Mindset

Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, spent decades studying why two people with the same talent react differently to failure. The answer is a silent belief about the nature of ability. Those with a fixed mindset believe intelligence and talent are given traits, so every challenge becomes a test of identity: if I fail, it's because I'm not good. Those with a growth mindset believe ability is developed through effort, strategy and help, so the challenge is an opportunity and the mistake is information. Before reading her, almost all of us believe we are "good at" some things and "bad at" others; by the end, you understand that phrase describes where you are, not how far you can go.

Three ideas to remember. First: the wrong kind of praise produces fragility. In her experiments with children, those praised for being smart later avoided hard problems and lied about their results; those praised for their effort and strategy asked for harder challenges. For a founder this applies to how you talk about your team and about yourself: celebrating "how talented" manufactures people who protect their reputation; celebrating "how well you worked that" manufactures people who learn. Second: the fixed mindset disguises itself as a talent culture. Dweck uses the case of Enron, the company obsessed with hiring "the smartest people," where no one could admit a mistake because admitting it meant no longer being brilliant; the result was an organization that hid problems until they sank it. Third: the growth-mindset leader is recognized by what he does with bad news. Dweck contrasts the CEOs who need to be the smartest person in the room with those who, like Jack Welch at GE, build systems to hear the truth from below and accept that they themselves have to change.

There is a trap she herself warned about in later years: the false growth mindset, which consists of declaring that "anything is possible" and praising any effort even when it leads nowhere. The effort that counts is the one accompanied by a new strategy and by asking for help; repeating the same thing with more enthusiasm is not growth, it's stubbornness.

Dweck tells the story of a school on a Native American reservation in Washington State that in a year and a half went from last place in its district to first, ahead of the wealthy schools in the Seattle suburbs where the children of Microsoft engineers study. And the mechanism that best summarizes the approach she saw in a Chicago high school: a student who didn't pass a course stopped getting a failing grade and started getting "Not Yet." With those two words, the grade stops being a verdict on who you are and becomes a point on a curve that keeps rising.

The practice she proposes is extremely simple: add the word "yet." I don't know how to sell; yet. We don't know how to raise capital; yet. Dweck shows that the brain responds differently to "I can't" than to "I can't yet." The recipe for your company this week: in your next performance review or results meeting, shift the axis of the conversation from "how good are you at X" to "what did you do differently this time and what will you try next," and in your hiring interviews ask about the candidate's biggest mistake and what they learned from it; whoever has none has either never attempted anything hard or has a fixed mindset.

The author's line: "Becoming is better than being." And it works beyond your role as a founder: it is the manual for raising children who dare, for giving feedback without destroying, and for surviving the first "no" from an investor without concluding that the problem is you.