At that meeting, the three of us developed a hypothesis: Teachers who have an optimistic way of interpreting adversity have more grit than their more pessimistic counterparts, and grit, in turn, predicts better teaching. For instance, an optimistic teacher might keep looking for ways to help an uncooperative student, whereas a pessimist might assume there was nothing more to be done. To test whether that was true, we decided to measure optimism and grit before teachers set foot in the classroom and, a year later, see how effectively teachers had advanced the academic progress of their students.
That August, four hundred TFA teachers completed the Grit Scale and, in addition, Marty’s questionnaire assessing their optimism. To the extent they thought of temporary and specific causes for bad events, and permanent and pervasive causes of good events, we coded their responses as optimistic. To the extent they did the reverse, we coded their responses as pessimistic.
In the same survey, we measured one more thing: happiness. Why? For one thing, there was a small but growing body of scientific evidence that happiness wasn’t just the consequence of performing well at work, it might also be an important cause. Also, we were curious about how happy the grittiest teachers were. Did single-minded passion and perseverance come at a cost? Or could you be gritty and happy at the same time?
One year later, when Teach For America had tabulated effectiveness ratings for each teacher based on the academic gains of their students, we analyzed our data. Just as we’d expected, optimistic teachers were grittier and happier, and grit and happiness in turn explained why optimistic teachers got their students to achieve more during the school year.
After staring at these results for a while, I began reminiscing about my own experience of classroom teaching. I remembered the many afternoons I’d gone home exasperated and exhausted. I remembered battling catastrophic self-talk about my own capabilities—Oh god, I really am an idiot!—and those of my young charges—She got it wrong again? She’ll never learn this! And I remembered the mornings I’d gotten up and decided, after all, that there was one more tactic worth trying: Maybe if I bring in a Hershey bar and cut it into pieces, they’ll get the idea of fractions. Maybe if I have everyone clean out their lockers on Mondays, they’ll get in the habit of keeping their lockers clean.
The data from this study of young teachers, along with Wendy Kopp’s intuitions, interviews with grit paragons, and a half century of psychological research all point to the same, commonsense conclusion: When you keep searching for ways to change your situation for the better, you stand a chance of finding them. When you stop searching, assuming they can’t be found, you guarantee they won’t.
Or as Henry Ford is often quoted as saying, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t—you’re right.”
* * *
Around the time Marty Seligman and Steve Maier were linking hopelessness to a lack of perceived control, a young psychology major named Carol Dweck was making her way through college. Carol had always been intrigued that some people persevere while others in identical circumstances give up. Right after graduation, she enrolled in a doctoral program in psychology and pursued this question.
Marty and Steve’s work had a profound influence on young Carol. She believed their findings but was unsatisfied. Sure, attributing your misery to causes beyond your control was debilitating, but where did these attributions come from in the first place? Why, she asked, did one person grow up to be an optimist and another a pessimist?
In one of Carol’s first studies, she worked with middle schools to identify boys and girls who, by consensus of their teachers, the school principal, and the school psychologist, were especially “helpless” when confronted by failure. Her hunch was that these children believed that a lack of intellectual ability led to mistakes, rather than a lack of effort. In other words, she suspected it wasn’t just a long string of failures that made these children pessimistic, but rather their core beliefs about success and learning.
To test her idea, Carol divided the children into two groups. Half the children were assigned to a success only program. For several weeks, they solved math problems and, at the end of each session, no matter how many they’d completed, they received praise for doing well. The other half of the children in Carol’s study were assigned to an attribution retraining program. These children also solved math problems, but were occasionally told that they hadn’t solved enough problems during that particular session and, crucially, that they “should have tried harder.”
Afterward, all the children were given a combination of easy and very difficult problems to do.
Carol reasoned that, if prior failures were the root cause of helplessness, the success only program would boost motivation. If, on the other hand, the real problem was how children interpreted their failures, then the attribution retraining program would be more effective.
What Carol found is that the children in the success only program gave up just as easily after encountering very difficult problems as they had before training. In sharp contrast, children in the attribution retraining program tried harder after encountering difficulty. It seems as though they’d learned to interpret failure as a cue to try harder rather than as confirmation that they lacked the ability to succeed.
* * *
Over the next four decades, Carol probed deeper.
She soon discovered that people of all ages carry around in their minds private theories about how the world works. These points of view are conscious in that if Carol asks you questions about them, you have a ready answer. But like the thoughts you work on when you go to a cognitive behavioral therapist, you may not be aware of them until you’re asked.
Here are four statements Carol uses to assess a person’s theory of intelligence. Read them now and consider how much you agree or disagree with each:
Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t change very much.
You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are.
No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.
You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.
