MALE SPEAKER: really excited to have such a full room.
And I know we have a lot of people
on the live stream and a lot more people
still who can't make either and looking forward
to seeing this up on YouTube which will be
the case in the next few days.
I'm really excited to introduce Professor Carol
Dweck from Stanford University.
She's the Lewis and Virginia Eaton professor of psychology.
She is best known for her work on mindsets
that people use to guide their behavior.
She earned a BA in psychology from Columbia University
and then a Ph.D. In psychology from Yale.
She's the author of a bestselling book, "Mindset:
The New Psychology of Success."
And despite traffic, a bunch of books
arrived at the back of the room, which
you can purchase afterwards.
I certainly encourage you to do so.
There's my well-thumbed copy.
It's sold over a million copies, so there
are many of your friends out there
who have enjoyed this work.
She's a frequent speaker, has spoken on the TED stage
multiple times, at the United Nations, the White House,
among other prestigious organizations.
Her work has won so many awards that if I named them all
that would be the entire talk.
So I'm not going to do that.
And now that I've incredibly boosted her ego,
I'd like to bring up Professor Dweck.
[APPLAUSE]
All right, before we get into mindsets,
I want you to share what we've learned from what is now
the widely-discredited theory of self esteem and the self esteem
movement.
CAROL DWECK: OK.
In the 1990s the self esteem movement took over the world.
We were told to tell everyone how
fabulous, brilliant, talented, special they were all the time.
This was going to motivate them and boost their achievement.
Instead, as you said, it was a complete disaster.
It led to the acceptance of mediocrity.
It didn't challenge people to fulfill their potential.
And our research showed telling people they're smart
actually backfires.
It makes them afraid of challenges,
it makes them fold in the face of obstacles,
because they're worried, oh, does this not look smart?
Am I not smart?
The whole currency is built around smart.
MALE SPEAKER: So what triggered your interest
in going deeper and researching how people
are motivated and learn, and how did that lead
to your definition of mindsets?
CAROL DWECK: I was always interested
in why some people wilted in the face of failure,
shied away from challenges, when people
who are no more talented or able were embracing challenges
and thriving in the face of failure.
Ultimately this led to our discovery of the mindsets.
And what we found was that some people believe their talents
and abilities are just these fixed traits-- you have
a certain amount and that's it.
But other people believe talents and abilities
can be developed through hard work, good strategies,
good mentoring from others.
Through years of work, we found that having a fixed mindset led
you to be afraid of challenges that might unmask
your deficiencies, made you withdraw
in the face of difficulty because you felt stupid.
You didn't want to feel stupid.
You didn't want other people to think you're stupid.
Whereas having this growth mindset,
the idea that your abilities could be developed,
made you think, why waste my time
looking smart when I could be getting smarter?
And I do that through taking on challenges.
I do that through seeing them through.
Now granted, that doesn't mean everyone's
the same, that they don't different talents
and abilities.
It just means everyone can grow.
MALE SPEAKER: And sort of building on that, you really
can't watch a sports broadcast or the TV
show America's Got Talent, who has talent in the name,
without hearing how talented that player is.
Or seeing someone perform the ballet
and say she has tremendous talent.
What role, if any, does innate talent play?
CAROL DWECK: Well, they do have talent now,
when we're watching them, but I think
it's created a nation that thinks
when they see someone displaying talent
or incredible performance, they were born that way.
And they've had this inevitable rise to great success.
I teach a freshman seminar at Stanford every year.
And I have my students do an assignment
where they do research on their hero,
and almost invariably they think that hero just
catapulted to success because of this amazing inborn talent.
But every single time they find that the hero
put in inordinate amounts of work, met with obstacles,
and really powered through them.
So I don't rule out the idea of the fact
that some people are born with passions and talents
and build those, but many people who never achieve anything
are also born with talents and passions
that they don't see through.
And what's there, what we come with,
that's the raw material that you've got to develop.
Michael Jordan, it turns out, wasn't particularly talented
until he went at it so ferociously, more ferociously
than anyone else.
MALE SPEAKER: Over lunch, we had an interesting discussion
with part of the team here about growth mindset, fixed mindset,
it's a great simplified way to think of it.
Yet people can have both, and it's more of the spectrum.
