Growth Mindset
Let’s return to the old saw “If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.” If turns out there is more truth here than wit. Attitude counts for a lot. The studies of the psychologist Carol Dweck have gotten huge attention for showing just how big an impact one simple conviction can have on learning and per for mance: the belief that your level of intellectual ability is not fi xed but rests to a large degree in your own hands.16
Dweck and her colleagues have replicated and expanded on their results in many studies. In one of the early experiments, she ran a workshop for low- performing seventh graders at a New York City ju nior high school, teaching them about the brain and about effective study techniques. Half the group also received a pre sen ta tion on memory, but the other half were given an explanation of how the brain changes as a result of effortful learning: that when you try hard and learn something new, the brain forms new connections, and these new connections, over time, make you smarter. This group was told that intellectual development is not the natural unfolding of intelligence but results from the new connections that are formed through effort and learning. After the workshop, both groups of kids fi ltered back into their classwork. Their teachers were unaware that some had been taught that effortful learning changes the brain, but as the school year unfolded, those students adopted what Dweck calls a “growth mindset,”
a belief that their intelligence was largely within their own control, and they went on to become much more aggressive
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learners and higher achievers than students from the fi rst group, who continued to hold the conventional view, what Dweck calls a “fi xed mindset,” that their intellectual ability was set at birth by the natural talents they were born with.
Dweck’s research had been triggered by her curiosity over why some people become helpless when they encounter challenges and fail at them, whereas others respond to failure by trying new strategies and redoubling their effort. She found that a fundamental difference between the two responses lies in how a person attributes failure: those who attribute failure to their own inability—“I’m not intelligent”— become helpless.
Those who interpret failure as the result of insuffi cient effort or an in effec tive strategy dig deeper and try different approaches.
Dweck came to see that some students aim at per for mance goals, while others strive toward learning goals. In the fi rst case, you’re working to validate your ability. In the second, you’re working to acquire new knowledge or skills. People with per for mance goals unconsciously limit their potential. If your focus is on validating or showing off your ability, you pick challenges you are confi dent you can meet. You want to look smart, so you do the same stunt over and over again. But if your goal is to increase your ability, you pick ever- increasing challenges, and you interpret setbacks as useful information that helps you to sharpen your focus, get more creative, and work harder. “If you want to demonstrate something over and over, ‘ability’ feels like something static that lies inside of you, whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable,” Dweck says. Learning goals trigger entirely different chains of thought and action from per formance goals.17
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Paradoxically, a focus on per for mance trips up some star athletes. Praised for being “naturals,” they believe their perfor mance is a result of innate gifts. If they’re naturals, the idea goes, they shouldn’t have to work hard to excel, and in fact many simply avoid practicing, because a need to practice is public evidence that their natural gifts are not good enough to cut the mustard after all. A focus on per for mance instead of on learning and growing causes people to hold back from risk taking or exposing their self- image to ridicule by putting themselves into situations where they have to break a sweat to deliver the critical outcome.
Dweck’s work has extended into the realm of praise and the power it has in shaping the way people respond to challenges.
Here’s an example. A group of fi fth grade students are individually given a puzzle to solve. Some of the students who solve the puzzle are praised for being smart; other students who solve it are praised for having worked hard. The students are then invited to choose another puzzle: either one of similar diffi culty or one that’s harder but that they would learn from by making the effort to try solving. A majority of the students who are praised for their smarts pick the easier puzzle; 90
percent of the kids praised for effort pick the harder one.
In a twist on this study, students get puzzles from two people, Tom and Bill. The puzzles Tom gives the students can be solved with effort, but the ones Bill gives them cannot be solved. Every student gets puzzles from both Tom and Bill.
After working to solve the puzzles, some of the kids are praised for being smart, and some for their effort. In a second round, the kids get more puzzles from both Tom and Bill, and this time all the puzzles are solvable. Here’s the surprise: of the
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students who were praised for being smart, few solved the puzzles they got from Bill, even though they were the same puzzles these students had solved earlier when they got them from Tom. For those who saw being considered smart as para-mount, their failure to solve Bill’s puzzles in the fi rst round instilled a sense of defeat and helplessness.
