it back up.”
1437-1438 “Create an environment that teaches the growth mindset to the adults and children in your life, especially the ones who are targets of negative stereotypes. Even when the negative label comes along, they’ll remain in charge of their learning.”
1580-1582 “people prize natural endowment over earned ability. As much as our culture talks about individual effort and self-improvement, deep down, he argues, we revere the naturals. We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.”
1641-1645 “character grows out of mindset. We now know that there is a mindset in which people are enmeshed in the idea of their own talent and specialness. When things go wrong, they lose their focus and their ability, putting everything they want—and in this case, everything the team and the fans so desperately want—in jeopardy. We also know that there is a mindset that helps people cope well with setbacks, points them to good strategies, and leads them to act in their best interest.”
1658-1660 “Sampras says, “When you’re sitting on the changeover you think of past matches that you’ve lost the first set…came back and won the next three. There’s time. You reflect on your past experiences, being able to get through it.””
1717-1720 ““I believe ability can get you to the top,” says coach John Wooden, “but it takes character to keep you there….It’s so easy to…begin thinking you can just ‘turn it on’ automatically, without proper preparation. It takes real character to keep working as hard or even harder once you’re there. When you read about an athlete or team that wins over and over and over, remind yourself, ‘More than ability, they have character.’”
1732-1734 ““For me the joy of athletics has never resided in winning,” Jackie Joyner-Kersee tells us, “…I derive just as much happiness from the process as from the results. I don’t mind losing as long as I see improvement or I feel I’ve done as well as I possibly could. If I lose, I just go back to the track and work some more.””
1747-1748 “For those with the fixed mindset, success is about establishing their superiority, pure and simple. Being that somebody who is worthier than the nobodies.”
1751-1752 “in the fixed mindset, effort is not a cause for pride. It is something that casts doubt on your talent.”
1754-1754 “Those with the growth mindset found setbacks motivating. They’re informative. They’re a wake-up call.”
1821-1822 ““In our society sometimes it’s hard to come to grips with filling a role instead of trying to be a superstar,” says Jordan.”
1875-1875 “Somebodies are not determined by whether they won or lost. Somebodies are people who go for it with all they have.”
1915-1918 “the gurus at McKinsey & Company, the premier management consulting firm in the country, were insisting that corporate success today requires the “talent mind-set.” Just as there are naturals in sports, they maintained, there are naturals in business. Just as sports teams write huge checks to sign outsized talent, so, too, should corporations spare no expense in recruiting talent, for this is the secret weapon, the key to beating the competition.” ORLY?
1923-1924 “people with the fixed mindset do not admit and correct their deficiencies.”
1930-1932 “Gladwell concludes that when people live in an environment that esteems them for their innate talent, they have grave difficulty when their image is threatened: “They will not take the remedial course. They will not stand up to investors and the public and admit that they were wrong. They’d sooner lie.”” COLLINS
1943-1946 “the type of leader who in every case led the company into greatness. These were not the larger-than-life, charismatic types who oozed ego and self-proclaimed talent. They were self-effacing people who constantly asked questions and had the ability to confront the most brutal answers—that is, to look failures in the face, even their own, while maintaining faith that they would succeed in the end.”
1948-1950 “They’re not constantly trying to prove they’re better than others. For example, they don’t highlight the pecking order with themselves at the top, they don’t claim credit for other people’s contributions, and they don’t undermine others to feel powerful.”
1980-1983 “Collins’s comparison leaders were typically concerned with their “reputation for personal greatness”—so much so that they often set the company up to fail when their regime ended. As Collins puts it, “After all, what better testament to your own personal greatness than that the place falls apart after you leave?””
1999-2001 “If it’s the more self-effacing growth-minded people who are the true shepherds of industry, why are so many companies out looking for larger-than-life leaders—even when these leaders may in the end be more committed to themselves than to the company?”
