And I know we have a lot of people

on the live stream and a lot more people

still who can't make either and looking forward

to seeing this up on YouTube which will be

the case in the next few days.

I'm really excited to introduce Professor Carol

Dweck from Stanford University.

She's the Lewis and Virginia Eaton professor of psychology.

She is best known for her work on mindsets

that people use to guide their behavior.

She earned a BA in psychology from Columbia University

and then a Ph.D. In psychology from Yale.

She's the author of a bestselling book, "Mindset:

The New Psychology of Success."

And despite traffic, a bunch of books

arrived at the back of the room, which

you can purchase afterwards.

I certainly encourage you to do so.

There's my well-thumbed copy.

It's sold over a million copies, so there

are many of your friends out there

who have enjoyed this work.

She's a frequent speaker, has spoken on the TED stage

multiple times, at the United Nations, the White House,

among other prestigious organizations.

Her work has won so many awards that if I named them all

that would be the entire talk.

So I'm not going to do that.

And now that I've incredibly boosted her ego,

I'd like to bring up Professor Dweck.

[APPLAUSE]

All right, before we get into mindsets,

I want you to share what we've learned from what is now

the widely-discredited theory of self esteem and the self esteem

movement.

CAROL DWECK: OK.

In the 1990s the self esteem movement took over the world.

We were told to tell everyone how

fabulous, brilliant, talented, special they were all the time.

This was going to motivate them and boost their achievement.

Instead, as you said, it was a complete disaster.

It led to the acceptance of mediocrity.

It didn't challenge people to fulfill their potential.

And our research showed telling people they're smart

actually backfires.

It makes them afraid of challenges,

it makes them fold in the face of obstacles,

because they're worried, oh, does this not look smart?

Am I not smart?

The whole currency is built around smart.

MALE SPEAKER: So what triggered your interest

in going deeper and researching how people

are motivated and learn, and how did that lead

to your definition of mindsets?

CAROL DWECK: I was always interested

in why some people wilted in the face of failure,

shied away from challenges, when people

who are no more talented or able were embracing challenges

and thriving in the face of failure.

Ultimately this led to our discovery of the mindsets.

And what we found was that some people believe their talents

and abilities are just these fixed traits-- you have

a certain amount and that's it.

But other people believe talents and abilities

can be developed through hard work, good strategies,

good mentoring from others.

Through years of work, we found that having a fixed mindset led

you to be afraid of challenges that might unmask

your deficiencies, made you withdraw

in the face of difficulty because you felt stupid.

You didn't want to feel stupid.

You didn't want other people to think you're stupid.

Whereas having this growth mindset,

the idea that your abilities could be developed,

made you think, why waste my time

looking smart when I could be getting smarter?

And I do that through taking on challenges.

I do that through seeing them through.

Now granted, that doesn't mean everyone's

the same, that they don't different talents

and abilities.

It just means everyone can grow.

MALE SPEAKER: And sort of building on that, you really

can't watch a sports broadcast or the TV

show America's Got Talent, who has talent in the name,

without hearing how talented that player is.

Or seeing someone perform the ballet

and say she has tremendous talent.

What role, if any, does innate talent play?

CAROL DWECK: Well, they do have talent now,

when we're watching them, but I think

it's created a nation that thinks

when they see someone displaying talent

or incredible performance, they were born that way.

And they've had this inevitable rise to great success.

I teach a freshman seminar at Stanford every year.

And I have my students do an assignment

where they do research on their hero,

and almost invariably they think that hero just

catapulted to success because of this amazing inborn talent.

But every single time they find that the hero

put in inordinate amounts of work, met with obstacles,

and really powered through them.

So I don't rule out the idea of the fact

that some people are born with passions and talents

and build those, but many people who never achieve anything

are also born with talents and passions

that they don't see through.

And what's there, what we come with,

that's the raw material that you've got to develop.

Michael Jordan, it turns out, wasn't particularly talented

until he went at it so ferociously, more ferociously

than anyone else.

MALE SPEAKER: Over lunch, we had an interesting discussion

with part of the team here about growth mindset, fixed mindset,

it's a great simplified way to think of it.

Yet people can have both, and it's more of the spectrum.

Talk a little bit more about how you can have both mindset.

CAROL DWECK: Yes, we're all a mixture.

