Fixed Or Grown? How Your Mindset About Intelligence Determines Your Success

Our Better Health

BY BRIANNA WIEST

Of all the beliefs we carry about ourselves, Carol Dweck argues there is one that stands out among the rest. After 20 years of research, she concluded that the way we approach the acquisition of intelligence actually carves out whether or not we’ll be successful. There are two particular mindsets people have, “incremental” or “entity.” Incremental is the belief that intelligence and skill can be grown and developed; entity is the belief that intelligence and skill is fixed, and you either have it or you don’t.

In the “fixed mindset,” our character, intelligence and creative abilities are static givens. They cannot change or evolve at all, and success is how the world validates that inherent intelligence, or how well it measures up against the world’s fixed standard. In this mindset, people strive for an image and idea of success at any cost, as they belief that failure…

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