“You’re so talented!”, “You are gifted – a natural!”, “You’re doing so well in school, you must be really smart!” – children receive these messages (or their negative counterparts), along with many other messages on a daily basis from their peers, parents and teachers. Are these just words or do they mean more? How are children affected by the words we use to praise, coach and criticize them?

Meet Stanford University’s Professor Dr. Carol S. Dweck to learn more about her fascinating research into “self-conceptions (or mindsets) people use to structure the self and guide their behavior”, and how you can apply a Growth Mindset at home, at school and in your career.

I am really excited to have such a full room.

And I know we have a lot of people on the live stream and a lot more people still who can't make either and are looking forward to seeing this up on YouTube, which will be the case in the next few days.

I'm really excited to introduce Professor Carol Dweck from Stanford University.

She's the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology.

She is best known for her work on mindsets that people use to guide their behavior.

She earned a BA in psychology from Columbian University and then a PhD in psychology from Yale.

She's the author of a best-selling book, Mindset, the New Psychology of Success.

And despite traffic, a bunch of books arrived at the back of the room, which you can purchase afterwards.

So there are many of your friends out there who have enjoyed this work.

She's a frequent speaker, has spoken on the TED stage multiple times at the United Nations, the White House, among other prestigious organizations.

Her work has won so many awards that if I named them all, that would be the entire talk.

And now that I have incredibly boosted her ego, I'd like to bring up Professor Dweck.

All right, before we get into mindsets, I want you to share what we've learned from what is now the widely discredited theory of self-esteem and the self-esteem movement.

In the 1990s, the self-esteem movement took over the world.

We were told to tell everyone how fabulous, brilliant, talented, special they were all the time.

This was going to motivate them and boost their achievement.

Instead, as you said, it was a complete disaster.

It didn't challenge people to fulfill their potential.

And our research showed telling people they're smart actually backfires.

It makes them fold in the face of obstacles because they're worried, oh, does this not look smart?

The whole currency is built around smart.

So what triggered your interest in going deeper and researching how people are motivated and learned?

And how did that lead to your definition of mindsets?

I was always interested in why some people wilted in the face of failure, shied away from challenges, when people who were no more talented or able were embracing challenges and thriving in the face of failure.

Ultimately, this led to our discovery of the mindsets.

And what we found was that some people believe their talents and abilities are just these fixed traits.

You have a certain amount, and that's it.

But other people believe talents and abilities can be developed through hard work, good strategies, good mentoring from others.

Through years of work, we found that having a fixed mindset led you to be afraid of challenges that might unmask your deficiencies, made you withdraw in the face of difficulty because you felt stupid.

You didn't want other people to think you were stupid.

Whereas having this growth mindset, the idea that your abilities could be developed, made you think, why waste my time looking smart when I can be getting smarter?

And I do that through taking on challenges.

Now, growth mindset doesn't mean everyone's the same, that they don't differ in talent and abilities.

And sort of building on that, you really can't watch a sports broadcast or the TV show America's Got Talent, which has talent in the name, without hearing how talented that player is, or seeing someone perform the ballet and say she has tremendous talent.

What role, if any, does innate talent play?

Well, they do have talent now when we're watching them.

But I think it's created a nation that thinks when they see someone displaying talent or incredible performance, they were born that way.

And they've had this inevitable rise to great success.

I teach a freshman seminar at Stanford every year, and I have my students do an assignment where they do research on their hero.

And almost Invariably, they think that hero just catapulted to success because of this amazing inborn talent.

But every single time, they find that the hero put in inordinate amounts of work, met with obstacles, and really powered through them.

So I don't rule out the idea, the fact that some people are born with passions and talents and build those.

But many people who never achieve anything are also born with talents and passions that they don't see through.

And what's there, what we come with, that's the raw material that you've got to develop.

Michael Jordan, it turns out, wasn't particularly talented until he went at it so ferociously, more ferociously than anyone else.

So you talked about over lunch, we had an interesting discussion with part of the team here about growth mindset, fixed mindset.