Talk a little bit more about how you can have both mindset.
CAROL DWECK: Yes, we're all a mixture.
And it's true that you could have
a fixed mindset in one area and a growth mindset another area.
And it's true that it's a spectrum, not a dichotomy.
But it's a really dynamic.
Even in a given area, sometimes you're in a fixed mindset.
You think, oh, my ability to fix, I have to prove them,
I have to look smart, I can't show that I'm working too hard.
People might not think I'm so smart.
And other times we could be more in a growth mindset.
So what we have to start doing is looking for what triggers
the-- because the fixed mindset holds us back,
we have to start looking for what triggers it in all of us,
even me.
And what happens when you're facing a big challenge?
Do you worry about, well, I'm going to unmask deficiencies.
What happens when there's a setback?
Do you think maybe I'm not good at this?
What happens when you're receiving criticism?
Do you get angry and defensive?
What happens when you see someone
who's better than you in what you're good at?
Do you feel jealous and resentful,
or do you feel inspired?
Maybe I can learn from that person.
Maybe they can mentor me.
So watch out at these trigger moments.
See how you're feeling.
And see if you can get yourself into more of a growth mindset.
MALE SPEAKER: So I actually I have
two children, two daughters, college age
and high school age.
I read your book after my older daughter
was approaching high school, but my younger daughter benefited
from it to the point right where I
banned the two S-words in our house-- smart and stupid.
I never used the latter, but I was very
guilty of using the former.
Raise your hands if you told a friend, or a child,
or a loved one how smart they are.
Words are really powerful is one thing I took away
from your book.
Talk about trigger words like that: smart, stupid,
and how those can work against your best intentions.
CAROL DWECK: Yes.
When you call someone smart, you put them in a box.
Or, really, you are kind of putting them on a pedestal.
And their life becomes organized around deserving the pedestal,
staying on the pedestal.
And you can only do that by narrowing your life
to include only things you sure you're
good at, only things you're sure you can succeed at.
When we tell someone, you did that so quickly, I'm
so impressed, they hear if I didn't do it quickly,
you wouldn't be impressed.
A lot of things take a long time.
Or you got an A without working, then they think,
oh, if I work you're not going to think I'm smart at math,
say.
And so you're just very subtly conveying these ideas
that smart people don't make mistakes,
smart people don't have to work hard,
the most important thing in the world
is to be smart and look smart at all times.
And then people start narrowing their world
so they can succeed within that fixed mindset.
MALE SPEAKER: So one thing at Google
that we're obsessed with this is proving things through data.
And I think one of the compelling arguments
your book made was around the research you did with children
in school environments.
So talk about some of that early research
and how it's evolved to reinforce that there's
weight behind this concept.
CAROL DWECK: Yes, we've done research, now,
with tens of thousands of students.
First, finding that those who naturally have a growth mindset
do better.
We've traced them over challenging-- especially
in challenging courses, like pre-Med organic chemistry;
or challenging transitions, seventh grade, high school,
college transitions.
We've studied all of those.
Recently we studied all of the 10th grade students
in the country of Chile, 170,000.
And we found that at every level of family income,
those who believe they could develop their intelligence
perform substantially higher on achievement tests than those
who thought they couldn't.
And the most striking was that among the poorest kids,
those who had a growth mindset were
performing at the level of much wealthier kids.
But importantly, because those are correlations,
we've done a number of studies where we have taught
students a growth mindset.
The ideas that every time they do a really hard task
and stick to it, the neurons in their brain
form new connections and they can get smarter.
And then we show them how to put that into practice.
We have found that students who learn
this fare better across challenging
courses and transitions.
We just showed that in a study of women in STEM classes
at universities around the country.
But we shown that at the transition
to college, transition to high school, and so forth.
So teaching a growth mindset leads
kids to take on challenges, stick to them, and improve.
MALE SPEAKER: So in our current education culture,
and then I want to switch to in the work environment,
there's such an obsession with standardized testing
and those tests having a real material
impact on teachers' advancement and even,
in some cases, their income.
How do school systems battle on that front and at the same time
tackle growth mindset, which is more about working hard
in the process than the actual end results.
CAROL DWECK: Yes.
It's such an interesting story, because standardized tests were
brought in for good reason.
