Carol S. Dweck Quotes

Just because someone can do something with little or no training, it doesn’t mean that others can’t do it (and sometimes do it even better) with training.

What allowed me to take that first step, to choose growth and risk rejection? In the fixed mindset, I had needed my blame and bitterness. It made me feel more righteous, powerful, and whole than thinking I was at fault. The growth mindset allowed me to give up the blame and move on. The growth mindset gave me a mother.

All of these people had character. None of them thought they were special people, born with the right to win. They were people who worked hard, who learned how to keep their focus under pressure, and who stretched beyond their ordinary abilities when they had to.

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.

When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world--the world of fixed traits--success is about proving you're smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other--the world of changing qualities--it's about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.

If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.

Praising children's intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance.

…You decide that, rather than trying to talk out of the fixed mindset [to your kid], you have to live the growth mindset, you have to live the growth mindset. AT the dinner table each evening, you and your partner structure the discussion around the growth mindset, asking each child (and each other): “What did you learn today?” “What mistake did you make that taught you something?” “What did you try hard at today?” You go around the table with each question, excitedly discussing your own and one another’s effort, strategies, setbacks, and learning.

Beware of success. It can knock you into a fixed mindset.

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.

… see failure not as a sign of stupidity but as a lack of experience and skill.(Seth Abrams)