2044-2057 “he worried that his underlings might get credit for successful new designs, so he balked at approving them. He worried, as Chrysler faltered, that his underlings might be seen as the new saviors, so he tried to get rid of them. He worried that he would be written out of Chrysler history, so he desperately hung on as CEO long after he had lost his effectiveness. Iacocca had a golden opportunity to make a difference, to leave a great legacy. The American auto industry was facing its biggest challenge ever. Japanese imports were taking over the American market. It was simple: They looked better and they ran better. Iacocca’s own people had done a detailed study of Honda, and made excellent suggestions to him. But rather than taking up the challenge and delivering better cars, Iacocca, mired in his fixed mindset, delivered blame and excuses. He went on the rampage, spewing angry diatribes against the Japanese and demanding that the American government impose tariffs and quotas that would stop them. In an editorial against Iacocca, The New York Times scolded, “The solution lies in making better cars in this country, not in angrier excuses about Japan.” Nor was Iacocca growing as a leader of his workforce. In fact, he was shrinking into the insulated, petty, and punitive tyrant he had accused Henry Ford of being. Not only was he firing people who were critical of him, he’d done little to reward the workers who had sacrificed so much to save the company. Even when the money was rolling in, he seemed to have little interest in sharing it with them. Their pay remained low and their working conditions remained poor. Yet even when Chrysler was in trouble again, he maintained a regal lifestyle.”
2085-2087 “if he has to prove himself, he needs a yardstick. Employee satisfaction or community responsibility or charitable contributions are not good yardsticks. They cannot be reduced to one number that represents his self-worth. But shareholder profits can.”
2088-2090 ““The most ridiculous term heard in boardrooms these days is ‘stakeholders.’ ” The term refers to the employees, the community, and the other companies, such as suppliers, that the company deals with. “You can’t measure success by the interest of multiple stakeholders. You can measure success by how the shareholder fares.”” EDIT
2125-2128 “As resident genius, Skilling had unlimited faith in his ideas. He had so much regard for his ideas that he believed Enron should be able to proclaim profits as soon as he or his people had the idea that might lead to profits. This is a radical extension of the fixed mindset: My genius not only defines and validates me. It defines and validates the company. It is what creates value. My genius is profit.”
2143-2145 “when the new CEO, Richard Parsons, sent someone down to fix AOL, Case was intensely against it. If someone else fixed AOL, someone else would get the credit. As with Iacocca, better to let the company collapse than let another prince be crowned.”
2147-2148 “AOL Time Warner ended the year 2002 with a loss of almost one hundred billion dollars. It was the largest yearly loss in American history.”
2154-2156 “What is fascinating is that as they led their companies toward ruin, all of these leaders felt invulnerable and invincible. In many cases, they were in highly competitive industries, facing onslaughts from fierce rivals. But they lived in a different reality. It was a world of personal greatness and entitlement.”
2161-2164 “As these leaders cloaked themselves in the trappings of royalty, surrounded themselves with flatterers who extolled their virtues, and hid from problems, it is no wonder they felt invincible. Their fixed mindset created a magic realm in which the brilliance and perfection of the king were constantly validated. Within that mindset, they were completely fulfilled. Why would they want to step outside that realm to face the uglier reality of warts and failures?”
2164-2168 “As Morgan McCall, in his book High Flyers, points out, “Unfortunately, people often like the things that work against their growth….People like to use their strengths…to achieve quick, dramatic results, even if…they aren’t developing the new skills they will need later on. People like to believe they are as good as everyone says…and not take their weaknesses as seriously as they might. People don’t like to hear bad news or get criticism….There is tremendous risk…in leaving what one does well to attempt to master something new.”
2189-2191 ““The minute a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse.””
2203-2204 ““I wish to have as my epitaph: ‘Here lies a man who was wise enough to bring into his service men who knew more than he.’ ””
2225-2228 “Steve Bennett, the CEO of Intuit. “I learned about nurturing employees from my time at General Electric from Jack Welch….He’d go directly to the front-line employee to figure out what was going on. Sometime in the early 1990s, I saw him in a factory where they made refrigerators in Louisville….He went right to the workers in the assembly line to hear what they had to say. I do frequent CEO chats with front-line employees. I learned that from Jack.””
2234-2236 ““I hate having to use the first person. Nearly everything I’ve done in my life has been accomplished with other people….Please remember that every time you see the word I in these pages, it refers to all those colleagues and friends and some I might have missed.””
