Carol S. Dweck

Children love this idea that their brain is like a muscle that gets stronger as they use it.

People often confuse a growth mindset with being flexible or open-minded or with having a positive outlook - qualities they believe they've simply always had. My colleagues and I call this a false growth mindset.

I had the great good fortune of getting my Ph.D. in the very first year that universities were actively seeking women faculty. The government was putting pressure on universities to hire more women.

Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. You could have a predominant growth mindset in an area, but there can still be things that trigger you into a fixed mindset trait.

One very common thing is that often very brilliant children stop working because they're praised so often that it's what they want to live as - brilliant - not as someone who ever makes mistakes. It really stunts their motivation.

We found that process praise predicted the child's mindset and desire for challenge five years later.

You don't know what your abilities are until you make a full commitment to developing them.

Most experts and great leaders agree that leaders are made, not born, and that they are made through their own drive for learning and self-improvement.

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.

What can I learn from this? What will I do next time I'm in this situation?

What did you try hard at today?

Exceptional people convert life's setbacks into future successes.

It is not always people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest.

Failure is information-we label it failure, but it's more like, 'This didn't work, I'm a problem solver, and I'll try something else.'

Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance.

More and more research is suggesting that, far from being simply encoded in the genes, much of personality is a flexible and dynamic thing that changes over the life span and is shaped by experience.

I don’t mind losing as long as I see improvement or I feel I’ve done as well as I possibly could.