How to Enhance Performance & Learning by Applying a Growth Mindset | Andrew Huberman

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we're discussing growth mindset. Growth mindset is 1 of the most interesting and powerful concepts in all of psychology. Growth mindset is essentially a way of embracing challenge and thinking about your bodily and brain's response to challenge in a way that allows you to optimize your performance. Growth mindset consists of many things, which we will discuss today. And of course, we will discuss how to implement growth mindset.

But some of the key features of growth mindset are developing an ability to distance your identity from the challenge you happen to be embracing. Now that might come as a bit of a surprise to many of you. For instance, we grow up hearing, we hope from time to time, that we are smart, that we are talented, that we are a good athlete, that we are a good artist. We like to think that we are good at something or perhaps many things, but it turns out that the kind of praise or feedback that we receive that attaches our identity to performance can actually undermine our performance.

And believe it or not, this is especially problematic for people that perform well in their endeavors. That's right. If you are somebody who performs well in school or athletics or music, and you are told that you are very smart, that you're an excellent student, that you're an excellent athlete or that you're an excellent musician, you have much to lose if you at any moment do not perform well. And that's because your identity has been integrated with your performance. Somewhat counterintuitively, growth mindset is the process of distancing your identity from performance and rather attaching your identity and your efforts and your sense of motivation to effort itself and to the process of enjoying learning and getting better at learning anything.

So today we are going to discuss what growth mindset is and what it isn't because it's often discussed in terms that frankly are not accurate to the science. We will also talk about another mindset which is the stress is enhancing mindset that it turns out can act synergistically with growth mindset such that when you combine growth mindset with the stresses enhancing mindset, you and anyone it's been shown can vastly improve your performance in essentially anything. So today's discussion will of course explore the classic work of Carol Dweck, who was really the founder of the growth mindset field, as well as some of the newer research from people like David Yeager, Ali Crum, and others, who have explored how growth mindset and stress-enhancing mindsets can be applied both in and out of the classroom in children and adults, and really in people of all backgrounds.

By the end of today's episode, you will have a rich understanding of the science, as well as many tools that you can apply in everyday life in essentially any endeavor. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring 0 cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need, but nothing you don't.

That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are vital for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking element dissolved in water makes it extremely easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve 1 packet of element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning.

I also drink element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing. They have a bunch of different great tasting flavors of element. They have watermelon, citrus, et cetera. Frankly, I love them all. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman lab to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman Lab to claim a free sample pack. Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and NSDR non-sleep deep rest protocols.

I started using the waking up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing yoga nidra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app, turned out to be the Waking Up app, which could teach you meditations of different durations and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states and that he liked it very much. So I gave the Waking Up app a try and I too found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate.

And indeed I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the Waking Up app has lots of different types of yoga nidra sessions. For those of you who don't know, yoga nidra is a process of lying very still, but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations. And there's excellent scientific data to show that yoga nidra and something similar to it called non-sleep deep rest or NSDR can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even with just a short 10 minute session.

If you'd like to try the waking up app, you can go to wakingup.com slash Huberman and access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com slash Huberman to access a free 30 day trial. Let's talk about growth mindset. Growth mindset, as the name suggests, is the idea that we can get better at things. That is that our abilities are not fixed, but rather that our abilities are malleable. And at the core of growth mindset is the idea that our brains can change, and indeed they can. We refer to that ability as neuroplasticity or the nervous system's ability to change in response to experience.

Now, I've done several episodes about neuroplasticity. So that's a topic unto itself, but suffice to say that neuroplasticity, brain change, can occur throughout the entire lifespan. It is far more robust early in life, from birth until about age 25. Neuroplasticity is sort of the default process. Our brain is being shaped by our everyday experiences. But certainly from age 25 and onward, and certainly well into people's 90s, even it's been shown, the brain can change if we want it to. It can change for the worse, of course, through injury or disease, things of that sort, but it also can change for the better through deliberate focused bouts of learning.