It's a great simplified way to think of it.

Yet people can have both, and it's more of a spectrum.

Talk a little bit more about how you can have both mindsets

It's true that you can have a fixed mindset in 1 area and a growth mindset in another area.

And it's true that it's a spectrum, not a dichotomy.

But it's really dynamic, even in a given area.

And Other times, we could be more in a growth mindset.

So what we have to start doing is looking for what triggers the, because the fixed mindset holds us back, we have to start looking for what triggers it in all of us, Even me.

What happens when you're facing a big challenge?

Do you worry about, well, I'm going to unmask deficiencies?

Do you think, maybe I'm not good at this?

What happens when you're receiving criticism?

What happens when you see someone who's better at you in what you're good at?

And see if you can get yourself into more of a growth mindset.

So actually, I have 2 children, 2 daughters, college age and high school age.

I read your book after my older daughter was approaching high school.

But my younger daughter benefited from it to the point where I banned the 2 S words in our house, smart and stupid.

But I was very guilty of using the former.

Raise your hands if you've told a friend or a child or a loved 1 how smart they are.

Words are really powerful, is 1 thing I took away from your book.

Talk about trigger words like that, smart, stupid, and how those can work against your best intentions.

When you call someone smart, you put them in a box, or really you're kind of putting them on a pedestal.

And their life becomes organized around deserving the pedestal, staying on the pedestal.

And you can only do that by narrowing your life to include only things you're sure you're good at, only things you're sure you can succeed at.

When we tell someone, you did that so quickly, I'm so impressed, they hear, if I didn't do it quickly, you wouldn't be impressed.

Then they think, oh, if I work, you're not going to think I'm smart at math, say.

And so you're just very subtly conveying these ideas that smart people don't make mistakes, smart people don't have to work hard.

The most important thing in the world is to be smart and look smart at all times.

And then people start narrowing their world so they can succeed within that fixed mindset.

So 1 thing at Google that we're obsessed with is proving things through data.

And I think 1 of the compelling arguments your book made was around the research you did with children in a school environment.

So talk about some of that early research and how it's evolved to reinforce that there's weight behind this concept.

We've done research now with tens of thousands of students.

First, finding that those who naturally have a growth mindset do better.

We've traced them over challenging, especially in challenging courses like pre-med organic chemistry, or challenging transitions, seventh grade, high school, college transitions.

Recently, we studied all of the 10th grade students in the country of Chile.

And we found that at every level of family income, those who believed they could develop their intelligence performed substantially higher on achievement tests than those who thought they couldn't.

And the most striking thing was that among the poorest kids, those who had a growth mindset were performing at the level of much wealthier kids.

But importantly, because those are correlations, we've done a number of studies where we have taught students a growth mindset.

The idea that every time they do a really hard task and stick to it, the neurons in their brain form new connections and they can get smarter.

And when we show them how to put that into practice, we have found that students who learn this fare better across challenging courses and transitions.

We just showed that in a study of women in STEM classes at universities around the country.

But we've shown that at the transition to college, transition to high school, and so forth.

So teaching a growth mindset leads kids to take on the challenges, stick to them, and improve.

So in our current education culture, and then I want to switch into the work environment, there's such an obsession with standardized testing and those tests having a real material impact on teachers' advancement, and even in some cases, their income.

How do school systems battle on that front at the same time tackle growth mindset, which is more about working hard

It's such an interesting story because standardized tests were brought in for a good reason.

There were students in certain parts of the country and in certain schools who were performing so poorly, and nobody knew, and nobody cared.

And it was an attempt to say, let's not cheat kids out of a good education.

But we all know the unintended consequences.

And many teachers, feeling that their jobs or their raises were on the line, taught to the test the entire year.

How rewarding could that be for teachers or for students?

And we did research to show that a lot of students think that those tests measure how smart they are and how smart they'll be when they grow up.

So they're nervous about them, and the whole year is spent on them.