And it's true that you could have

a fixed mindset in one area and a growth mindset another area.

And it's true that it's a spectrum, not a dichotomy.

But it's a really dynamic.

Even in a given area, sometimes you're in a fixed mindset.

You think, oh, my ability to fix, I have to prove them,

I have to look smart, I can't show that I'm working too hard.

People might not think I'm so smart.

And other times we could be more in a growth mindset.

So what we have to start doing is looking for what triggers

the-- because the fixed mindset holds us back,

we have to start looking for what triggers it in all of us,

even me.

And what happens when you're facing a big challenge?

Do you worry about, well, I'm going to unmask deficiencies.

What happens when there's a setback?

Do you think maybe I'm not good at this?

What happens when you're receiving criticism?

Do you get angry and defensive?

What happens when you see someone

who's better than you in what you're good at?

Do you feel jealous and resentful,

or do you feel inspired?

Maybe I can learn from that person.

Maybe they can mentor me.

So watch out at these trigger moments.

See how you're feeling.

And see if you can get yourself into more of a growth mindset.

MALE SPEAKER: So I actually I have

two children, two daughters, college age

and high school age.

I read your book after my older daughter

was approaching high school, but my younger daughter benefited

from it to the point right where I

banned the two S-words in our house-- smart and stupid.

I never used the latter, but I was very

guilty of using the former.

Raise your hands if you told a friend, or a child,

or a loved one how smart they are.

Words are really powerful is one thing I took away

from your book.

Talk about trigger words like that: smart, stupid,

and how those can work against your best intentions.

CAROL DWECK: Yes.

When you call someone smart, you put them in a box.

Or, really, you are kind of putting them on a pedestal.

And their life becomes organized around deserving the pedestal,

staying on the pedestal.

And you can only do that by narrowing your life

to include only things you sure you're

good at, only things you're sure you can succeed at.

When we tell someone, you did that so quickly, I'm

so impressed, they hear if I didn't do it quickly,

you wouldn't be impressed.

A lot of things take a long time.

Or you got an A without working, then they think,

oh, if I work you're not going to think I'm smart at math,

say.

And so you're just very subtly conveying these ideas

that smart people don't make mistakes,

smart people don't have to work hard,

the most important thing in the world

is to be smart and look smart at all times.

And then people start narrowing their world

so they can succeed within that fixed mindset.

MALE SPEAKER: So one thing at Google

that we're obsessed with this is proving things through data.

And I think one of the compelling arguments

your book made was around the research you did with children

in school environments.

So talk about some of that early research

and how it's evolved to reinforce that there's

weight behind this concept.

CAROL DWECK: Yes, we've done research, now,

with tens of thousands of students.

First, finding that those who naturally have a growth mindset

do better.

We've traced them over challenging-- especially

in challenging courses, like pre-Med organic chemistry;

or challenging transitions, seventh grade, high school,

college transitions.

We've studied all of those.

Recently we studied all of the 10th grade students

in the country of Chile, 170,000.

And we found that at every level of family income,

those who believe they could develop their intelligence

perform substantially higher on achievement tests than those

who thought they couldn't.

And the most striking was that among the poorest kids,

those who had a growth mindset were

performing at the level of much wealthier kids.

But importantly, because those are correlations,

we've done a number of studies where we have taught

students a growth mindset.

The ideas that every time they do a really hard task

and stick to it, the neurons in their brain

form new connections and they can get smarter.

And then we show them how to put that into practice.

We have found that students who learn

this fare better across challenging

courses and transitions.

We just showed that in a study of women in STEM classes

at universities around the country.

But we shown that at the transition

to college, transition to high school, and so forth.

So teaching a growth mindset leads

kids to take on challenges, stick to them, and improve.

MALE SPEAKER: So in our current education culture,

and then I want to switch to in the work environment,

there's such an obsession with standardized testing

and those tests having a real material

impact on teachers' advancement and even,

in some cases, their income.

How do school systems battle on that front and at the same time

tackle growth mindset, which is more about working hard

in the process than the actual end results.

CAROL DWECK: Yes.

It's such an interesting story, because standardized tests were

brought in for good reason.

There are students in certain parts of the country

and in certain schools who were performing so poorly.

And nobody knew and nobody cared.

And it was an attempt to say let's not cheat kids out

of a good education.

But we all know the unintended consequences.