This is a list of my favourite growth mindset quotes all taken from Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
As Stanford Professor Carol Dweck explains in her book Mindset: The Growth Mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are thing you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others.
👉🏻 For more on mindset and how one can change their mindset, read here.
- Why wasting time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset.
- You have a choice. Mindsets are just beliefs. They’re powerful beliefs, but they’re just something in your mind, and you can change your mind.
- I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures … I divide the world into the learners and the nonlearners. – Benjamin Barber
- Marina Semyonova, a great Russian dancer and teacher, devised a novel way of selecting her students. It was a clever test for mindset. As a former student tells it, ‘Her students first have to survive a trial period while she watches to see how you react to praise and correction. Those more responsive to the correction are deemed worthy’ (This is not a quote but I found this fascinating!).
- Performance cannot be based on one assessment. You cannot determine the slope of a line given only one point, as there is no line to begin with. A single point in time does not show trends, improvement, lack of effort, or mathematical ability… – Michael D. Riordan
- As a society, we value natural, effortless accomplishment over achievement through effort. We endow our heroes with superhuman abilities that led them inevitably toward their greatness. It’s as if Midori popped out of the womb fiddling, Michael Jordan dribbling, and Picasso doodling. – Malcolm Gladwell
- For people with the growth mindset, even geniuses have to work hard for their achievements. And what’s so heroic, they would say, about having a gift? They may appreciate endowment, but they admire effort, for no matter what your ability is, effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment.
- The growth mindset does allow people to love what they’re doing – and to continue to love it in the face of difficulties.
- Many growth-mindset people didn’t even plan to go to the top. They got there as a result of doing what they love. It’s ironic: The top is where the fixed-mindset people hunger to be, but it’s where many growth-mindset people arrive as a by-product of their enthusiasm for what they do.
- In the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. If you fail – or if you’re not the best – it’s all been wasted. The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome. They’re tackling problems, charting new courses, working on important issues. Maybe they haven’t found the cure for cancer, but the search was deeply meaningful.
- Is there something in your past that you think measured you? A test score? A dishonest or callous action? Being fired from a job? Being rejected? Focus on that thing. Feel all the emotions that go with it. Now put it in a growth-mindset perspective. Look honestly at your role in it, but understand that it doesn’t define your intelligence or personality. Instead, ask: What did I (or can I) learn from that experience? How can I use it as a basis for growth?
- Boxing experts relied on physical measurements, called ‘tales of the tape’, to identify naturals. They included measurements of the fighter’s fist, reach, chest expansion, and weight. Muhammad Ali failed these measurements. He was not a natural.
- Those with the growth mindset found success in doing their best, in learning and improving.
- Those with the growth mindset found setbacks motivating. They’re informative. They’re a wake-up call.
- We as educators must take seriously our responsibility to create growth-mindset-friendly environments – where kids feel safe from judgement, where they understand that we believe in their potential to grow, and where they know that we are totally dedicated to collaborating with them on their learning. We are in the business of helping kids thrive, not finding reasons why the can’t.
- Although for simplicity I’ve talked as though some people have a growth mindset and some people have a fixed mindset, in truth we’re all a mixture of the two. There’s no point denying it. Sometimes we’re in one mindset and sometimes we’re in the other. Our task then becomes to understand what triggers our fixed mindset. What are the events or situations that take us to a place where we feel our (or other people’s) abilities are fixed? What are the events or situations that take us to a place of judgement rather than to a place of development?
The Fixed VS Growth is one way to look at mindset. Here are some more perspectives from my experience working with people on their mindset – Mindset Coaching.
