It’s also important to realize that even if people have a fixed mindset, they’re not always in that mindset. In fact, in many of our studies, we put people into a growth mindset. We tell them that an ability can be learned and that the task will give them a chance to do that. Or we have them read a scientific article that teaches them the growth mindset. The article describes people who did not have natural ability, but who developed exceptional skills. These experiences make our research participants into growth-minded thinkers, at least for the moment - and they act like growth-minded thinkers, too.

A remarkable thing I’ve learned from my research is that in the growth mindset, you don’t always need confidence.

What I mean is that even when you think you’re not good at something, you can still plunge into it wholeheartedly and stick to it. Actually, sometimes you plunge into something because you’re not good at it. This is a wonderful feature of the growth mindset. You don’t have to think you’re already great at something to want to do it and to enjoy doing it.

Meta-analytic studies suggest that the gender differences in narcissism have indeed been declining over the past few decades, largely because women have become more narcissistic, rather than men becoming less so. This change reaffirms the danger of encouraging women to lean in or act more like men to climb the corporate ladder. We are only inviting them to strengthen a problematic leadership model and augment rather than reduce current incompetence rates.

In a very different study with similar conclusions, my colleagues Bradley “Brad” Staats and Francesca Gino—then professors at the University of North Carolina—studied how seventy-one surgeons learned from failure versus success on a total of 6,516 cardiac surgeries in ten years. The surgeons learned more from their own successes than from their own failures, but learned more from others’ failures than from others’ successes. This effect—again ego protecting—was less pronounced if a surgeon had a history of personal success. Failures presumably stung less sharply with that cushion of prior success.

Our brains, tuned for novelty and danger, catch fire when stimulated by the wonders of new technology and the stresses of the workplace. Compared to those two things, the subtle currents of our positive relationships, so important to our well-being, are likely to be overshadowed. If our relationships—both at work and at home—are going to thrive in this new work environment, we have to elevate and care for them. We are the only ones who can. If we don’t, and if the Harvard Study still exists in eighty years, then when today’s youngest generation reaches their 80s and the interviewers ask if there was anything they regret about their lives, they might look back, as some of our First Generation participants did in their comments quoted earlier in this chapter, and realize that something crucial has been lost.