Business Insight Zone

Recently I read Carol Dweck’s book Mindset — a book that deserves to reshape the way smart businesses think about developing their people, and the way smart people go about developing themselves. In a follow-up post I’ll focus more on the business applications of Mindset; this time around, I want to give you an overview of its ideas, which have profound application to many areas of life.

The book first came to my attention a while back when Guy Kawasaki did two posts on Dweck and her work. Dweck is a psychology professor at Stanford; in her research, she tries to find out why some people succeed throughout life while others don’t.

We might summarize the explosive idea at the heart of Mindset like this:

To a breathtaking degree, whether people develop and grow in their careers traces back to their fundamental mindsets. People with the growth mindset, who believe that they can improve their abilities and accomplishments through purposeful effort, excel. People with the fixed mindset, who believe that their intrinsic worth is cast in stone, stagnate.

The poisonous mental habits of fixed-mindset people and the virtuous mental habits of growth-mindset people are captured neatly in this [PDF] chart by Nigel Holmes, which is also included in the book.

Dweck’s insights into the two mindsets are so powerful because the mindsets have such pervasive effects. Under the fixed mindset, the poor get poorer: those who have a fixed image of themselves as highly talented believe that things “should” come easily to people like them, so they don’t put forth effort. Those with a fixed image of themselves as untalented erroneously believe that there’s nothing they can do to make their performance better . . . and so they don’t put forth effort.

Effort is vastly underrated.

“The Effort Effect,” an article about Dweck that appeared in Stanford Magazine last year, summarizes these behaviors well:

Students [with the fixed mindset] want to look smart even if it means not learning a thing in the process. For them, each task is a challenge to their self-image, and each setback becomes a personal threat. So they pursue only activities at which they’re sure to shine — and avoid the sorts of experiences necessary to grow and flourish in any endeavor.

By contrast,

Students with [growth mindsets] . . . take necessary risks and don’t worry about failure because each mistake becomes a chance to learn.

In her book, Dweck details her own research (and others’) that verifies the tonic effects of sustained effort, and of the belief that sustained effort will get you where you want to go. In working with everyone from young schoolchildren to college students to professional soccer players, Dweck has demonstrated the huge impact that people’s beliefs about their ability to improve have on their actual performance.

Darwin was an unremarkable student,
yet produced one of the most influential theories
in the history of science — after half a lifetime of effort.

She also cites many famous examples of high performers who credited hard work and stick-to-it-iveness for their own success. One standout after another — Charles Darwin, Tiger Woods, Jackson Pollock, Jackie Joyner-Kersee — emerged into the spotlight only after years and years of hard, focused toil.

Her examples made me think of something I came across about George Brett, the baseball Hall-of-Famer who was known for his “natural” batting stroke:

“He would get out there and work so long and hard, he had blisters on his hands,” said Denny Matthews, the [Kansas City] Royals’ radio voice since 1969. ‘He would be out there at 2:30 in the afternoon working in the hot sun. Then that evening he would go 3-for-4 and people would say, ‘Gee, what a natural hitter.’ “

Many factors, including how we are raised and how we are taught in school, blind us to examples like this. Far too many of us continue to believe, explicitly or implicitly, that effort won’t be rewarded, or that so much effort ought not be necessary if we’re truly cut out to pursue the matter at hand.

Talent is vastly overrated.

Fixed-mindset types are prone to blame everything and everyone except themselves for their own failings, because they don’t realize — or they can’t admit — that talent isn’t that important, and that their weak performances trace directly back to their own lack of effort.

Whatever genius he possessed, Mozart devoted himself
wholeheartedly, even maniacally, to his work.

Now, people devoted to the idea of the “natural genius” will typically retort with an argument along the lines of “What about Mozart?” But Dweck talks directly about how hard Mozart worked. Yes, he was composing music when he was still an adolescent, but his first ten years’ worth of compostions were for the most part derivative of other composers, and nowhere near the quality of The Magic Flute or the other “genius” works that we associate with him. It took years of dogged effort for even Mozart to become Mozart.

Regular readers of this blog will detect the echo of Anders Ericsson’s work on “deliberate practice,” which emphasizes the unimportance of talent and the inescapable importance of the dogged-yet-shrewd practice habits of Tiger Woods, Yo-Yo Ma, Judit Polgar, and other great performers.

Curiously, to me at least, I found no reference to Ericsson’s work in Dweck’s book, and none to Dweck in Ericsson’s massive edited volume, The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Why this is, I don’t know, since the two bodies of work seem highly complementary to me. Both Ericsson and Dweck emphasize the importance of a few key things:

• Incremental increases in ability sustained over the long haul;
• Consistent motivation that makes the individual resilient in the face of setbacks;
• An emphasis on learning and improvement rather than status or comforts.

If any of you who are better-versed in academic psychology than I am (not a hard standard to reach!) can enlighten me on potential divisions between the work of Dweck and Ericsson, please do.

We CAN change our brains and our lives.

It should be noted that those with the growth mindset are correct in scientific terms when they express a belief that they can learn and get better. Conversely, those with the fixed mindset are factually, scientifically incorrect when they believe that their mental abilities are fixed.

Why? Over the past couple of decades, breakthroughs in neuroscience have demonstrated that humans (along with many other animals) display a remarkable degree of neuroplasticity. This means that our brains, far from being set like concrete when we reach adulthood, can continue to form new connections and pathways in a virtuous cycle that (a) grows out of new patterns of thought and behavior and (b) enables more new thoughts and behaviors.

Mind you, top performers like Darwin and Edison and Picasso were acting like the brain could do this long before the neuroscientists proved it.