When in fact, if you just taught kids in a way that made them love learning, to love challenges, know how to stick to them, feel the thrill of improvement, then the test score would come as a byproduct of that.

Finland, the country that does so well on all these international tests, They don't teach to the test.

So going into the corporate environment, can you actually think of an organization as a growth mindset organization or a fixed mindset organization.

As an example of, probably not the positive side.

So talk about how you can look at it from an organizational level.

And then if you want your culture to be a growth mindset culture, how do you start to tackle that?

So in my book, I identify organizations that value talent, raw talent above all else, or that believed in everyone's ability to improve and develop and valued that.

In our recent work, we've actually gone in and asked the people.

We asked employees in different Fortune 500 organizations, what mindset does your company have?

Is it a company that believes in fixed talent and worships it?

Or is it a company that believes everyone can develop their abilities and really provides these opportunities?

And what we found was there was remarkable consensus within organizations about which mindset their organization has.

And more important, it made a big difference.

So in terms of that difference, kind of compare and contrast companies that you view as leaders in growth mindset versus those that have struggled maybe because of a fixed mindset culture?

Well, in this research, we found that employees in fixed mindset, let me go the other way, that employees in growth mindset organizations said they felt more empowered by the organization and more committed to it, whereas their counterparts in the more fixed mindset organizations kind of had 1 foot out the door waiting for the next highest bidder.

But to me, what was even more interesting is that the people in growth mindset organizations said their companies valued creativity, innovation.

And they really put their money where their mouth was.

So if you took a reasonable risk and it didn't work out, they said, my company has my back.

My company really values teamwork, was another thing they said in the growth mindset organization.

In the more fixed mindset organizations, the employees said, yeah, the company talks innovation and creativity.

But if things don't work out, someone pays the price.

And finally, the managers in the growth mindset organizations said that their employees had tremendous potential to rise within the organization, become stars, join management.

And I love this finding, because in the fixed mindset organization, they're worshipping the talent, and hiring the talent, and paying to keep the talent.

But a few years later, they're not saying there are a lot of people who have potential to rise in the organization.

Either they've left, or they don't have that potential anymore.

So as many of us in the room participate in interviewing potential candidates for Google, so let's assume for a second that Google's trying to have a growth mindset.

That what are strategies that interviewers can use to help identify that trait in people, or identify that someone would be open to going down that path?

I worked with a major league baseball team.

2 devised questions that they could ask to potential draft choices.

1 was, how'd you get so good at baseball?

And some of them said, well, I was born with this natural talent.

And others said, well, my father and I, we worked at it constantly.

Another 1 was thinking about on-field success in the major leagues.

And some of them said things like, I'll have to get used to the cheering of larger crowds.

I'll have to take all my skills to a new level.

So this knowledge that you might have to really Reorganize, redefine yourself, and build new skills is really important.

Taking that to the corporate setting, first I might ask people what their greatest failures were.

See whether they take responsibility and what they did with that failure.

Did they capitalize on it to do something even better than they could have imagined?

Did they use it to put value added back into the company?

Or on the other hand, did they say, well, I had this failure.

Or did they make it something that really reflects well on them?

And then this kind of readiness to learn, readiness to share credit, these kinds of questions.

So I wonder, when I've debated your theories of mindset with colleagues over lunch, particularly my last company, there was really this resistance to accept that talent and or intelligence were in any way malleable.

Is intelligence truly something that's malleable?

And maybe are there physiological differences between people that you've researched that are identified as growth mindset or fixed mindset?

So we absolutely know that skills and abilities are malleable.

That's what turns itself into performance.

First of all, looking into the brains of fixed and growth mindset people as they work on a hard task and make errors.

And you see that the people who are in a growth mindset are having the relevant areas of the brain really light up, catch fire, as they process the errors and correct them.

Whereas in the brains of the people who are in more of a fixed mindset, Very little is going on.

They're seeing their errors, and they're moving on as quickly as possible.

But my favorite study along these lines tracked teenagers from the age of 14 to

Our brains are still very malleable, but the teenage brain is unbelievably malleable.