There are students in certain parts of the country
and in certain schools who were performing so poorly.
And nobody knew and nobody cared.
And it was an attempt to say let's not cheat kids out
of a good education.
But we all know the unintended consequences.
School became about standardized tests,
and many teachers, feeling that their jobs or their raises
were on the line, taught to the test the entire year.
How warning could that be for teachers or for students?
And we did research to show that a lot of students
think that those tests measure how smart they are
and how smart they'll be when they grow up.
So they're nervous about them, and the whole year
is spent on them.
When, in fact, if you just taught kids,
and in a way that made them love learning, to love challenges,
know how to stick to them, feel the thrill of improvement,
then the test score would come as a byproduct of that.
Finland, the country that does so well
on all these international tests,
they don't teach to the test.
They teach.
The teachers love teaching, the kids love learning,
and they do well on the test.
Let's get back to that here.
MALE SPEAKER: So going into the corporate environment,
can you actually think of an organization
as a growth mindset organization or a fixed mindset
organization?
You do talk about Enron in your book
as an example of probably not the positive side.
So talk about how you can look at it
from an organizational level, and then
if you want your culture to be a growth mindset culture,
how do you start to tackle that?
CAROL DWECK: Yes, yes.
So in my book, I identify organizations that value
talent, raw talent, above all else,
or they believed in everyone's ability to improve and develop
and value that.
In our recent work we've actually gone in
and asked the people.
We asked employees in different Fortune 500 organizations,
what mindset does your company have?
Is it a company that believes in fixed talent and worships it?
Or is it a company that believes everyone
can develop their abilities and really provides
these opportunities?
And what we found was there was remarkable consensus
within organizations about which mindset their organization has,
and more important, it made a big difference.
MALE SPEAKER: So in terms of that difference,
you kind of compare and contrast companies
that you view as leaders in growth mindset versus those
that have struggled maybe because of a fixed mindset
culture.
CAROL DWECK: Well, in this research
we found that employees in a growth mindset organizations
said they felt more empowered by the organization
and more committed to it.
Whereas their counterparts in the more fixed mindset
organizations kind of had one foot out
the door waiting for the next highest bidder.
But to me what was even more interesting
is that the people in growth mindset organizations
said their companies valued creativity, innovation,
and they really put their money where their mouth was.
So if you took it a reasonable risk and it didn't work out,
they said my company has my back.
My company really values teamwork
was another thing they said in the growth mindset
organization.
In the more fixed mindset organizations,
the employees said, yeah, the company talks
innovation and creativity.
But if things don't work out, someone pays the price.
And finally, the managers in the growth mindset organizations
said that their employees had tremendous potential
to rise within the organization, become stars, join management.
Whereas, and I love this finding because in the fixed mindset
organization they're worshipping the talent,
and hiring the talent, and paying to keep the talent,
but a few years later, they're not saying
there are a lot of people who have potential
to rise in the organization.
Either they've left or they don't have the potential
anymore.
MALE SPEAKER: So many of us in the room
participate in interviewing potential candidates
for Google.
So let's assume for a second that Google's
trying to have a growth mindset-- that it is.
What are strategies that interviewers
can use to help identify that train people,
or identify that someone will be open to going down that path?
CAROL DWECK: Great question.
I worked with a major league baseball team,
so I'll talk about that first, to devise questions
that they could ask to potential draft choices.
One was, how do you get so good at baseball?
And some of them said, well, you know,
I was born with this natural talent.
And others said, well, my father and I--
we worked at it constantly.
We had a batting cage in the backyard.
He filmed me, we watched the tapes, and so forth.
Another one was thinking about on-field success
in the major leagues, what do you think you'd have to change?
And some of them said things like I'll
have to get used to the cheering of larger crowds.
And others said, maybe everything.
I'll have to take all my skills to a new level.
It's a whole new ball game.
So this knowledge that you might have
to really reorganize, redefine yourself and build new skills
is really important.
Taking that to the corporate setting,
first I might ask people with their greatest failures were,
see whether they take responsibility,
and what they did with that failure.
Did they capitalize on it to do something even better
than they could have imagined?
Did they use it to put value added back into the company?
Or on the other hand, did they say well, I had this failure.
I worked too hard.