We can learn new languages, we can learn art, we can learn music, we can get smarter, we can get better at essentially anything if we devote our attentional resources to learning those things. So really any discussion about growth mindset has as a subtext, a discussion about neuroplasticity. Although today we aren't going to focus so much on neuroplasticity, meaning we aren't going to focus so much on the neural circuit and neurochemical changes that underlie neuroplasticity, because I've covered those on previous episodes. We'll talk about them a little bit today, but we are mainly going to talk about the data, the studies from the field of psychology, applying growth mindset in and out of the classroom in children and adults.

And we are going to talk about tools, everyday tools that you can use to enhance growth mindset for yourself and perhaps for those around you if you care to teach growth mindset, which as you'll learn later turns out to be an excellent way to reinforce your own growth mindset. And we're going to talk about how to apply those tools in a bunch of different domains, musical, athletic, intellectual, and on and on. No discussion of growth mindset would be complete without mentioning that growth mindset is the brainchild of my colleague, Carol Dweck in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University.

Today, you'll learn how she discovered growth mindset, and you will learn how others have taken that discovery and expanded upon it, and especially its application in and out of the classroom. To start off our discussion about growth mindset, however, we need to define what a mindset is. I think most of us think we know what a mindset is. We think, oh, it's kind of a mental stance where we are positive or we are negative or we believe something or we don't believe something. But a mindset actually has a very specific definition. And here I'm referring to the definition provided by Dr.

Ali Crum. Ali Crum is also a professor of psychology at Stanford. She runs her own laboratory working on stress-related mindsets and other mindsets. She's actually been a guest on this podcast previously. Highly recommend you listen to that episode if you haven't already. Dr. Crumb defines a mindset as quote, a mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and encodes information. And I think the key thing to highlight there is organizes information. Because as you all well know, we are constantly being bombarded with information from the outside world, sensory information about what's going on with our visual system, what we're hearing, what we're seeing, what we're feeling.

We are also bombarded with internal sensations of how full or empty our gut feels. Are we hungry? Are we tired? Are we anxious? Are we calm, et cetera. So tons and tons of information funneling into our brain and mindsets really help us organize that information such that we pay attention to certain things and not others, and we respond to certain things and not others. Okay, so here I'm not trying to put additional language on something simple in order to make it complex. I'm trying to put a little bit of language, that is that a mindset does many things, but it mainly organizes information.

I'll add to that for specific actions or inactions in a way that allows us to simplify our world, in a way that allows us to make certain choices and do away with thinking about and acting on other types of information. The other thing about mindsets is that they include entire narratives. And most of the time, we aren't even aware of how those narratives are operating. Meaning we don't walk around looking at opportunities in the world, like the opportunity to get better at fitness or a sport or music or arithmetic or languages or anything for that matter, thinking, okay, what is my mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and encodes information?

We don't do that. Instead, what we have are stories. And those stories are usually attached to our sense of identity. Like, I'll just use myself for instance, I do not think of myself as a good musician. In fact, I can't read music, I'm terrible at playing instruments, I like listening to music, but I consider myself a terrible musician, right? I've really assigned a value or I've assigned my value to music and my relationship to music. We tend to do that. We can also do it in the opposite direction. I've been running a laboratory for a long time, been in science for close to 3 decades.

So if you ask me, do I feel proficient at science? I'd say, yeah, I'm proficient at science. I know how to do experiments, set up experiments, write research papers, write grants, et cetera. I'm pretty good at it, right? We tend to decide if we are good or bad at things and we tend to integrate those with our identity somewhat or a lot, depending on whether or not we're a professional or amateur or how much we engage in an activity. The point being that mindsets include all of these narratives. And often those narratives are visible to us if we think about them.

But most of the time we are moving through the world, meaning school, work, relationships, and all our endeavors without a lot of careful thought about the narratives we carry. And the beauty of growth mindset is that it forces us to step back and ask ourselves some simple questions. These are questions that you could ask yourself right now. And in fact, I highly recommend you do. You could ask yourself, for instance, what have I been told I'm really good at? You should also ask yourself, what have I been told I'm really poor at that I'm just not good at?

