Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Let’s go back a few paragraphs to when you were rejected by the graduate school. Suppose your attempt to make yourself feel better had failed. You could still have taken the growth-mindset step. You can feel miserable and still reach out for information that will help you improve.

Sometimes after I have a setback, I go through the process of talking to myself about what it means and how I plan to deal with it. Everything seems fine—until I sleep on it. In my sleep, I have dream after dream of loss, failure, or rejection, depending on what happened. Once when I’d experienced a loss, I went to sleep and had the following dreams: My hair fell out, my teeth fell out, I had a baby and it died, and so on. Another time when I felt rejected, my dreams generated countless rejection experiences—real and imagined. In each instance, the incident triggered a theme, and my too-active imagination gathered up all the variations on the theme to place before me. When I woke up, I felt as though I’d been through the wars.

It would be nice if this didn’t happen, but it’s irrelevant. It might be easier to mobilize for action if I felt better, but it doesn’t matter. The plan is the plan. Remember the depressed students with the growth mindset? The worse they felt, the more they did the constructive thing. The less they felt like it, the more they made themselves do it.

The critical thing is to make a concrete, growth-oriented plan, and to stick to it.

The Number One Draft Choice

The last dilemma seemed hard, but, basically, it was solved by a phone call. Now imagine you’re a promising quarterback. In fact, you’re the winner of the Heisman trophy, college football’s highest award. You’re the top draft pick of the Philadelphia Eagles, the team you’ve always dreamed of playing for. So what’s the dilemma?

The Second Dilemma. The pressure is overwhelming. You yearn for playing time in the games, but every time they put you in a game to try you out, you turn anxious and lose your focus. You were always cool under pressure, but this is the pros. Now all you see are giant guys coming toward you—twelve hundred pounds of giant guys who want to take you apart. Giant guys who move faster than you ever thought possible. You feel cornered … helpless.

The Fixed-Mindset Reaction. You torture yourself with the idea that a quarterback is a leader and you’re no leader. How could you ever inspire the confidence of your teammates when you can’t get your act together to throw a good pass or scramble for a few yards? To make things worse, the sportscasters keep asking, What happened to the boy wonder?

To minimize the humiliation you begin to keep to yourself and, to avoid the sportscasters, you disappear into the locker room right after the game.

Whoa. Is this a recipe for success? What steps could you take to make things better? Think about the resources at your disposal and how you could use them. But first, get your mindset turned around.

The Growth-Mindset Step. In the growth mindset, you tell yourself that the switch to the professionals is a huge step, one that takes a lot of adjustment and a lot of learning. There are many things you couldn’t possibly know yet and that you’d better start finding out about.

You try to spend more time with the veteran quarterbacks, asking them questions and watching tapes with them. Instead of hiding your insecurities, you talk about how different it is from college. They, in turn, tell you that’s exactly how they felt. In fact, they share their humiliating stories with you.

You ask them what they did to overcome the initial difficulties and they teach you their mental and physical techniques. As you begin to feel more integrated into the team, you realize you’re part of an organization that wants to help you grow, not judge and belittle you. Rather than worrying that they overpaid for your talent, you begin to give them their money’s worth of incredibly hard work and team spirit.

PEOPLE WHO DON’T WANT TO CHANGE

Entitlement: The World Owes You

Many people with the fixed mindset think the

world

needs to change, not them. They feel entitled to something better—a better job, house, or spouse. The world should recognize their special qualities and treat them accordingly. Let’s move to the next dilemma and imagine yourself in this situation.

The Next Dilemma. “Here I am,” you think, “in this low-level job. It’s demeaning. With my talent I shouldn’t have to work like this. I should be up there with the big boys, enjoying the good life.” Your boss thinks you have a bad attitude. When she needs someone to take on more responsibilities, she doesn’t turn to you. When it’s time to give out promotions, she doesn’t include you.