But will you ever actually be able to achieve success? What you believe about your own ability to succeed may be your answer.
Enter Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University.
In her 2006 book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she wrote that people are on a continuum based on their beliefs about where their ability to succeed comes from. Some people believe that success is innate. Those people have what she called a fixed mindset. Other people believe that success is based on hard work, learning, and their persistence. According to Dweck, those people have a growth mindset.
She concluded that, although people may not be consciously aware of which mindset they hold, it is apparent in their actions — especially when they fail. People with a fixed mindset hate failure because they see it as an indicator of their own inabilities. People with a growth mindset aren’t afraid to fail, because they believe that they can improve and learn from failure.
Wikipedia sites an interview she did in 2012, Dweck defined fixed and growth mindsets like this:
In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.
Dweck’s work was based on education, but we can really apply it to success in general and what you believe about your own ability to achieve it. There are people on one end of the continuum who believe the same things about success in business, in marriage, and in anything else you can think of.
They believe that their own success is out of their hands. They think that the set of skills that they were born with — or have in that particular moment — are all they’ll ever have. Taking risks in pursuing what they want in life can be damn near impossible because, for them, failure is an indicator that they are unintelligent, incapable, and unworthy.
Then there are those of us on the other end of the continuum who believe that we are able to learn new skills and to develop our talents. Taking risks, to us, is part of the process of growth, because we understand that each time we fail, we learn a new lesson and build on that experience.
Carol Dweck believes that a growth mindset will allow you to live life with less stress and more success, and I agree. Failure is inevitable in life, no matter what. When you’re able to accept it as part of the human experience, it becomes less traumatizing and stressful.
I would also add that a growth mindset leads to a happier life. That isn’t based on any scientific research that I’ve done, but it is based on personal experience.