What have I told myself I'm really good at? And what have I told myself I'm really bad at? And then a second set of questions is what am I good at and why? Did it come naturally to me? Did I apply myself for many years? Meaning, did I apply a lot of effort to learning that thing or perhaps both, right? And then it's also important to ask yourself, why am I not good at other things? Is it simply because you've never applied yourself with those things? Or is it because you tried and had an early failure or perhaps you tried and tried and tried for many years and you continued to fail at that thing, or you just didn't reach a level of proficiency that made you want to pursue it further.

In asking yourselves those questions, you are asking yourself not just what you're good at and bad at and why, you should also be thinking about where the messages of being good at something or being bad at something arrived from. Did they arrive from outside you, meaning from your parents, from your coaches, from your teachers, or was it the case that despite a lot of positive feedback, you just sort of decided you weren't good at something. Or conversely, was it the case that despite a lot of negative feedback that you would never be good at something or that you weren't good at something that you continue to persist?

Because there are certainly people like that. The more negative feedback they get, the more they dig their heels in to prove themselves as capable of becoming good at something. So I do recommend as we march forward in this conversation, you think about those questions. What am I good at? What am I bad at? Why am I good at those things? Why am I bad at those things? And ask yourself to what extent your labels, that is your identity, is attached to the things that you are good at or bad at. And the reason I'd like you to ask yourself those questions is that next we're going to talk about some research from Dr.

Carol Dweck's laboratory that was really the seed of the entire field of growth mindset. It relates to a specific set of experiments that really show that the specific feedback we get, meaning whether or not we get feedback that is attached to our identity, like a label, like smart or great athlete or talented, sends us down a very different path of performance in the short and long run, as compared to whether or not we receive feedback that's based on effort, meaning you tried really hard or you really seem to apply yourself under conditions where you're getting the right answer over time because you simply refuse to quit.

Those are 2 very divergent sets of feedback. And as you'll learn in a moment, the sorts of feedback that we get, especially early in life or early in an endeavor. So this doesn't just apply to young kids, this applies to adults too, who are taking on a new skill or are trying to expand on an existing skill. Those 2 divergent forms of feedback get integrated into our core beliefs about what we think is possible for us in a given endeavor. And the great news is we can also modify those core beliefs simply by changing the feedback that we give ourselves.

The research paper I'd like to discuss briefly that beautifully embodies the runway that led to the discovery of growth mindset is a paper from Dr. Carol Dweck as well as her colleague, Claudia Mueller. And the title of the paper essentially says it all. The title is, "'Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation and Performance.'" That should be surprising, that praise for intelligence can undermine motivation and performance. I would have thought, and I think many people probably believe that if you tell a child or an adult that they're really good at something and you're genuine about that feedback, meaning they're performing well and you say, great, you're doing really well, you're so smart, you're so talented that their performance would continue to improve, that it would bolster their motivation to engage in that activity, which hopefully they enjoy, but regardless, provided that it's a safe activity, it's educational, what have you, that it would serve to encourage them, right?

The kid thinks, not only am I engaging in this activity, but I'm getting positive feedback, presumably from people that I care about or whose opinion I care about, wouldn't that serve to elevate performance? It does not. In fact, the exact opposite happens. So I'll just give you a few of the key takeaways from this study. The way it was done is very interesting. They essentially gave feedback about performance that was linked up with a child's intelligence, telling kid they're smart, they're talented, that they can learn things really easily or that they're very good at learning this sort of thing.

And they called that intelligence feedback or they gave them what was called effort feedback. The simple way to think about effort feedback is that it's more attached to verbs as opposed to labels. So effort feedback consists of things like you tried really hard on that problem. It was great the way that you applied effort. It was great the way that you persisted. It was great the way that even when you got the wrong answer, you spent 10 minutes thinking about it and then you tried again and again, or in some cases, even if they didn't get the right answer, telling them, well, even though you didn't get the right answer, it's really terrific that you continue to try.

