Carol S. Dweck Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.