Mindset

Carol provides basketball legend Michael Jordan as an example of an individual with a Growth Mindset. Although Jordan is arguably the greatest sportsman ever to live, he was imperfect. He missed some dunks, and he missed some game-winning shots. However, the critical matter is how Jordan responded to these misses. After making mistakes, he would practice the missed shot over and over again. Jordan’s ability to learn from his mistakes and practice these weaknesses brought him so much success. Jordan did not find fault in his teammates or his shoes for his own mistakes. Additionally, it is well-known that Jordan was a driving force behind his teammates’ improvements. Jordan wanted his teammates to be the best they could be. So, he always supported them in improving their game.

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“We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.”

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• “[Children with a growth mindset] knew that human qualities, such as intellectual skills, could be cultivated through effort”.
• “Not only were [the children with a growth mindset]not discouraged by failure, they didn’t even think they were failing. They thought they were learning”.
• “What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait?”
• “Robert Sternberg, the present-day guru of intelligence, writes that the major factor in whether people achieve expertise ‘is not some fixed prior ability, but purposeful engagement’.”
• “For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life”.
• “Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over”.
• “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”.
• “The fixed mindset makes you concerned with how you’ll be judged; the growth mindset makes you concerned with improving”.
• “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”.
• “Benjamin Barber, an eminent sociologist, once said, ‘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 non-learners’.”