2251-2252 “True self-confidence is “the courage to be open—to welcome change and new ideas regardless of their source.””
2258-2259 “If we’re managing good people who are clearly eating themselves up over an error, our job is to help them through it.””
2280-2283 “he rewarded teamwork rather than individual genius. For years, GE, like Enron, had rewarded the single originator of an idea, but now Welch wanted to reward the team that brought the ideas to fruition. “As a result, leaders were encouraged to share the credit for ideas with their teams rather than take full credit themselves. It made a huge difference in how we all related to one another.””
2301-2303 ““Hierarchy means very little to me. Let’s put together in meetings the people who can help solve a problem, regardless of position.””
2347-2348 “The fixed-mindset leaders were, in the end, full of bitterness, but the growth-minded leaders were full of gratitude.”
2375-2378 “members of the growth-mindset groups were much more likely to state their honest opinions and openly express their disagreements as they communicated about their management decisions. Everyone was part of the learning process. For the fixed-mindset groups—with their concern about who was smart or dumb or their anxiety about disapproval for their ideas—that open, productive discussion did not happen. Instead, it was more like groupthink.”
2382-2383 “Groupthink can occur when people put unlimited faith in a talented leader, a genius.”
2391-2392 “Groupthink can happen when the group gets carried away with its brilliance and superiority.”
2396-2399 ““Gentlemen,” he said, “I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here….Then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.””
2401-2401 “Groupthink can also happen when a fixed-mindset leader punishes dissent.”
2412-2412 “Or workers, seeking validation from leaders, fall into line behind them.”
2472-2476 “many managers do not believe in personal change. These fixed-mindset managers simply look for existing talent—they judge employees as competent or incompetent at the start and that’s that. They do relatively little developmental coaching and when employees do improve, they may fail to take notice, remaining stuck in their initial impression. What’s more (like managers at Enron), they are far less likely to seek or accept critical feedback from their employees. Why bother to coach employees if they can’t change and why get feedback from them if you can’t change?”
2486-2489 “The workshop then takes managers through a series of exercises in which a) they consider why it’s important to understand that people can develop their abilities, b) they think of areas in which they once had low ability but now perform well, c) they write to a struggling protégé about how his or her abilities can be developed, and d) they recall times they have seen people learn to do things they never thought these people could do. In each case, they reflect upon why and how change takes place.”
2493-2496 “our best bet is not simply to hire the most talented managers we can find and turn them loose, but to look for managers who also embody a growth mindset: a zest for teaching and learning, an openness to giving and receiving feedback, and an ability to confront and surmount obstacles. It also means we need to train leaders, managers, and employees to believe in growth, in addition to training them in the specifics of effective communication and mentoring.”
2510-2513 “most people, when they first become managers, enter a period of great learning. They get lots of training and coaching, they are open to ideas, and they think long and hard about how to do their jobs. They are looking to develop. But once they’ve learned the basics, they stop trying to improve. It may seem like too much trouble, or they may not see where improvement will take them. They are content to do their jobs rather than making themselves into leaders.” !!!
2556-2559 “Supervisors in growth-mindset companies saw their team members as having far greater management potential than did supervisors in fixed-mindset companies. They saw future leaders in the making. I love the irony. The fixed-mindset companies presumably searched for the talent, hired the talent, and rewarded the talent—but now they were looking around and saying, “Where’s the talent?” The talent wasn’t flourishing.”
2605-2606 ““She took my worth with her when she left. Not a day goes by I don’t think about how to make her pay.””
2606-2607 ““If I had to choose between me being happy and him being miserable, I would definitely want him to be miserable.””
2611-2612 ““That relationship and how it ended really taught me the importance of communicating. I used to think love conquers all, but now I know it needs a lot of help.””
2612-2613 ““I also learned something about who’s right for me. I guess every relationship teaches you more about who’s right for you.””
2614-2614 ““Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.” To understand all is to forgive all.”
2632-2634 “Nicole spoke repeatedly about the pain and trauma of being stood up at her wedding, but she never used the word humiliated. If she had judged herself, felt flawed and unworthy—humiliated—she would have run and hidden. Instead, her good clean pain made her able to surround herself with the love of her friends and relatives and begin the healing process.”
