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.
