What Carol found is that the children in the success only program gave up just as easily after encountering very difficult problems as they had before training.  In sharp contrast, children in the attribution retraining program tried harder after encountering difficulty.  Is seems as though they'd learned to interpret failure as a cue to try harder rather than as confirmation that they lacked the ability to succeed.

I like to think of a growth mindset this way:  Some of us believe, deep down, that people really can change.  These growth-oriented people assume that it's possible, for example, to get smarter if you're given the right opportunities and support and if you try hard enough and if you believe you can do it.  Conversely, some people think you can learn skills, like how to ride a bike or do a sales pitch, but your capacity to learn skills - your talent - can't be trained.  The problem with holding the latter fixed-mindset view - and many people who consider themselves talented do - is that no road is without bumps. Eventually, you're going to hit one.  At that point, having a fixed mindset becomes a tremendous liability.  This is when a C-, a rejection letter, a disappointing progress review at work, or any other setback can derail you.  With a fixed mindset, you're likely to interpret these setbacks as evidence that, after all, you don't have "the right stuff" - you're not good enough. With a growth mindset, you believe you can learn to do better.  

...I also worry about people who cruise though life, friction-free, for a long, long time before encountering their first real failure.  They have so little practice falling and getting up again...

I see a lot of invisibly vulnerable high-achievers stumble in young adulthood and struggle to get up again.  I call them the "fragile perfects."

Interest is one source of passion.  Purpose - the intention to contribute to the well-being of others - is another.  The mature passions of gritty people depend on both.

When I talk to grit paragons, and they tell me that what they're pursuing has purpose, they mean something much deeper than mere intention.  They're not just goal-oriented; the nature of their goals is special.

When I probe, asking, "Can you tell me more?  What do you mean?"  there sometimes follows an earnest stumbling struggle to put how they feel into words.  But always - always - those next sentences mention other people.  Sometimes it's very particular ("my children," "my clients," "my students") and sometimes quite abstract ("this country," "the sport," "science," "society").  However they say it, the message is the same:  the long days and evenings of toil, the setbacks and disappointments and struggle, the sacrifice - all this is worth it because, ultimately, their efforts pay dividends to other people.

Consider the parable of the bricklayers:

Three bricklayers are asked:  "What are you doing?"

The first says, "I am laying bricks."

The second says, "I am building a church [building]."

And the third says, "I am building a house of God."

​The first bricklayer has a job.  The second has a career.  The third has a calling.

In other words, a bricklayer who one day says, "I am laying bricks" might at some point become the bricklayer who recognizes "I am building the house of God."

First of all, childhood is generall far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up... Second, interests are not discovered through introspection... Third, what follows the initial discrovery of an interest is a much lengthier and increasingly proactive period of interest development... Finally, interests thrive when there is a crew of encouraging supporters, including parents, teachers, coaches, and peers...

Is it "a drag" that passions don't come to us all at once, as epiphanies, without the need to actively develop them?  Maybe. But the reality is that our early interests are fragile, vaguely defined, and in need of energetic, years-long cultivation and refinement.

First, they set a stretch goal, zeroing in on just one narrow aspect of their overall performance.  Rather than focus on what they already do well, experts strive to improve specific weaknesses.  They intentionally seek out challenges they can't yet meet.

Then, with undivided attention and great effort, experts strive to reach their stretch goal.  Interestingly, many choose to do so while nobody's watching.

As soon as possible, experts hungrily seek feedback on how they did.  Necessarily, much of that feedback is negative.  This means that experts are more interested in what they did wrong - so they can fix it - than what they did right​.  The active processing of this feedback is essential as its immediacy.

I'm happy to see some of that coming to a true balance now with common sense.  With all that has been written about Growth Mindset, we now see that the identification and correction of mistakes is something to be celebrated. In our classroom, we see the identification of a mistake to be a stepping stone to success.  Students who find and fix failures are held up as positive examples to the rest of the class.  One of the things I lost in the tornado, five years ago, was a poster I picked up from Cape Kennedy.  The poster quoted the Apollo 13 mission:  "Mistakes are not an option."  I loved the sentiment of that poster and what it meant for getting our astronauts back home, but it really had no place on the wall of my classroom. Then experts do it all over again, and again, and again.  Until they have finally mastered what they set out to do.  Until what was a struggle before is now fluent and flawless.  Until conscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence.

And...then what?  What follows mastery of a stretch goal?

Then experts start alll over again with a new stretch goal.

One by one, these subtle refinements add up to dazzling mastery.

Angela Duckworth writes about interest in her book, Grit:  the Power of Passion and Perseverance: First, research shows that people are enormously more satisfied with their jobs when they do something that fits their personal interests.  This is the conclusion of a meta-analysis that aggregated data from almost a hundred different studies that collectively included working adults in just about every conceivable profession...What's more, people whose jobs match their personal interests are, in general, happier with their lives as a whole.

Second, people perform better at work when what they do interests them.  This is the conclusion of another meta-analysis of sixty studies conducted over the past sixty years.

A related problem, Barry says, is the mythology that falling in love with a career should be sudden and swift:  "There are a lot of things where the subtleties and exhilerations come with sticking with it for a while, getting elbow-deep into something.  A lot of things seems uninteresting and superficial until you start doing them and, after a while, you realize that there are som many facets you didn't know at the start, and you never can fully solve the problem, or fully understand it, or what have you.  Well, that requires that you stick with it."

A seventh grader is just beginning to figure out her general likes and dislikes.