One by one, the children enter the researcher’s office. They’re here to do some puzzles as part of a study. The task starts off easy, but quickly becomes challenging. As the researcher hands out the more difficult of the puzzles, she observes how each child reacts:
“I love a challenge!”
“You know, I was hoping this would be informative!”
But many of the kids lose their enthusiasm once the puzzles get tough. The researcher asks if they want to take some home to practice. One child tells a white lie to get out of it: “It’s okay, you can keep them. I already have them”.
What’s the difference between how these kids react to a challenge? Even some of the best puzzle solvers lost interest when the difficulty level was raised. So it isn’t whether they’re good at the task.
The thing that set some of these kids apart from the others is that they embraced the challenge. They got excited by the opportunity to stretch themselves and do something difficult. They didn’t mind that the puzzles didn’t come easy to them. They simply saw it as a chance to learn something new.
That researcher was Dr. Carol Dweck, who would go on to pioneer the concept of growth mindset. She tells these and many more such stories in her groundbreaking book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. As she points out in the book, “People in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it.”
What is growth mindset?
Growth mindset is the belief that your own efforts will make a difference in how talented, smart, and successful you are. It’s the attitude that you can work to get better at something. That no matter how smart you were when you were born, you can become more intelligent by learning new things.
Growth mindset is focused on opportunities. It’s always looking to add new knowledge and skills. It isn’t afraid of failure. In fact, when people who have a growth mindset fail, they tend to think of it in terms of what they learned from the experience, rather than focusing on the failure itself.
Having a growth mindset opens doors, because it leads you to assume that you’ll get better at something over time. And go figure—people who believe they can do something often find a way!
What about people who don’t have a growth mindset?
The opposite of growth mindset is called fixed mindset. Someone with a fixed mindset tends to believe that whatever they were born with is what they’ve got, period. They see being smart as something you either are or aren’t, from the very beginning. They see talent as an innate skill, rather than the result of years of consistent hard work.
A fixed mindset leads people to be afraid of any failure, because to them it would show that they aren’t actually smart or talented. And that fear leads, in turn, to other forms of pessimism that end up preventing them from learning and improving.
There’s a saying in the U.S.: “If you believe you can’t do something, you’re probably right!” In the end, having a fixed mindset becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Let’s take a look at how this plays out.
A tale of two mindsets
Ricardo and Natalia are engineers at rival companies whose rosters include several English speakers. The two have never met, but they have quite a lot in common. They’re both South American, smart and well-spoken. They’ve both been studying English for six years. And they both have the end goal of working for a U.S. company.
As much as Ricardo wants to get better at speaking English, he refuses to use it in the workplace—even with colleagues who have invited him to practice with them. The very idea of sounding like he’s less intelligent than he is makes him really uncomfortable. He plans to get better on his own, no matter how long that takes. Once he’s really good, then he’ll start to speak English with his coworkers.
Natalia doesn’t love the idea of looking dumb either. After all, her intelligence is part of why her teams love her. At the same time, she’s not willing to pass up the opportunity to practice her English. In fact, using it in her engineering job has helped her focus her efforts on the vocabulary and modes of speech that are most relevant for her role.
In Natalia’s mind, even if she says something incorrectly, it’s a chance to learn. She knows her limits and how to avoid embarrassing herself too badly. By strategically picking which conversations she’ll use to practice her English, she gets lots of opportunities to improve.
Ricardo is worried about the threat of failure, while Natalia is focused on the possibilities. If we visit them again in a year, who do you think will be the better English speaker?
What a growth mindset means for your career
As technology advances, more and more jobs rely on soft skills like a growth mindset, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, communication, and teamwork. Not only that, but roles evolve quickly along with industry practices. The ability to learn continuously throughout your life is more important now than at any other point in history.
Having a growth mindset impacts every aspect of your career. It means you’re more likely to take advantage of educational opportunities. You’re more likely to choose a challenging career and then pick up new skills at each job you work at. Your bosses are more likely to lean on you, because they know you’ll embrace new challenges. Rather than stubbornly sticking to outdated methods and processes, you’ll be looking to innovate and improve.
These qualities are all incredibly attractive to employers and clients—especially in fields where innovation is prized.
Many studies have proven this to be true. The research shows that having a growth mindset makes workers:
- More engaged in their work
- More adaptable
- More likely to seek out challenges
- More successful
- More satisfied in their career
- More likely to learn from feedback
- More likely to persist through difficulties
When it comes down to it, having a growth mindset is the key to unlocking your potential. It means you’ll be able to grow and learn faster and better. And that will make you more competitive in the job market, as an independent worker, or as an entrepreneur.
“What if I have a fixed mindset?”
We can practically hear the gears turning in your mind. Maybe you feel more like Ricardo than Natalia right now. Research shows that 55–60% of people have a fixed mindset, so if this is you, you certainly aren’t alone.
The very concept of growth mindset promises that you can change and grow. That’s true even for people with a fixed mindset. The trouble, of course, is that someone whose mindset is fixed is less likely to try to grow in the first place. So it turns into a cycle of stagnation.
Self-awareness is the first step toward change. So congrats on accomplishing that! As you move forward from here, your goal is going to be to choose growth. Expand your comfort zone. Take on a new challenge.
You can start small! This is something you can practice in your everyday life. Try a new cooking technique. Have that hard conversation you’ve been avoiding. The next time a question occurs to you, research the answer instead of just letting it slide.
When an experiment turns out badly (and they will sometimes), try not to waste too much energy feeling bad. If you’re having thoughts like, “Well, this shows that I’m just not smart”, reject them. Instead, focus your attention on what went wrong and how to do better next time.
Over time, your ability to embrace the new and challenging will grow. In fact, you’ll start to see exponential results. Be patient. Be kind to yourself. And keep focusing on the opportunities.
Conclusion
If you want to live up to your potential, your very first step should be to focus your efforts and your mental energy on growth. Embrace opportunities to learn, practice, and add to your skill set. Enjoy the challenge. Test what you’re capable of. And as we say in the U.S., “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again!”
We’ll be talking about growth mindset a lot more in future blog posts—and in our upcoming book! So stay tuned as we dig deeper into this topic.
Sources
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine Books.
Murphy, M. C., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). “Mindsets shape consumer behavior.” Journal of Consumer Psychology, 26(1), 127-136.
Keating, L. A., & Heslin, P. A. (2015). “The potential role of mindsets in unleashing employee engagement.” Human Resource Management Review, 25(4), 329-341.
Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). “Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention.” Child Development, 78(1), 246-263.
Dweck, C. S. (2014). “Mindsets and human nature: Promoting change in the middle east, the schoolyard, the racial divide, and willpower.” American Psychologist, 69(6), 614-622.
Yeager, D. S., & Dweck, C. S. (2012). “Mindsets That Promote Resilience: When Students Believe That Personal Characteristics Can Be Developed.” Educational Psychologist, 47(4), 302-314.