Okay, so intelligence feedback was the sort of feedback that was tied to labels of identity, things like smart, talented, et cetera. Whereas effort feedback was tied to verbs, choices, behavioral and cognitive choices that children made in an effort to learn or get better at something. So in this study, which included over a hundred children, they either got the intelligence type feedback or the effort type feedback, or there was a control group that didn't get either the intelligence or the effort type feedback. And then they looked at a number of different outcomes. So I'll just highlight a few examples of what they found.

First of all, the kids that got the intelligence based feedback, when they were then later offered problem sets that were either challenging or were of the sort that they knew they could perform well on, they tended to select problems that they knew they could perform well on. These were what were referred to as performance goals. In other words, they picked problems that allowed them to continue to get the praise that they had received previously about being smart or talented. Whereas the kids that got feedback about their strong effort when later presented with problems that were either easy or hard, more often than not, they pick the harder problems that stood to teach them more.

So that's striking. It says that if you tell a kid that they're smart or talented, and that's the reason why they perform well, when they encounter challenges, they are likely to go with the least amount of challenge so that they can continue to receive that praise or feedback. Whereas if you receive praise and feedback for your strong effort, then later you tend to pick environments, problem sets, et cetera, that allow you to exert the very effort that got you the praise in the first place. So in both cases, these children are essentially attached to the praise, right, in some sense.

I mean, we like to think that they enjoy these activities and they're benefiting from them as well. But in both cases, the praise really serves to reinforce a certain pattern of behavior. But in the case of giving intelligence feedback, the kids are really just trying to reinforce being told that they're smarter, talented, as opposed to reinforcing the engagement in the activity that got them the praise in the first place. And the converse is also true. When kids are told, hey, you really tried hard and that's great. Or I like how you persisted or you're so persistent.

I can really see how persistent you are in trying to get the right answer, even if you don't get the right answer. Well, then when you present those kids with additional challenges, they work very hard to stay in challenge. And guess what? No surprise. The kids that are rewarded for effort and that continue to pick harder problems outperform the kids that are given the intelligence praise and feedback by a large margin. So what does this tell us? This tells us that the narratives that we hear from others, of course, reinforce certain patterns of behavior. What else does this tell us?

This tells us that if you're a parent or teacher, you have to be very careful about giving feedback to a child that is attached to their identity around an endeavor, especially if they're performing well at that endeavor, right? Now, of course, if a child is not performing well at something, you also don't want to tell them that they're stupid, right? You don't want to tell them that they're deficient, right? But that's a rare occurrence in the classroom, 1 would hope. That's a rare occurrence on the field, 1 would hope. But what's very common, very, very common, is that when we see children or adults performing well, we tend to give them identity labels as a way to try and reinforce whatever behavior we observe and we like.

Now, the other thing they looked at in the study besides whether or not these kids would pick hard or easier challenges down the line were the actual raw performance on cognitive problems. And these data I must say are just so interesting. They took the kids and they gave them all the same problem sets. And all the kids across the board, whether or not they were getting intelligence praise or effort praise or they were in the control group, were performing more or less the same way. They were getting some of these questions right, some of these questions wrong.

Then they gave them praise after they completed those problems. They either got intelligence praise, you're so smart, you're so talented, or they got effort praise. You tried so hard, you really persisted, that's fantastic. Then later they gave them another set of problems and they looked at performance. Now remember, the first time around, all the kids got some of the questions right and some of the questions wrong. So there's room for improvement for everybody. What they found was absolutely striking. The kids that were in the control group, so they didn't get any specific form of praise, they perform more or less the same way as they did before.

So if they were getting 75% of the answers right the first time they got 75% of the answers right the second time, 25% wrong in both cases. The kids that were in the intelligence praise group, the you're so smart, you're so talented praise group, their performance went down significantly. Whereas the kids that were in the effort praise group, their performance increased significantly. Okay, so this is a bi-directional effect where giving intelligence praise reduces performance and giving effort praise improves performance, which is absolutely striking and tells you everything you need to know, which is if you're a parent, you're a teacher, and of course, as we all give ourselves feedback, rewarding yourself for effort is the best way to improve performance.