Or do they make it something that really reflects well
on them, or was it someone else's fault?
And then this kind of readiness to learn,
readiness to share credit, these kinds of questions.
MALE SPEAKER: So I've debated your theories of mindset
with colleagues over lunch, particularly my last company.
There was really this resistance to accept
that talent and/or intelligence were in any way malleable.
Talk about that for a minute.
Is intelligence truly something that's malleable?
And maybe other physiological differences between people
that you've researched that are identified as growth
mindset or fixed mindset.
CAROL DWECK: So we absolutely know
that skills and abilities are malleable,
and that's kind of what counts.
That's what turns itself into performance.
But there have been fascinating studies.
First of all, looking into the brains of fixed and growth
mindset people as they work on a hard task and make errors,
and you see that the people who are in a growth mindset
are having the relevant areas of the brain
really light up, catch fire as they process the errors
and correct them.
Whereas in the brains of the people who
are in more of a fixed mindset, very little is going on.
They're seeing their errors, and they're moving on
as quickly as possible.
But my favorite study along these lines
tracked teenagers from the age of 14 to 18.
The teenage brain-- our brains are still very malleable,
but the teenage brain is unbelievably malleable.
It's a time of tremendous potential growth.
And what they found over those four years
was that there were some kids who gained a lot in IQ points
in math or verbal areas, and there
were others that lost a lot of points
and attract with the density of their neurons
in the relevant parts of their brains.
So we believe that the kids who really went at it,
and took on the challenges, and worked
hard were creating these denser neurons,
and the others who didn't use it lost it.
MALE SPEAKER: And I thought another interesting aspect
of your research was, this could apply in education, at home,
or in business, is the proclivity
to cheat based on the mindset that a person is in.
Talk a little bit about that.
CAROL DWECK: Yes.
We have studied that directly.
And we see that cheating is more-- the desire to cheat
and the actual cheating-- is more prevalent within a fixed
mindset.
Within a fixed mindset, if, say you
haven't done well on a subject before,
but you want a good grade, you feel
like, oh, I have to find some circuitous means.
But if you feel that there are many ways that you
can do better through actual learning,
you're more likely to do that.
So in one study after a poor grade,
students who held more of a fixed
mindset of their intelligence actually
said in advance they're seriously considering
cheating on the next test.
MALE SPEAKER: So in your recent TED talk--
CAROL DWECK: Oh, I want to say one more thing.
In our business study, the people in the fixed mindset
organization said cheating and deception
were much more prevalent.
And think about it.
If I have to be smarter than you,
if I have to be the superstar, I'm
going to consider all different ways
to look better than you look.
And if I have to keep secrets from you
or hoard my knowledge from other people, I'm going to do that.
But in the growth mindset organization
where people are collaborating, and learning,
and tackling challenges together, where's
the cheating going to come in?
It isn't.
MALE SPEAKER: So if a company observes that behavior,
and it's a company of scale-- let's
say it's not a company of 10 people,
but hundred or thousands-- and they recognize
we have a culture problem.
How do you go about even trying to tackle that?
What are some of the strategies companies
can use if they decide, we want to shift the culture.
We know it's going to take time.
It's not just a switch that you flip.
What are some of the strategies a company could
employ to change the culture?
CAROL DWECK: So I think the best thing is for the message
to come down from the top, where they don't just announce
we're a growth mindset culture.
They really explain what the new value system is.
The new value system on taking on challenges,
on rewarding reasonable risk, on teamwork,
on sharing information, giving performance evaluations that
speak to people's growth and contribution
to the company in terms of learning,
and salary increases that take into account
did someone take on challenges, improve,
help other people improve, were they are good team player.
Bottom line counts, but these things also count.
So to just kind of talk growth mindset
talk without backing it up, I don't
think that's going to happen.
If you have the old reward system
that's rewarding individual jockeying
for acclaim and power.
But if you back it up with evaluations, rewards,
and mentoring, and what a growth mindset deeply means,
and how it can be enacted within the job,
I think that that's a great start.
MALE SPEAKER: In your recent Ted talk,
you talked about the power of yet,
which I thought it was a very interesting concept.
Tell me a little about what you meant by that.
CAROL DWECK: Yes.
It all started when I learned about a high school in Chicago
where students had to pass maybe 84 units to graduate.