Grinders in sports

What ties together all these high performers is the consistent pursuit of improvement. While many fields of endeavor demonstrate the truth of this, one of Dweck’s clearest chapters talks about how these concepts apply in the world of sports. For all the faults that can lay hidden in sports metaphors, sports’ clear-cut definitions of performance make them a useful domain for studying the underlying principles of excellence.

The sports world is filled with famous examples of “grinders” who succeeded despite limited ability, and of stars who excelled by marrying a greater level of aptitude to a grinder’s mentality. Here are a few examples of my own:

• Pete Rose became baseball’s Hit King by practicing and playing harder than everybody else.
• Football greats Walter Payton and Jerry Rice were famous for doing workouts so hard that other pro players couldn’t complete a training session alongside them.
• Larry Bird honed his incredible shooting ability through endless hours of practice — long after his teammates were out of the gym.
• Ivan Lendl lacked grace on the tennis court, but rode an iron-willed work ethic to eight Grand Slam wins and a record-breaking run as the #1 men’s tennis player in the world.

Lendl understood the advantage that his work ethic gave him over his flashier, more gifted rival John McEnroe, whom Dweck singles out (maybe a wee bit too much) as the poster child for the fixed mindset. McEnroe didn’t like to practice nearly as much as Lendl, and he often complained about bad calls from umpires or anything else that disturbed his need for perfect conditions on the court.

In Dweck’s analysis, McEnroe called attention to those times when he lost under imperfect conditions because it tended to place the blame for the loss on the conditions instead of on the way he himself played. One hallmark of fixed-mindset people is the tendency to portray themselves as victims of outside forces — anything or anyone besides themselves — to explain away their own failures. The psychology of the fixed minset is such that these folks must seek outside explanations, lest their assessment of their own worthiness crumble.

This is in stark contrast to greater champions who have fought through tough conditions. Dweck writes, “as Billie Jean King tells us, the mark of a champion is to win when things are not quite right.” Dweck cites other great champions — Michael Jordan, Mia Hamm, Jackie Joyner-Kersee — for their mental toughness and their ability to muster great performances even under adverse circumstances. Mindset was written long before the 2008 U.S. Open of golf, but Woods’s gutsy performance there, while playing on a broken knee, fits in right alongside Joyner-Kersee’s triumphs in the face of asthma attacks and hamstring injuries.

Basketball fans will remember Michael Jordan’s performance in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals, when he scored 38 points in Salt Lake City, despite being seriously ill with a stomach virus. It’s not surprising that Dweck would quote Jordan on the importance of character or mindset above physical attributes:

For Jordan, success stems from the mind. “The mental toughness and the heart are a lot stronger than some of the physical advantages you might have. I’ve always said that and I’ve always believed that.” But other people don’t. They look at Michael Jordan and they see the physical perfection that led inevitably to his greatness.

Plow horses and other admirable types

Dweck spends plenty of time looking at other areas of endeavor, too, including education, personal relationships, and business. Across all of these fields, she undermines the myth of genius and elevates the importance of sustained hard work. Two passages can serve to illustrate her approach:

Experts agree that [Jackson] Pollock had little native talent for art, and when you look at his early products, it showed. They also agree that he became one of the greatest American painters of the twentieth century and that he revolutionized modern art. How did he go from point A to point B? . . .

Dedication is how Jackson Pollock got from point A to point B. Pollock was wildly in love with the idea of being an artist. He thought about art all the time, and he did it all the time. Because he was so gung-ho, he got others to take him seriously and mentor him until he mastered all there was to master and began to produce startlingly original works.

[Jim] Collins [in Good to Great] reports that Alan Wurtzel, the CEO of . . . Circuit City, held debates in his boardroom. Rather than simply trying to impress his board of directors [as someone with a fixed mindset might], he used them to learn. With his executive team as well, he questioned, debated, prodded until he slowly gained a clearer picture of where the company was and where it needed to go . . .

Wurtzel considered himself a “plow horse,” a hardworking, no-nonsense normal kind of guy, but he took a company that was close to bankruptcy and over the next fifteen years turned it into one that delivered the highest total return to its stockholders of any firm on the New York Stock Exchange.

We contain multitudes.

Dweck admits that few of us are all one type — all growth-oriented or all fixed-mindset. In my own experience, I’ve known plenty of people who had growth-minded attitudes when it came to, say, scientific or literary ideas, but fixed-minded ones when it came to, say, physical fitness or relationships. A successful athlete, conversely, might have a lot of confidence in her ability to take on new athletic or social situations, without having similar confidence to launch into graduate school.

The beauty of Dweck’s work is that it opens our eyes to the possibilities for growth across different areas of our lives, while alerting us to the fixed mindsets that may be weighing down our careers, relationships, families, or schooling.

In every case, we can stoke a passionate curiosity and an appetite for open-ended hard work so that we can grow. As Dweck puts it,

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. Whether we’re talking about Darwin or college students, important achievements require clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies. Plus allies in learning. This is what the growth mindset gives people, and that’s why it helps their abilities grow and bear fruit.

The verdict: a book that can change your life and work for the better

I had a few quibbles with the book, mostly with its narrative flow. (The editor in me would have suggested one more round of tweaks to the manuscript to clarify a few things.) But these were no more than quibbles, and for the sake of your own growth, if you detect fixed-mindset thinking in yourself, I urge you to read this book and put it to use in your own life and career.

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Next time: the implications of Mindset for savvy businesses.

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Related posts:

• Are you willing to re-tool your swing?
• How well do you tolerate mistakes?

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(Photo credits: Darwin, Mozart, dendrites [CC-No derivatives license], Woods, Pollock.)

Category: Books, The business brain