2647-2648 “as a society, we don’t understand relationship skills. Yet everything is at stake in people’s relationships.”
2685-2687 “one of the most destructive beliefs for a relationship is “If we need to work at it, there’s something seriously wrong with our relationship.””
2688-2689 ““Every marriage demands an effort to keep it on the right track; there is a constant tension…between the forces that hold you together and those that can tear you apart.””
2690-2691 “It’s probably why so many relationships go stale—because people believe that being in love means never having to do anything taxing.”
2693-2695 “We are like one. My partner should know what I think, feel, and need and I should know what my partner thinks, feels, and needs. But this is impossible. Mind reading instead of communicating inevitably backfires.”
2692-2695 “Part of the low-effort belief is the idea that couples should be able to read each other’s minds: We are like one. My partner should know what I think, feel, and need and I should know what my partner thinks, feels, and needs. But this is impossible. Mind reading instead of communicating inevitably backfires.”
2704-2706 “many people with a fixed mindset believe that a couple should share all of each other’s views. If you do, then you don’t need communication; you can just assume your partner sees things the way you do.”
2724-2726 “Few things can make partners more furious than having their rights violated. And few things can make a partner more furious than having the other feel entitled to something you don’t think is coming to them.”
2737-2738 “A no-effort relationship is a doomed relationship, not a great relationship. It takes work to communicate accurately and it takes work to expose and resolve conflicting hopes and beliefs.”
2747-2748 “once people with the fixed mindset see flaws in their partners, they become contemptuous of them and dissatisfied with the whole relationship.”
2780-2780 “Brenda is boring, Jack is selfish, and our relationship is no good.”
2776-2780 “Brenda and Jack were clients of Daniel Wile, and he tells this tale. Brenda came home from work and told Jack a long, detailed story with no apparent point. Jack was bored to tears but tried to hide it to be polite. Brenda, however, could sense his true feelings, so, hoping to be more amusing, she launched into another endless story, also about a project at work. Jack was ready to burst. They were both mentally hurling traits right and left. According to Wile, they were both thinking: Brenda is boring, Jack is selfish, and our relationship is no good.”
2896-2899 “Boys who believed in the fixed mindset showed a boost in self-esteem when they endorsed the stereotypes. Thinking that girls were dumber and more scatterbrained made them feel better about themselves. (Boys with the growth mindset were less likely to agree with the stereotypes, but even when they did, it did not give them an ego boost.)”
2927-2929 “Your failures and misfortunes don’t threaten other people’s self-esteem. Ego-wise, it’s easy to be sympathetic to someone in need. It’s your assets and your successes that are problems for people who derive their self-esteem from being superior.”
2938-2938 “people with the fixed mindset were more likely to be shy.”
2939-2939 “But there were plenty of shy people with both mindsets,”
2940-2941 “Shyness harmed the social interactions of people with the fixed mindset but did not harm the social relations of people with the growth mindset.”
3040-3044 “some schools have created a dramatic reduction in bullying by fighting the atmosphere of judgment and creating one of collaboration and self-improvement. Stan Davis, a therapist, school counselor, and consultant, has developed an anti-bullying program that works. Building on the work of Dan Olweus, a researcher in Norway, Davis’s program helps bullies change, supports victims, and empowers bystanders to come to a victim’s aid. Within a few years, physical bullying in his school was down 93 percent and teasing was down 53 percent.”
3050-3053 “First, while enforcing consistent discipline, he doesn’t judge the bully as a person. No criticism is directed at traits. Instead, he makes them feel liked and welcome at school every day. Then he praises every step in the right direction. But again, he does not praise the person; he praises their effort.”
3073-3075 “The notion that some people are entitled to brutalize others is not a healthy one. Stan Davis points out that as a society, we rejected the idea that people were entitled to brutalize blacks and harass women. Why do we accept the idea that people are entitled to brutalize our children?”