And if they didn't pass a unit, they got the grade Not Yet.
I thought that isn't that great, because if you get a failing
grade, you think, I hate this, I'm out of here,
I'm no good at this.
And you kind of lose your steam.
But Not Yet means hey, you're on a trajectory, a learning
trajectory.
Maybe you're not at the finish line, but you're on your way
there.
And the students went around the school unabashedly saying
to each other, how many Not Yets do you have,
how many Not Yets do you have?
So we started a program of research
that's still continuing on the word
yet, and showing that saying not yet after a wrong answer
keeps up motivation and encourages persistence.
And listen to yourself.
If sometimes you say, I'm not a "hmm" person,
or I could never do "hmm," then just add the word yet.
Or if one of your employees says, I can't do it,
I'm no good at this yet, it takes a very fixed mindset
statement, and it puts it in a whole different growth mindset
context.
MALE SPEAKER: Just the second to last question
for me is you did some interesting research very
recently around gaming and gaming applied to math.
Talk a little bit about how you're
able to incorporate your concept of the growth mindset
into that experience.
CAROL DWECK: We teamed up with Zoran Popovic
and his colleagues at the University of Washington
to create a math game called Brain Points
that incorporated growth mindset principles.
There were algorithms built into the game that
detected the students' effort, their use of strategies,
and their improvement.
And then in our experiment, we compared Brain Points
to the standard version of the game.
Now the standard version of the game
is your usual game, where the more you
zoom through and answer problems correctly,
the more you rack up points.
Not in Brain Points.
Actually, if you zoom through, it apologizes to you
and says you didn't earn any points that time.
We're sorry.
We'll give you something more challenging the next time.
So what happened was this: First,
students played-- these were grade school students--
they played longer because they could
leave the game at any point.
They played significantly longer.
They used more strategies.
We dropped in difficult problems occasionally.
They persevered on them longer.
But this was my favorite finding:
In the standard version, it was mostly the high achievers
who played to the end.
But in the Brain Points version, they
stayed in, they played to the end, they liked it,
but so many more lower and medium achievers also
stayed till the end.
MALE SPEAKER: So what keeps you up and night
as you think about where your research can go,
because like any scientific endeavor,
it's constantly being challenged and revisited.
What keeps you up worrying about where your theory could
be right or wrong or improved?
CAROL DWECK: Yes.
I always had this attitude of challenging
my ideas and my theories, because if you're wrong,
you want to know it as soon as possible.
You don't want to spend your life on it.
So what keeps me up at night in a good way
are different areas where it could be applied.
So we have a whole program of research
on peace in the Middle East where
we're using mindset principles.
I'm not minimizing the hugeness of the problem,
but we're using mindset principles
to try to build some greater understanding.
So I love to think of ways that we can extend it into areas
we never thought of before.
I love to think of ways to implement it
so that more kids who need this way of thinking
can benefit from it.
And something that also keeps me up at night
is the fear that people are developing what I'm
calling a false growth mindset.
It's this idea of if it's good, I have it.
So a lot of people are kind of declaring they have it,
but they don't.
They think it just means open-minded or being
a nice person, or maybe they're saying they have it
for fixed mindset reasons.
I want you to judge me as being the right kind of person.
So developing a growth mindset is really a journey.
It's a lifelong journey of monitoring your trigger points
and trying to approach things in a more growth mindset way
of taking on the challenges, sticking to them,
learning from them.
So right now I'm writing something for educators
that I'm calling false growth mindset to tell them, no, you
can't just say it.
You have to take a journey.
Because we're doing research now showing that many teachers
and parents who say they have a growth mindset
are actually responding to kids in ways
that are creating fixed mindsets for the kids.
So that's kind of the array of things
that keep me up at night.
But that said, I do sleep pretty well.
MALE SPEAKER: All right, with that
we'll open up for questions from the audience.
And I'm going to take a quick look at the dory too,
so the mics can get passed around.
AUDIENCE: Hi, I was introduced to your book a couple of years
ago.
And I have 15 nieces and nephews.
And I find myself, when I'm with them,
I don't know what to say to them.
Because I don't want to be, oh, you're so smart.
Because I'm not supposed to use that word or whatever.