If you found yourself nodding affirmatively to the first two statements but shaking your head in disagreement with the last two, then Carol would say you have more of a fixed mindset. If you had the opposite reaction, then Carol would say you tend toward a growth mindset.
I like to think of a growth mindset this way: Some of us believe, deep down, that people really can change. These growth-oriented people assume that it’s possible, for example, to get smarter if you’re given the right opportunities and support and if you try hard enough and if you believe you can do it. Conversely, some people think you can learn skills, like how to ride a bike or do a sales pitch, but your capacity to learn skills—your talent—can’t be trained. The problem with holding the latter fixed-mindset view—and many people who consider themselves talented do—is that no road is without bumps. Eventually, you’re going to hit one. At that point, having a fixed mind-set becomes a tremendous liability. This is when a C–, a rejection letter, a disappointing progress review at work, or any other setback can derail you. With a fixed mindset, you’re likely to interpret these setbacks as evidence that, after all, you don’t have “the right stuff”—you’re not good enough. With a growth mindset, you believe you can learn to do better.
Mindsets have been shown to make a difference in all the same life domains as optimism. For instance, if you have a growth mindset, you’re more likely to do well in school, enjoy better emotional and physical health, and have stronger, more positive social relationships with other people.
A few years ago, Carol and I asked more than two thousand high school seniors to complete a growth-mindset questionnaire. We’ve found that students with a growth mindset are significantly grittier than students with a fixed mindset. What’s more, grittier students earn higher report card grades and, after graduation, are more likely to enroll in an
d persist through college. I’ve since measured growth mindset and grit in both younger children and older adults, and in every sample, I’ve found that growth mindset and grit go together.
* * *
When you ask Carol where our mindsets come from, she’ll point to people’s personal histories of success and failure and how the people around them, particularly those in a position of authority, have responded to these outcomes.
Consider, for example, what people said to you when, as a child, you did something really well. Were you praised for your talent? Or were you praised for your effort? Either way, chances are you use the same language today when evaluating victories and defeats.
Praising effort and learning over “natural talent” is an explicit target of teacher training in the KIPP schools. KIPP stands for the Knowledge Is Power Program, and it was started in 1994 by Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, two gritty young Teach For America teachers. Today, KIPP schools serve seventy thousand elementary, middle, and high school students across the country. The vast majority of KIPPsters, as they proudly refer to themselves, come from low-income families. Against the odds, almost all graduate from high school, and more than 80 percent go on to college.
KIPP teachers get a little thesaurus during training. On one side, there are encouragements teachers often use with the best of intentions. On the other, there is language that subtly sends the message that life is about challenging yourself and learning to do what you couldn’t do before. See below for examples appropriate for people of any age. Whether you’re a parent, manager, coach, or any other type of mentor, I suggest you observe your own language over the next few days, listening for the beliefs your words may be reinforcing in yourself and others.
Undermines Growth Mindset and Grit
Promotes Growth Mindset and Grit
“You’re a natural! I love that.”
“You’re a learner! I love that.”
“Well, at least you tried!”
“That didn’t work. Let’s talk about how you approached it and what might work better.”
“Great job! You’re so talented!”
“Great job! What’s one thing that could have been even better?”
“This is hard. Don’t feel bad if you can’t do it.”
“This is hard. Don’t feel bad if you can’t do it yet.”
“Maybe this just isn’t your strength. Don’t worry—you have other things to contribute.”I
“I have high standards. I’m holding you to them because I know we can reach them together.”
* * *
Language is one way to cultivate hope. But modeling a growth mindset—demonstrating by our actions that we truly believe people can learn to learn—may be even more important.
Author and activist James Baldwin once put it this way: “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” This is one of Dave Levin’s favorite quotes, and I’ve watched him begin many KIPP training workshops with it.
A psychologist in my lab, Daeun Park, recently found this to be exactly the case. In a yearlong study of first- and second-grade classrooms, she found that teachers who gave special privileges to higher-performing students and emphasized how they compared to others inadvertently inculcated a fixed mindset among the young students. Over the year, students of teachers who acted this way grew to prefer games and problems that were easy, “so you can get a lot right.” By year’s end, they were more likely to agree that “a person is a certain amount smart, and stays pretty much the same.”
Similarly, Carol and her collaborators are finding that children develop more of a fixed mindset when their parents react to mistakes as though they’re harmful and problematic. This is true even when these parents say they have a growth mindset. Our children are watching us, and they’re imitating what we do.