Rewarding yourself based on identity labels, so smart, so talented, you're a great athlete, et cetera. All that stare in the mirror and do self-affirmation stuff can actually undermine performance. And in fact, it does undermine performance. It may not do it right away, but eventually it does. And in a moment, I'll explain why. The other thing this study looked at that I just have to mention is this notion of persistence. So remember earlier I said that the kids that got intelligence praise tended to pick easier problems down the line, whereas the kids that got effort praise tended to pick harder problems.

It turns out that the kids that got intelligence praise also tended to take on fewer problems overall. They tended to limit the total number of challenges that they engaged in. Whereas the kids that got the effort praise, that you worked so hard, you're so determined, that was so impressive how you just kept going, even when you got some answers wrong, those kids not only opted for harder challenges, they not only performed better, but they also took on many more challenges. So these data really make clear that the effort praise is the way to go. Now I know many people have heard this whole thing about don't reward the person, reward the effort, reward the verbs as I'm referring to it.

But it's actually pretty rare that we hear effort rewarded in everyday settings. And it is very common for us to overhear intelligence praise or talent praise. You know, a kid comes home with a trophy and we tell them you're a great athlete, right? Kid comes home with a great report card, you know, you're so smart, congratulations. A kid comes home with some sort of win in their world and we tend to give them a label because we like to think that that label will get internalized and they'll start to view themselves as a winner. We tell them, you can do anything.

You're a winner, you're a winner. And of course you don't want to tell children or yourself or any other adult, you're a loser, right? We do not want to do that. You don't want to undermine performance that way. But it's very clear based on this research and a lot of other papers similar to it that we all have a giant blind spot sitting in our psychological field when we are getting and receiving praise that really it is the sort of praise that's attached to the very efforts that led to the results that will lead to even improved results over time.

Okay, so this paper is really truly important. It's a landmark paper in the field of psychology, motivation, learning, and performance. And that's why I'm discussing it in such detail here. But it actually includes 1 additional piece of information that I also think everyone should know about. And that is the tendency for children who get intelligence praise to misrepresent their performance on subsequent efforts. What do I mean by that? Basically what I'm saying is in this paper, they had the children perform on a given task and then they either got intelligence praise, you're so smart, you're so talented, or effort praise.

You worked so hard, you're so diligent, you kept going even when you were faced with results you didn't like. And then they had them do a series of other tasks and then report their results to other kids. And what they found is that children who get intelligence praise, when they need to report their scores, either by walking up to the board and putting a little mark where their particular score is or telling another student what their score was or even writing it down on a piece of paper covertly so that's not visibly being compared to all the other scores.

The kids that got intelligence praise tend to lie about their score. And as you could imagine, they tend to lie in the direction of making themselves appear as having performed better than they actually did. So this is a pretty sinister aspect of intelligence praise that we don't often hear about. Even if you've heard telling a person that they are smart or talented can ultimately undermine performance. Rarely, if ever, do we hear that telling someone that they're smart or talented can increase the probability that that person is going to misrepresent their performance in the future. And that's true regardless of whether or not they performed pretty well or not in the past.

I mean, you could imagine that the kids that were told that they were intelligent, that they're talented, that those kids, if they were doing well and then suddenly did poorly, that they slide the score up a little bit. We don't want anyone to do that, but you can imagine how a young kid might do that to kind of preserve their ego. But no, in some cases, these kids are already performing pretty well. They're not getting a hundred percent, but they're performing in the top bracket. And yet if they received intelligence praise, they're still more likely to lie about their performance, increasing it further still.

Whereas the kids that receive the effort praise do no such thing. They faithfully represent their performance. And as I mentioned before, for many reasons that we'll talk about in a few minutes, meaning the mechanisms and what's really going on in the heads of these kids that get effort praise, they're performing better than everybody else. So just to illustrate how important the findings in this study really are, the paper was published in 1998, but just 2 years prior in 1996, There was a survey of parents asking to what extent do you believe that intelligence is fixed?