But it's like I forget what to say when they're
telling me about friends at school or problems
they're having.
It's somethings like that sounds really hard.
Am I just supposed to say, well, that's hard.
I can do hard things.
You can do hard things.
Do you have any advice?
CAROL DWECK: OK.
The question is if you can't say smart, what can you say?
You can say so many other things.
One thing is you can just show interest in the process
that the child or other person is engaging in.
In our research, that's what we've
shown is effective: focusing on the process,
or appreciating the process, someone is engaging in
or that has engaged in.
So just show interest, ask questions, give encouragement
if they've been grappling with something
and they've tried new strategies or stuck to the strategies.
One parent said, oh, I hate it because I can't appreciate when
my child does something great.
I say, whoa, where'd you get that from?
Of course you can appreciate it, but then tie it
to something they engaged in.
Oh, you couldn't do that yesterday.
You made progress.
That's so exciting.
Oh, that's great.
You really stuck to it and learned it.
Or you tried all different ways and look, that worked.
So you're really appreciating some outcome
where they are, and you're talking
about how they got there.
But if you don't have that information, just ask them.
Never praise effort that isn't there.
MALE SPEAKER: Got a question from our Dory,
and then we'll go back to the room.
So the question from the Dory is how
do you think shame plays a role in the growth mindset-- fixed
versus growth?
CAROL DWECK: Oh, that's a great question.
We have studied that, and we have
shown that shame is a big factor in a fixed mindset.
You don't want to take on a challenge.
It's humiliating to have the set back within a fixed mindset.
It means you're not the person you want to be,
and other people aren't going to look at you in the same way.
We've studied it in adolescence.
Adolescents in a fixed mindset feel incredible shame
when they are excluded or rejected,
and that makes them want to lash out violently.
For many years, many people's research
has shown that shame is not a productive emotion.
It makes you want to hide or lash out,
both of which are not going to get you,
in the long run, where you want to be.
In a growth mindset, you could feel very disappointed.
You can feel hurt.
You can feel guilty.
You can feel a lot of things.
But these are emotions that allow you to go forward and be
constructive.
AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Jennifer and thanks
for coming to speak with us.
I worked on the K-12 education outreach team
here, focusing specifically on computer science education
and diversity in that.
So I'm curious if you've looked into how stereotypes may
interact with growth mindset.
For instance, thinking that math is not for girls.
How does that interact with growth mindset?
CAROL DWECK: Yes.
So how does the growth mindset interact with stereotypes?
We've done extensive research on that.
So a fixed mindset would be the belief that I can't do math,
girls can't do math, et cetera.
And a growth mindset is it's a learned set of skills.
Anyone can get better at them.
So notice, first of all, that a stereotype is a fixed mindset
label.
It says it's fixed and certain groups have it and certain
groups don't.
But in our research, we also find
that when females have a fixed mindset about math or computer
science, they're more vulnerable to the stereotypes.
So in one study that we did at Columbia University,
we found that when women in calculus
have a fixed mindset about their calculus,
their math abilities, when they encountered stereotyping where
they felt their classmates or the professors
thought women weren't as good as men, they fell prey to that.
So as we tracked them over their semester they started thinking,
I don't belong here, I don't like this anymore,
I don't have confidence I can succeed in this area.
And ultimately, they did not intend as much
to take it in the future.
Whereas if they had a growth mindset,
they did not like the stereotyping,
but it didn't speak to them.
They didn't believe that they couldn't improve, learn,
and succeed.
So they maintained their confidence,
and maintained their enjoyment of math,
and they maintained their desire to take math in the future.
We just finished a study of women in computer science
and are finding very similar things in addition
to finding that teaching a growth mindset
is helping women withstand the stereotypes,
maintain their interest, maintain the sense that it's
a field they belong in.
And these result in higher grades in the course.
So we're very, very interested in that intersection
between growth mindset and stereotyping.
We also are finding at the transition to college
that learning a growth mindset helps
students from underrepresented groups in general even more,
because it helps them deal with stereotypes that they
might encounter.
MALE SPEAKER: Got another Dory question here,
which I think is an interesting take.
Do you see any context in which a fixed mindset is more
beneficial to growth mindset?
CAROL DWECK: Well, first let me say
that a growth mindset doesn't require you to go
around improving everything.
