Why it was said

Carol Dweck writes this in the chapter that lays out the fixed and growth mindsets, on what each does to a person's relationship with their own identity.

What it actually means

The fixed mindset wants to be smart, talented, good, and defends the label against every test. The growth mindset wants to become those things and treats every test as information. Dweck's four words compress the whole difference: a life spent proving a fixed quality is anxious and small, and a life spent developing one is neither. The sentence is a choice of verb, and the verb is the mindset.

How to use it

1. 1Catch yourself defending a label, 'I'm just not a numbers person', and rewrite it in the becoming tense: 'I'm not good at this yet.'
2. 2After a setback, ask what it taught rather than what it proved.