When you praise for intelligence, kids get the message that being seen as smart is the name of the game. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a rare variable they can control,” Dweck says. But “emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of a child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”18
Paul Tough, in his recent book How Children Succeed, draws on Dweck’s work and others’ to make the case that our success is less dependent on IQ than on grit, curiosity, and persis tence. The essential ingredient is encountering adversity in childhood and learning to overcome it. Tough writes that children in the lowest strata of society are so beset by challenges and starved of resources that they don’t stand a chance of experiencing success. But, and here’s another paradox, kids at the top of the heap, who are raised in cosseted settings, praised for being smart, bailed out of predicaments by he li-cop ter parents, and never allowed to fail or overcome adversity on their own initiative, are also denied the character-building experiences essential for success later in life.19 A kid who’s born on third base and grows up thinking she hit a tri-ple is unlikely to embrace the challenges that will enable her to discover her full potential. A focus on looking smart keeps a person from taking risks in life, the small ones that help people rise toward their aspirations, as well as the bold, vi-sionary moves that lead to greatness. Failure, as Carol Dweck
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tells us, gives you useful information, and the opportunity to discover what you’re capable of doing when you really set your mind to it.
The takeaway from Dweck, Tough, and their colleagues working in this fi eld is that more than IQ, it’s discipline, grit, and a growth mindset that imbue a person with the sense of possibility and the creativity and per sis tence needed for higher learning and success. “Study skills and learning skills are inert until they’re powered by an active ingredient,” Dweck says.
The active ingredient is the simple but nonetheless profound realization that the power to increase your abilities lies largely within your own control.
Deliberate Practice
When you see stellar per for mances by an expert in any fi eld— a pianist, chess player, golfer— perhaps you marvel at what natural talent must underlie their abilities, but expert per for mance does not usually rise out of some ge ne tic predisposition or IQ advantage. It rises from thousands of hours of what Anders Ericsson calls sustained deliberate practice. If doing something repeatedly might be considered practice, deliberate practice is a different animal: it’s goal directed, often solitary, and consists of repeated striving to reach beyond your current level of per for mance. What ever the fi eld, expert per for mance is thought to be garnered through the slow acquisition of a larger number of increasingly complex patterns, patterns that are used to store knowledge about which actions to take in a vast vocabulary of different situations. Witness a champion chess player. In studying the positions on a board, he can contemplate many alternative moves and the countless different directions each might precipitate. The striving, failure, problem solving, and renewed attempts that characterize
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deliberate practice build the new knowledge, physiological adaptations, and complex mental models required to attain ever higher levels.
When Michelangelo fi nally completed painting over 400
life size fi gures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he is reported to have written, “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.” What appeared to his admirers to have fl owed from sheer genius had required four torturous years of work and dedication.20
Deliberate practice usually isn’t enjoyable, and for most learners it requires a coach or trainer who can help identify areas of per for mance that need to be improved, help focus attention on specifi c aspects, and provide feedback to keep perception and judgment accurate. The effort and per sis tence of deliberate practice remodel the brain and physiology to ac-commodate higher per for mance, but achieving expertise in any fi eld is par tic u lar to the fi eld. It does not confer some kind of advantage or head start toward gaining expertise in another domain. A simple example of practice remodeling the brain is the treatment of focal hand dystonia, a syndrome affecting some guitarists and pianists whose repetitive playing has rewired their brains to think that two fi ngers have been fused into one. Through a series of challenging exercises, they can be helped gradually to retrain their fi ngers to move separately.
One reason that experts are sometimes perceived to possess an uncanny talent is that some can observe a complex per for mance in their fi eld and later reconstruct from memory every aspect of that per for mance, in granular detail. Mozart was famous for being able to reconstruct complex musical scores after a single hearing. But this skill, Ericsson says, rises
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not out of some sixth sense but from an expert’s superior perception and memory within his domain, which are the result of years of acquired skill and knowledge in that domain.
Most people who achieve expertise in a fi eld are destined to remain average performers in the other realms of life.
Ten thousand hours or ten years of practice was the average time the people Ericsson studied had invested to become expert in their fi elds, and the best among them had spent the larger percentage of those hours in solitary, deliberate practice. The central idea here is that expert per for mance is a product of the quantity and the quality of practice, not of ge-ne tic predisposition, and that becoming expert is not beyond the reach of normally gifted people who have the motivation, time, and discipline to pursue it.
Memory Cues
Mnemonic devices, as we mentioned, are mental tools to help hold material in memory, cued for ready recall. (Mnemosyne, one of the nine Muses of Greek mythology, was the goddess of memory.) Some examples of simple mnemonic devices are acronyms, like “ROY G BIV” for the colors of the rainbow, and reverse acronyms, as in “I Value Xylophones Like Cows Dig Milk” for the ascending value of Roman numerals from 1 to 1000 (e.g., V = 5; D = 500).
A memory palace is a more complex type of mnemonic device that is useful for or ga niz ing and holding larger volumes of material in memory. It’s based on the method of loci, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and involves associating mental images with a series of physical locations to help cue memories. For example, you imagine yourself within a space that is very familiar to you, like your home, and then you associate prominent features of the space, like your easy
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