It's a time of tremendous potential growth.

And what they found over those 4 years was that there were some kids who gained a lot in IQ points in math or verbal areas.

And there were others that lost a lot of points and it tracked with the density of their neurons in the relevant parts of their brains.

So we believe that the kids who really went at it and took on the challenges and worked hard were creating these denser neurons.

And the others who didn't use it lost it.

So I thought another interesting aspect of your research was, and this could apply in education at home or in business, is the proclivity to cheat based on the mindset that a

And we see that cheating is more the desire to cheat, and the actual cheating is more prevalent within a fixed mindset.

Within a fixed mindset, if, say, you haven't done well on a subject before, but you want a good grade, you feel like, oh, I have to find some circuitous means.

But if you feel that there are many ways that you can do better through actual learning, you're more likely to do that.

So in 1 study after a poor grade, students who held more of a fixed mindset of their intelligence actually said in advance, they're seriously considering cheating on the next test.

In our business study, the people in the fixed mindset organization said cheating and deception were much more prevalent.

If I have to be smarter than you, if I have to be the superstar, I'm going to consider all different ways to look better than you look.

And if I have to keep secrets from you or hoard my knowledge from other people, I'm going to do that.

But in the growth mindset organization where people are collaborating and learning and tackling challenges together, where's the cheating going to come in?

So if a company observes that behavior, and it's a company of scale.

Let's say it's not a company of 10 people, but of hundreds or thousands, and they recognize this is, we have a culture problem.

How do you go about even trying to tackle that?

What are some of the strategies companies can use if they decide, we want to shift the culture.

But what are some of the strategies a company can employ to change the culture?

So I think the best thing is for the message to come down from the top, where they don't just announce we're a growth mindset culture.

They really explain what the new value system is, the new value system on taking on challenges, on rewarding reasonable risk, on teamwork, on sharing information, giving performance evaluations that speak to people's growth and contribution to the company in terms of learning, and salary increases that take into account, Did someone take on challenges, improve, help other people improve?

So to kind of talk growth mindset talk without backing it up, I don't think that's going to happen.

If you have the old reward system that's rewarding kind of individual jockeying for acclaim and power.

But if you back it up with evaluations, rewards, and mentoring in what a growth mindset deeply means and how it can be enacted within the job.

In your recent TED Talk, you talked about the power of yet, which I thought was a very interesting concept.

Talk a little bit about what you meant by that.

It all started when I learned about a high school in Chicago where students had to pass maybe 84 units to graduate.

And if they didn't pass a unit, they got the grade not yet.

Because if you get a failing grade, you think, I hate this.

But not yet means, hey, you're on a trajectory, a learning trajectory.

Maybe you're not at the finish line, but you're on your way there.

And the students went around the school unabashedly saying to each other, how many not yets do you have?

So We started a program of research, still continuing, on the word yet.

And showing that saying not yet after a wrong answer keeps up motivation and encourages persistence.

If sometimes you say, I'm not a person, or I could never do then just add the word yet.

And it takes a very, or if 1 of your employees says, I can't do it, I'm no good at this.

It takes a very fixed mindset statement and it puts it in a whole different growth mindset context.

And just a second to last question for me is you did some interesting research very recently around gaming and gaming applied to math.

And talk a little about how you were able to incorporate your concept of the growth mindset into that experience.

We teamed up with Mazoran Popovich and his colleagues at the University of Washington to create a math game called Brain Points that incorporated growth mindset principles.

There were algorithms built into the game that detected the student's effort, their use of strategies, and their improvement.

And then in our experiment, we compared brain points to the standard version of the game.

Now, the standard version of the game is your usual game, where the more you zoom through and answer problems correctly, the more you rack up points.

Actually, if you zoom through, it apologizes to you and says, you didn't earn any points that time.

We'll give you something more challenging the next time.

They played longer, because they could leave the game at any point.

See all Talks at Google transcripts on Youtube

The Growth Mindset | Carol Dweck | Talks at Google