Carol Dweck

A no-effort relationship is a doomed relationship, not a great relationship. It takes work to communicate accurately and it takes work to expose and resolve conflicting hopes and beliefs. It doesn’t mean there is no “they lived happily ever after,” but it’s more like “they worked happily ever after.”

it’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest.

Why did Ali appear to “go crazy” before each fight? Because, Torres says, he knew that a knockout punch is the one they don’t see coming. Ali said, “Liston had to believe that I was crazy. That I was capable of doing anything. He couldn’t see nothing to me at all but mouth and that’s all I wanted him to see

The Fastest Women on Earth
What about Wilma Rudolph, hailed as the fastest woman on earth after she won three gold medals for sprints and relay in the 1960 Rome Olympics? She was far from a physical wonder as a youngster. She was a premature baby, the twentieth of twenty-two children born to her parents, and a constantly sick child. At four years of age, she nearly died of a long struggle with double pneumonia, scarlet fever, and polio(!), emerging with a mostly paralyzed left leg. Doctors gave her little hope of ever using it again. For eight years, she vigorously pursued physical therapy, until at age twelve she shed her leg brace and began to walk normally

What exactly is a heptathlon? It’s a grueling two-day, seven-part event consisting of a 100-meter hurdles race, the high jump, the javelin throw, a 200-meter sprint, the long jump, the shotput, and an 800-meter run.

As much as our culture talks about individual effort and self-improvement, deep down, he argues, we revere the naturals. We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary. Why not? To me that is so much more amazing

Once, while Wooden was still a high school coach, a player was unhappy because he wasn’t included in the big games. The player, Eddie Pawelski, begged Wooden to give him a chance, and Wooden relented. “All right Eddie,” he said, “I’ll give you a chance. I’ll start you against Fort Wayne Central tomorrow night.”

n 1981, McEnroe bought a beautiful black Les Paul guitar. That week, he went to see Buddy Guy play at the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago. Instead of feeling inspired to take lessons or practice, McEnroe went home and smashed his guitar to pieces.
Here’s how failure motivated Sergio Garcia, another golden boy with mindset issues. Garcia had taken the golf world by storm with his great shots and his charming, boyish ways; he seemed like a younger Tiger. But when his performance took a dive, so did his charm. He fired caddie after caddie, blaming them for everything that went wrong. He once blamed his shoe when he slipped and missed a shot. To punish the shoe, he threw it and kicked it. Unfortunately, he almost hit an official. These are the ingenious remedies for failure in the fixed mindset.

No, because in the fixed mindset, you don’t take control of your abilities and your motivation. You look for your talent to carry you through, and when it doesn’t, well then, what else could you have done? You are not a work in progress, you’re a finished product. And finished products have to protect themselves, lament, and blame. Everything but take charge

championship. I just feel like I’d be such a failure…[I’d] feel like I’m regressing back and I’m going to end up like my dad: a nobody.”
Uh-oh, it’s the somebody–nobody syndrome. If I win, I’ll be somebody; if I lose I’ll be nobody