Toward a Growth Mindset

Last week I gave a chapel talk in Cade that stemmed from a long conversation where I was asked this difficult question: “what are you most proud of in your life?” This is an attempt to distill that chapel talk down to its most important points and maybe give some insight into what I think the real superpower of ESA is.

I grew up in a good school and was known as a “smart, nice kid,” a lot like our students right here at ESA. But if you had asked me “what is smart?” I would have had an answer much like Calvin from this classic Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. Smart was something you were or you weren’t. A lot of us growing up in the 1970s and 80s probably had similar ideas. Then some 25 years after I graduated high school, Dr. Carol Dweck published her book, Mindset (2006). In it she gives a name to the Calvin-way of thinking (fixed mindset) and its opposite (growth mindset). The difference can be boiled down to thinking that ability determines everything (fixed) or effort and attitude determine everything (growth). In reality, we are all a complicated mixture of both of these, but back then, I largely had a fixed mindset. Which worked great for me—I was almost never stressed. I did the things that were easy and avoided the things that were difficult, had way too much confidence and flew beneath the radar. In college that began to change as I learned some difficult lessons about work ethic, and graduate school moved the needle even further for me. However, it is the very end of my Ph.D. program that I want to highlight.

I had a fantastic research topic (on the chocolate tree), spent lots of time in Puerto Rico on a USDA cacao plantation and lots of time in the lab quantifying a hormonal response, got to my dissertation defense and my committee didn’t pass me. Or to say that less passively, I failed my dissertation defense, which was an epic fail, especially for a person still struggling with a fixed mindset. That could have been the end of the story. I could be Mr. Baker to all of our students. It’s actually not that uncommon for people who start a Ph.D. to not finish. There’s even an acronym for it—ABD, all but dissertation.

That brings me back to the question, “what are you most proud of in your life?” Well, my answer is that in that horrible moment I didn’t fold, that I didn’t run from the difficult situation, that I made a significant shift in my perspective to a growth mindset 10 years before Carol Dweck even wrote the book. And it happened because two things were in place. First was the truthful and difficult feedback that my committee gave me (you didn’t pass, it wasn’t good enough). And the other equally important part was the follow-up support that I received from my major professor, Karl Hasenstein. He is awesome—brilliant, creative and detailed. He pushed me to do additional research that summer; I added another chapter to my dissertation which made it much better, then successfully defended and graduated in December of that year. This was a huge turning point in my life—unfortunately, we can usually only understand the magnitude of these events by looking back at them. Looking back, if there had been only one of those two things, the brutally honest feedback without the support, or the support without the feedback, my perspective would not have changed. And that is what I think the secret superpower of this place (ESA) is. When alumni tell me what they most appreciate about ESA, there are two things that consistently come up. First is the close relationships with their teachers, how they were treated like adults by the adults in the community, respected, trusted and held accountable. The second thing they almost always say is something about how well ESA prepared them for college and for life. My contention is that those two things cannot be separated. Being in a loving and supportive community where you are treated with respect and held accountable to high standards—the combination of those two powerful forces—is what gives ESA the ability to move people from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. This is what prepares students for college and for life and is no easy feat. It requires both the support system and the guts to give and accept the authentic feedback necessary to grow. It’s a pretty rare combination and something that we must always nurture. Areté!