Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Dweck opens this chapter with stories about two well-regarded geniuses, Thomas Edison and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. She details their talents and triumphs but then retells the story, focusing on their failures instead. Next, to show the relationship between mindset and achievement, she describes a pair of experiments, one with students just entering junior high and the other with pre-med hopefuls starting college chemistry. In both instances, she measured their mindsets at the start by asking whether they agreed or disagreed with a set of statements. She and her team then monitored the students’ progress throughout the semester, checking in with neutral questionnaires to measure the impact of their mindsets on their experiences. In both cases, fixed mindsets tracked with lower grades over time, and growth mindsets tracked with higher grades over time.

One of the first things she noticed was that many of the seventh graders simply stopped working. Sometimes, these were historically low-achieving students, but formerly high-achieving students also responded this way regularly. This was true almost exclusively of those with the most fixed mindsets. This low-effort phenomenon did not occur among the pre-med hopefuls, who were used to a heavy workload and intense study, but Dweck noticed that those with the