Carol S. Dweck

“I had the great good fortune of getting my Ph.D. in the very first year that universities were actively seeking women faculty. The government was putting pressure on universities to hire more women.”

“What we found was that the greater proportion of process praise, the more likely the child was to have a mindset five years later that welcomed challenges and that represented traits as malleable, not a label you were stuck with.”

“Males and females can both have a fixed mindset about math and science, but it hurts girls more because they are on the negative end of the stereotype.”

“I teach a freshman seminar every year, and we delve very, very deeply into their mindsets. They read scientific articles, but we also focus on what their mindset is, and they learn to recognize when they are in more of a fixed mindset, because we're all a mixture.”

“Maybe you don't know how to do something at work. Instead of asking the boss or seeking someone as a mentor, you might not want to show them your ignorance. So, you're depriving yourself of this learning and mentorship. All of these ways are ways that a fixed mindset will hold you back.”

“I loved everything. I loved sciences and I loved humanities. But ultimately, I felt that in the humanities, you know, you're writing about things that already exist. But in the sciences, you're discovering things that no one has known before. Ultimately I chose psychology because it seemed to combine science with things that I liked to think about.”

“When I went into psychology, there were very few women.”

“The wrong kind of praise creates self-defeating behavior. The right kind motivates students to learn.”

“I'm such an egghead.”

“Business leaders who openly acknowledge people's concerns about becoming obsolete and who invest resources in workers' growth can help create a nation of learners - and perhaps resolve some of the political chaos that's bubbling around us.”

“We can choose partner, make friends, hire people who make us feel faultless. But think about it – do you never want to grow? Next time you’re tempted to surround yourself with worshippers, go to church.”

“My undergraduates, at first, get all starry-eyed about the idea of finding their passion, but over time, they get far more excited about developing their passion and seeing it through. They come to understand that that's how they and their futures will be shaped and how they will ultimately make their contributions.”

“You try something, it doesn't work, and maybe people even criticize you. In a fixed mindset, you say, 'I tried this, it's over.' In a growth mindset, you look for what you've learned.”

“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

“I expected differences among children in how they coped with the difficulty, but I saw something I never expected.Confronted with the hard puzzles, one then-year-old boy pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips, and cried out, :I love a challenge!".I never though anyone loved failure.Not only weren't they discouraged by failure, they didn't even think they were failing. They though they were learning.”

“This knowledge that you might have to really reorganize and redefine yourself and build new skills is really important.”

“The hallmark of successful people is that they are always stretching themselves to learn new things.”

“In one world, effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you're not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn't need effort. In the other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented.”

“With a fixed mindset, you're so worried about how smart or talented you are, you don't take on challenges. You don't try new things.”

“With a growth mindset, kids don't necessarily think that there's no such thing as talent or that everyone is the same, but they believe everyone can develop their abilities through hard work, strategies, and lots of help and mentoring from others.”