3100-3103 “every word and action can send a message. It tells children—or students, or athletes—how to think about themselves. It can be a fixed-mindset message that says: You have permanent traits and I’m judging them. Or it can be a growth-mindset message that says: You are a developing person and I am committed to your development.”
3134-3135 “Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance.”
3160-3162 “If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, seek new strategies, and keep on learning.” !!!
3200-3205 “In one study, we taught students a math lesson spiced up with some math history, namely, stories about great mathematicians. For half of the students, we talked about the mathematicians as geniuses who easily came up with their math discoveries. This alone propelled students into a fixed mindset. It sent the message: There are some people who are born smart in math and everything is easy for them. Then there are the rest of you. For the other half of the students, we talked about the mathematicians as people who became passionate about math and ended up making great discoveries. This brought students into a growth mindset. The message was: Skills and achievement come through commitment and effort. It’s amazing how kids sniff out these messages from our innocent remarks.”
3206-3211 “When we say to children, “Wow, you did that so quickly!” or “Look, you didn’t make any mistakes!” what message are we sending? We are telling them that what we prize are speed and perfection. Speed and perfection are the enemy of difficult learning: “If you think I’m smart when I’m fast and perfect, I’d better not take on anything challenging.” So what should we say when children complete a task—say, math problems—quickly and perfectly? Should we deny them the praise they have earned? Yes. When this happens, I say, “Whoops. I guess that was too easy. I apologize for wasting your time. Let’s do something you can really learn from!””
3264-3267 “coaches say that in the old days after a little league game or a kiddie soccer game, parents used to review and analyze the game on the way home and give helpful (process) tips. Now on the ride home, they say, parents heap blame on the coaches and referees for the child’s poor performance or the team’s loss. They don’t want to harm the child’s confidence by putting the blame on the child.”
3283-3285 ““Son, remember I told you how tedious things help us learn to concentrate? This one is a real challenge. This will really take all your concentration skills. Let’s see if you can concentrate through this whole assignment!””
3470-3471 “Lowering standards just leads to poorly educated students who feel entitled to easy work and lavish praise.”
3480-3481 “On the other hand, simply raising standards in our schools, without giving students the means of reaching them, is a recipe for disaster. It just pushes the poorly prepared or poorly motivated students into failure and out of school.”
3501-3506 “On the first day of school, she always promised her students—all students—that they would learn. She forged a contract with them. “I know most of you can’t spell your name. You don’t know the alphabet, you don’t know how to read, you don’t know homonyms or how to syllabicate. I promise you that you will. None of you has ever failed. School may have failed you. Well, goodbye to failure, children. Welcome to success. You will read hard books in here and understand what you read. You will write every day….But you must help me to help you. If you don’t give anything, don’t expect anything. Success is not coming to you, you must come to it.””
3533-3533 “Great teachers set high standards for all their students, not just the ones who are already achieving.”
3543-3544 “Stereotypes tell teachers which groups are bright and which groups are not. So teachers with the fixed mindset know which students to give up on before they’ve even met them.”
3574-3577 ““I know which child will handle the challenge of the most difficult paragraphs, and carefully plan a passage for the shy youngster…who will begin his journey as a good reader. Nothing is left to chance….It takes enormous energy, but to be in a room with young minds who hang on every word of a classic book and beg for more if I stop makes all the planning worthwhile.””
3590-3592 “When students don’t know how to do something and others do, the gap seems unbridgeable. Some educators try to reassure their students that they’re just fine as they are. Growth-minded teachers tell students the truth and then give them the tools to close the gap.”
3609-3611 ““Somnus, god of sleep, please awaken us. While we sleep, ignorance takes over the world….Take your spell off us. We don’t have long before ignorance makes a coup d’état of the world.””
3611-3612 “When teachers are judging them, students will sabotage the teacher by not trying. But when students understand that school is for them—a way for them to grow their minds—they do not insist on sabotaging themselves.”
3616-3619 “How can growth-minded teachers be so selfless, devoting untold hours to the worst students? Are they just saints? Is it reasonable to expect that everyone can become a saint? The answer is that they’re not entirely selfless. They love to learn. And teaching is a wonderful way to learn. About people and how they tick. About what you teach. About yourself. And about life. Fixed-minded teachers often think of themselves as finished products. Their role is simply to impart their knowledge.”