You can focus.
And you can decide no, I'm not going to do
that, I'm not going to do that.
But research, not my research, but research of others
has, in fact, looked at this question
and found two areas, so far, in which
a fixed mindset is better.
One is sexual orientation.
People who accept that this is who they are and this
is who they are meant to be seem to be better adjusted
than people who think I should be changing.
And the other is aging.
So it's nice to feel you can stay young through exercise
and so forth, but people who run around nipping, and tucking,
and the tummy tuck, and the this, that,
and the other-- it's kind of a desperate attempt
to retain extreme youth.
That doesn't seem to be so great either.
But when it comes to skill areas,
it looks like a growth mindset is typically more advantageous.
AUDIENCE: Could you identify specific behaviors
that one to try to advancing on the journey
for an open mindset?
And how do you know that you're not kidding yourself or falsely
believing that you are one?
How do you know when you get there?
CAROL DWECK: Yes.
Great question.
What are some specific behaviors you
can do to get yourself on the road to a growth mindset?
Here are some ideas.
So first, if you have a choice of something
safe versus the challenge, take the challenge.
If you hit an obstacle, try to interpret it
in a growth mindset way.
So what can I learn from this?
What can I do next?
As I mentioned before, if you see
someone who's better than you, go learn from them.
So those are a set of behaviors you
can start doing in addition to, as I also
mentioned before, monitoring those fixed mindset triggers.
And this thing is that it's a journey that one is always on.
It's not ever the case that you've
arrived at a full, permanent growth mindset.
It's something that you have to look at all the time.
So listen to that voice in your head at the trigger points,
because even I hear myself saying sometimes in my head.
I was never good at that.
Whoa, did I say that?
So listen to that voice that's constantly
running in your head.
And I actually recommend that as a very, very first step.
The first few weeks that you embark on this journey,
don't push yourself to exhibit any growth mindset
characteristics.
Just listen to that voice that says, don't try this,
you might look foolish.
You made a mistake.
If people knew that, they wouldn't look at you
in the same way.
That person's better than me.
I hate them.
Just whatever that voice is saying in your head,
listen to it.
And even do it with friends.
Discuss it.
Or when you see someone doing something
that looks effortless, are you thinking,
oh, they're just brilliant and talented?
Catch yourself thinking that.
Or someone who's struggling, are you thinking, oh, they're
not really good at that.
Albert Einstein says I'm not that smart.
I'm not smarter than other people.
And he meant it.
He said, I just stick to things to longer.
That's why people thought he was slow, originally.
He knew he didn't understand time, space, energy,
and so forth.
So I would say the very first step
is the first few weeks just listen to that fixed mindset
voice.
It's there.
We all have it, and if you don't hear it,
it will rule your behavior.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for coming.
I actually read your book right before I started at Google.
And I know I have a very fixed mindset,
and this is sort of a fixed mindset question, even.
But have you seen patterns in which kids have fixed mindsets?
Are there differences across socioeconomic lines?
Do you see that certain teachers--
most of their students will have the growth mindset?
Do you see patterns with who has the growth mindset,
and how does that happen to kids?
CAROL DWECK: Yes.
So first of all, I don't rule out
that there could be temperamental factors.
You kids pop out differently.
And some of them you see they're tearing around the world.
They fall down.
They get up.
And then other kids, you look at them sideways,
and they think, what did I do?
So there could be these temperamental factors.
But we've shown the environment is really powerful.
We actually did a study where we looked at mothers' praise
to babies.
And found that the praise they gave to their one, two,
and three-year-olds predicted the child's mindset and desire
for challenge five years later.
So that environment is powerful.
Another thing we found is that the way parents reacts
to kids' mistakes is this big determinant
of the child's mindset.
A parent can say, I have a growth mindset.
But if a child makes a mistake, and they
act like it's negative, importantly negative,
or even if they excuse it and gloss over it
in a way that communicates to the child is negative.
That child is more likely to have more of a fixed mindset.
So yeah, there can be temperamental input.
The environment is powerful.
MALE SPEAKER: Right.
I want to thank you so much for taking time
to come to Google today and for the terrific turn
out that we have here and, I know, virtually
through the live stream.
So thank you very much.
CAROL DWECK: Pleasure.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.