And 85% answered that they thought that intelligence was fixed. That means they believe that the brain was sort of a vessel of fixed size, that Of course, when we're born into the world, it's kind of empty, we don't have any knowledge, but that the job of schooling was to teach kids things and reveal an intelligence capacity that was innate and that couldn't be increased upon. Whereas nowadays we really understand mainly through our deeper understanding of neuroplasticity and how the brain learns that indeed the brain can learn and that intelligence is not fixed. However, in 1998, when these studies were done, most people were of the core belief that intelligence is fixed, that it cannot be improved upon.

And these results really drive home the fact that the type of feedback we get about our performance, even when our performance is good, can undermine our future performance. Or if we receive feedback of the effort praise type, the, you tried so hard, you're so persistent type, that our abilities can indeed improve. And when you look at any intelligence test, if you look at a standard IQ test, or you go way out onto the other end of the continuum in terms of intelligence testing, you look at emotional intelligence, it is very clear that anyone and everyone can improve their scores on those exams and in fact can improve the various aspects of intelligence because in fact there are many different forms of intelligence through dedicated effort.

So this paper was really ahead of its time and it's really what seeded the entire field of growth mindset and the understanding of what that is. So now I'd like to shift our attention to not just how getting 1 form of praise or another form of praise can diminish or enhance performance, but really to ask why that would be, how that is, because in that understanding, there's a very simple set of tools, of narratives that you can tell yourself, or that you can tell a child as they are attempting to learn that can greatly enhance your or their ability to learn.

Before we go any further, however, I know many of you are listening to this with an eye toward the tools, meaning you want to know what the tools are that you can implement. Well, earlier I had you ask some questions. What are you good at? What have you been told you're good at? And how did you arrive at being good at those things? I also encourage you to think about what you've been told you're bad at or less good at and what you tell yourself you're bad at and less good at and how you arrived at that conclusion.

Right now, I'd like you to ask yourself, what is your typical narrative when you are engaging in things that you believe you are good at. And what is your typical narrative, meaning your internal dialogue in your head, when you're engaging in things that you are not good at, or if you're not engaging in those things, when you think about engaging in those things. And the tool that's very effective to apply, even just in your own mind, is to start shifting your narrative from those performance narratives of being really good at something or bad at something, which are in fairness, are the labels I'm using here, but that's for sake of discussion and clarity.

And to start to shift those narratives towards effort-related narratives. So I'll use myself as an example. I'm pretty good at learning and remembering things, cognitive information. I'm pretty terrible at playing music. In fact, I'm downright terrible. If I were to step back from those 2 statements, I could take an intelligence type praise narrative and tell myself, okay, I have a great memory, right? That's a intelligence praise type narrative. Or I could tell myself the truth, which is I tend to spend a lot of time with information in different forms. I listen to it, I read it, I write it down, I highlight it, I put it up on a whiteboard, I tell myself that information again in my head, I think about it in different contexts, I tell other people about it.

That's how I developed a good memory for certain types of information. And that's still how I continue to build my memory and my information bank in my head to this day. It's not because I have a quote unquote great memory. It's because I engage in certain verb processes to build up that memory. I can also take a look at the, let's call it the negative statement. I am abysmal at music, which frankly is a fair statement. And I could say, okay, I'm just a terrible musician. I have no musical sense. I have no musical ability.

Those are labels of the intelligence type labels. Or I could look at the verbs. This is also true. I have never really spent a lot of time trying to learn an instrument. I failed early on, at least in my mind. I failed to get the results I wanted. And so I stopped playing. I made the dog next door howl, which by the way I did. So I stopped playing. I ceased the effort process. And so in looking at it through that lens, yes, I'm a terrible musician, but I'm a terrible musician as a consequence of having never really engaged in the types of behaviors and effort over time that would have allowed me to be anything but a terrible musician.

Now, I'm not asking you to do this exercise simply as a way to puff yourself up about the things you're good at and reward yourself for all the effort that went into it, nor am I asking you to look at the things that you're not good at and trying to take away some of the shame and blame, although that would be a good thing as well, that led to the fact that you're not good at these things. The reason I'm requesting that you ask those questions of yourself is that they can start to give you a sense of the actual tools and how those tools are implemented in order to get better at the things that you want to get better at.