3621-3624 ““There’s an assumption,” he said, “that schools are for students’ learning. Well, why aren’t they just as much for teachers’ learning?” I never forgot that. In all of my teaching, I think about what I find fascinating and what I would love to learn more about. I use my teaching to grow, and that makes me, even after all these years, a fresh and eager teacher.”
3638-3642 “Everyone who knows me well laughs when I say someone is complicated. “What do you think of so-and-so?” “Oh, he’s complicated.” It’s usually not a compliment. It means that so-and-so may be capable of great charm, warmth, and generosity, but there’s an undercurrent of ego that can erupt at any time. You never really know when you can trust him. The fixed mindset makes people complicated. It makes them worried about their fixed traits and creates the need to document them, sometimes at your expense. And it makes them judgmental.”
3773-3774 ““Success lulls you. It makes the most ambitious of us complacent and sloppy.””
3802-3803 “Misunderstanding #1. Many people take what they like about themselves and call it a “growth mindset.””
3807-3807 “Misunderstanding #2. Many people believe that a growth mindset is only about effort, especially praising effort.”
3811-3814 “Certainly, we want children to appreciate the fruits of hard work. But we also want them to understand the importance of trying new strategies when the one they’re using isn’t working. (We don’t want them to just try harder with the same ineffective strategy.) And we want them to ask for help or input from others when it’s needed. This is the process we want them to appreciate: hard work, trying new strategies, and seeking input from others.”
3814-3815 “Another pitfall is praising effort (or any part of the process) that’s not there.”
3818-3819 “of even greater concern to me is the fact that some teachers and coaches are using effort praise as a consolation prize when kids are not learning.”
3820-3821 “we should never be content with effort that is not yielding further benefits. We need to figure out why that effort is not effective and guide kids toward other strategies and resources that can help them resume learning.”
3824-3827 “Finally, when people realize I’m the mindset person, they often say, “Oh, yea! Praise the process not the outcome, right?” Well, not quite. This is such a common misconception. In all of our research on praise, we indeed praise the process, but we tie it to the outcome, that is, to children’s learning, progress, or achievements.”
3831-3832 “interest in it goes a very long way. Misunderstanding #3. A growth mindset equals telling kids they can do anything.”
3832-3832 “Misunderstanding #3. A growth mindset equals telling kids they can do anything.”
3850-3854 “Although for simplicity I’ve talked as though some people have a growth mindset and some people have a fixed mindset, in truth we’re all a mixture of the two. There’s no point denying it. Sometimes we’re in one mindset and sometimes we’re in the other. Our task then becomes to understand what triggers our fixed mindset. What are the events or situations that take us to a place where we feel our (or other people’s) abilities are fixed? What are the events or situations that take us to a place of judgment rather than to a place of development?”
3860-3862 “once we acknowledge that we all have recurrent fixed mindsets, we can talk to one another openly. We can talk about our fixed-mindset personas, when they show up, how they affect us, and how we’re learning to deal with them. And as we do, we will realize that we have lots of fellow travelers on our journey.”
3870-3872 “Adults’ mindsets are in their heads and are not directly visible to children. Adults’ overt actions speak far louder, and this is what children are picking up on. Unfortunately, these actions often don’t line up with the growth mindsets in adults’ heads.”
3877-3880 “When a child has a setback and the parent reacts with anxiety or with concern about the child’s ability, this fosters more of a fixed mindset in the child. The parent may try to gloss over the child’s failure but the very act of doing so may convey that the failure is an issue. So, although parents may hold a growth mindset, they may still display worry about their child’s confidence or morale when the child stumbles.”
3885-3888 “passing on a growth mindset is about whether teachers are teaching for understanding or are simply asking students to memorize facts, rules, and procedures. Research is showing that when teachers care about deeper understanding and work with students to achieve it, then students are more likely to believe that their abilities can be developed.”