The same dynamics apply in a corporate setting. Berkeley professor Jennifer Chatman and her collaborators recently surveyed employees of Fortune 1000 companies about mindset, motivation, and well-being. They found that, in each company, there was a consensus about mindset. In fixed-mindset companies, employees agreed with statements like “When it comes to being successful, this company seems to believe that people have a certain amount of talent, and they really can’t do much to change it.” They felt that only a few star performers were highly valued and that the company wasn’t truly invested in other employees’ development. These respondents also admitted to keeping secrets, cutting corners, and cheating to get ahead. By contrast, in growth-mindset cultures, employees were 47 percent more likely to say their colleagues were trustworthy, 49 percent more likely to say their company fosters innovation, and 65 percent more likely to say their company supports risk taking.
How do you treat high achievers? How do you react when others disappoint you?
My guess is that no matter how much you embrace the idea of growth mindset, you often default to a fixed mindset. At least, this is the case for Carol, Marty, and me. All of us know how we’d like to react when, say, someone we’re supervising brings us work that falls short of expectations. We’d like our knee-jerk reflex to be calm and encouraging. We aspire to have an Okay, what is there to learn here? attitude toward mistakes.
The reality is that most people have an inner fixed-mindset pessimist in them right alongside their inner growth-mindset optimist. Recognizing this is important because it’s easy to make the mistake of changing what we say without changing our body language, facial expressions, and behavior.
So what should we do? A good first step is to watch for mismatches between our words and actions. When we slip up—and we will—we can simply acknowledge that it’s hard to move away from a fixed, pessimistic view of the world. One of Carol’s colleagues, Susan Mackie, works with CEOs and encourages them to give names to their inner fixed-mindset characters. Then they can say things like “Oops. I guess I brought Controlling Claire to the meeting today. Let me try that again.” Or: “Overwhelmed Olivia is struggling to deal with all the competing demands, can you help me think this through?”
Ultimately, adopting a gritty perspective involves recognizing that people get better at things—they grow. Just as we want to cultivate the ability to get up off the floor when life has knocked us down, we want to give those around us the benefit of the doubt when something they’ve tried isn’t a raging success. There’s always tomorrow.
* * *
I recently called Bill McNabb for his perspective. Since 2008, Bill has served as the CEO of Vanguard, the world’s largest provider of mutual funds.
“We’ve actually tracked senior leaders here at Vanguard and asked why some did better in the long run than others. I used to use the word ‘complacency’ to describe the ones who didn’t work out, but the more I reflect on it, the more I realize that’s not quite it. It’s really a belief that ‘I can’t learn anymore. I am what I am. This is how I do things.’ ”
And what about executives who ultimately excelled?
“The people who have continued to be successful here have stayed on a growth trajectory. They just keep surprising you with how much they’re growing. We’ve had people who, if you looked at their résumé coming in, you’d say, ‘Wow, how did that person end up so successful?’ And we’ve had other people come in with incredible credentials, and you’re wondering, ‘Why did they not go further?’ ”
When Bill discovered the research on growth mindset and grit, it confirmed his intuitions—not just as a corporate leader but as a father, former high school Latin teacher, rowing coach, and athlete. “I really do think people develop theories about themselves and the world, and it determines what they do.”
When we got to the question of where, exactly, any of us begi
n formulating these theories, Bill said, “Believe it or not, I actually started out with more of a fixed mindset.” He chalks up that mindset, partly, to his parents enrolling him, while he was still in elementary school, in a research study at a nearby university. He remembers taking a whole battery of intelligence tests and, at the end, being told, “You did really well, and you’re going to do really well in school.”
For a while, an authoritative diagnosis of talent, in combination with early success, boosted his confidence: “I took great pride in finishing tests faster than anyone else. I didn’t always get one hundred percent, but I usually came close, and I took great pleasure in not working that hard to achieve what I did.”
Bill attributes his switch to a growth mindset to joining the crew team in college. “I’d never rowed before, but I found I liked being on the water. I liked being outside. I liked the exercise. I sort of fell in love with the sport.”
Rowing was the first thing Bill wanted to do well that didn’t come easily: “I was not a natural,” he told me. “I had a lot of failures early on. But I kept going, and then eventually, I started getting better. Suddenly, it began to make sense: ‘Put your head down and go hard. Hard work really, really matters.’ ” By the end of his freshman season, Bill was in the junior varsity boat. That didn’t sound so bad to me, but Bill explained that, statistically, this placement suggested there was no chance of ever making varsity. That summer, he stayed on campus and rowed all summer.
All that practice paid off. Bill was promoted to the “stroke seat” of the junior varsity boat, making him the one who sets the pace for the other seven rowers. During the season, one of the varsity rowers was injured, and Bill had the opportunity to show what he could do. By his account, and also the team captain’s, he did terrifically well. Still, when the injured rower recovered, the coach demoted Bill again.