And, and this is a very important and, to not set yourself up for getting worse at the things that you already think you're good at. Because as we'll soon talk about, when we attach performance labels to things that we are really good at, we internalize that sense of self. Oh, I'm good at this particular thing. In my case, if I gave a performance label or an intelligence label, it would be of the sort, okay, I have a great memory. But what happens when someone gives themselves or hears a performance or intelligence label around something that they're good at and then has an error or has a period where they're not that good at something.

Well, if you internalized a sense of identity around performing well at that thing, and then at some point you don't perform well, you will also attach your identity to that diminished performance. Whereas if you attach effort, verbs to why you got good at something as well as why you are not good at something, well, then there's only room for improvement. Why do I say that? Well, When we're talking about effort, we're talking about verbs, that is inherent to you. If you did it in 1 context, you can do it in another. Whereas ability and performance, it's not the case that if you have a good memory, you are by default a good musician.

That might be the case, but In my case, certainly it's not. The point being that when you think about the effort processes that you've engaged before and over and over again, that allows you to continue to get better in a given domain, even when, or perhaps we should say, especially when you stop getting the results you want or you start getting poor results and that effort process of practicing a lot, many repetitions, analyzing why you didn't get something right, that can be engaged in a lot of different endeavors across domains, as we say. So when we talk about verbs like effort or persistence or practicing a lot or analyzing errors and why you did something incorrectly and then getting back to the drawing board as it's called, when you start to think about your successes and your failures through those lenses, through the lens of verbs, then you're really talking about something that's central to who you are.

It's how you're wired. It's machinery that exists in your brain and nervous system and body that you can engage that time and any time. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge 1 of our sponsors, Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or usually twice a day is that it gets to be the probiotics that I need for gut health.

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And they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Huberman to get the 5 free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3K2. Okay, so I've been talking about cognitive or psychological processes. And the basic take home is that labels of intelligence, labels of identity undermine performance. And a striking aspect of that, by the way, which I failed to mention earlier, but I should have, is that If we receive those labels of being a high performer, smart, talented, et cetera, either before or after a given task or game or exam, it still has a detrimental effect in both cases.

Meaning you tell someone heading into something, you are a great athlete, you are so smart, you're gonna do so well on this exam. You undermine their performance. Or if they take the exam and afterwards, before you see their scores or even after they score, let's say they get an A plus, they get everything perfect And you say, you are so smart. You are so talented. You are undermining their performance on the next exam. That's how striking these results are. And again, they've been shown again and again in different populations of students and adults. Conversely, it's striking how powerful the effort labels can be at improving performance.

Conversely, and fortunately, the same is true for effort-based praise. So if before a kid or adult heads into a competition or exam or preparation for a competition and exam, you say, you know what? I know you to be a really dedicated worker. You really persist. You know how to do hard things. You really dig your heels when it gets hard and you overcome challenges. If you do that before that child or adult heads into challenge, they will perform better. And if after an exam or performance or practice, whatever the effort happens to be, you tell them, you really worked hard.

I love the way that even when you got kicked in the shin and you're limping along there and you're hurt, you continue to play. Or even when everyone else went to sleep and you continue to study, although by the way, I do encourage people to get enough sleep, there are times in which, let's face it, the person who stays up late is studying provided they get enough sleep, They're getting the extra hours in, right? I might've been that kid in college or tried to be that kid in college. If you reward effort after the effort, you also set the mind, the brain of that child or adult up to provide more effort to future endeavors.

So it's very clear. It doesn't matter if the timing of the praise comes before or after a given bout of effort or performance. You give identity praise before, performance diminishes. You give identity praise after, subsequent performance diminishes. You give effort praise before performance goes up. You give effort praise after performance goes up. So I know I sound a little bit like a broken record, but we hear so often about growth mindset, about giving the right form of praise, but it's not often that we are told when to give that praise. And the short answer of course is, doesn't matter.