3902-3905 “I am hearing from many researchers and educators that students across the economic spectrum are becoming increasingly unable to grasp the difference between memorizing facts, rules, and procedures and truly understanding the concepts underlying the material. Aside from the bad news for growth mindsets, this also has disturbing implications for our nation. Great contributions to society are born of curiosity and deep understanding. If students no longer recognize and value deep learning, where will the great contributions of the future come from?” !!!
3908-3910 “parents, teachers, and coaches pass on a growth mindset not by having a belief sitting in their heads but by embodying a growth mindset in their deeds: the way they praise (conveying the processes that lead to learning), the way they treat setbacks (as opportunities for learning), and the way they focus on deepening understanding (as the goal of learning).”
3967-3972 “In the 1960s, psychiatrist Aaron Beck was working with his clients when he suddenly realized it was their beliefs that were causing their problems. Just before they felt a wave of anxiety or depression, something quickly flashed through their minds. It could be: “Dr. Beck thinks I’m incompetent.” Or “This therapy will never work. I’ll never feel better.” These kinds of beliefs caused their negative feelings not only in the therapy session, but in their lives, too. They weren’t beliefs people were usually conscious of. Yet Beck found he could teach people to pay attention and hear them. And then he discovered he could teach them how to work with and change these beliefs. This is how cognitive therapy was born,”
3978-3978 “Mindsets frame the running account that’s taking place in people’s heads. They guide the whole interpretation process.”
4092-4093 “experts, and brain experts, we developed the “Brainology””
4194-4197 “vowing, even intense vowing, is often useless. The next day comes and the next day goes. What works is making a vivid, concrete plan: “Tomorrow during my break, I’ll get a cup of tea, close the door to my office, and call the graduate school.””
4444-4445 ““I’m not sure why, but when you do that, it makes me feel unimportant. Like you can’t be bothered to do things that matter to me.””
4443-4445 “spouses can’t read your mind, so when an anger-provoking situation arises, you have to matter-of-factly tell them how it makes you feel. “I’m not sure why, but when you do that, it makes me feel unimportant. Like you can’t be bothered to do things that matter to me.””
4447-4447 ““Please tell me that you care how I feel and you’ll try to be more watchful.”)”
4446-4447 “you can request it directly, as I’ve sometimes done: “Please tell me that you care how I feel and you’ll try to be more watchful.”)”
4459-4461 “It’s amazing—once a problem improves, people often stop doing what caused it to improve. Once you feel better, you stop taking your medicine. But change doesn’t work that way. When you’ve lost weight, the issue doesn’t go away.”
4463-4465 “that’s why Alcoholics Anonymous tells people they will always be alcoholics—so they won’t become complacent and stop doing what they need to do to stay sober. It’s a way of saying, “You’ll always be vulnerable.””
4493-4494 “The first step is to embrace your fixed mindset.”
4495-4496 “It’s not a shameful admission. It’s more like, welcome to the human race. But even though we have to accept that some fixed mindset dwells within, we do not have to accept how often it shows up and how much havoc it can wreak when it does.”
4498-4498 “become aware of your fixed-mindset triggers.”
==========
244-245 “Howard Gardner, Extraordinary Minds,”
521-521 “Paul Cézanne’s”
383-383 ““CEO disease.””
1217-1217 “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.”
1237-1237 “The Creative Habit.”
1543-1543 “double pneumonia, scarlet fever, and polio(!),”
1942-1942 “Good to Great,”
2001-2001 “James Surowiecki, writing in Slate,”
2106-2107 “Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, authors of The Smartest Guys in the Room,”
2176 “hornstein”
2176-2176 “Brutal Bosses”
2232-2232 “Welch’s autobiography—”
2576-2577 “Gerstner’s Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?” !!!
2648-2649 “Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence”
3482-3483 “Falko Rheinberg” !!!! — PRESENTATION NOTE: be mindful of framing w growth mindset and not fixed. diligent : audit books for mindset
3483-3484 “Jaime Escalante”
3484-3484 “Marva Collins”
3967-3967 “Aaron Beck”
4093-4093 ““Brainology””
4140-4140 “Karen Horney and Carl Rogers,”
4194-4194 “Peter Gollwitzer”
4627-4627 “DIAGRAM BY NIGEL HOLMES”
4651-4651 “NOTES