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LIE NO. 1: INTELLIGENCE IS FIXED
On the surface, it looked like Rae was a pretty positive person—she ran her own business, she had a thriving social network, and she loved being around people with big ideas who could imagine possibilities that most of us wouldn’t dream of.
When Rae had a daughter, she realized that perhaps she wasn’t as positive as she thought she was. A different kind of mindset started to show up in very subtle ways, as these things do. First it was in the way she reacted to some of the things her little girl did. Rae tended to think that
“that’s just the way she is,” instead of believing that she could have an effect on the way her daughter behaved. When her partner tried to teach their daughter new things, Rae noticed she felt a subtle discomfort, as if she wanted to protect her daughter from disappointment if she wasn’t able to learn what she was being taught. She became aware of the constant thought that her daughter was “too young to learn that.”
One day, her partner looked at her and said, “Do you think she can’t learn, that she’s never going to improve from where she is?” The answer was of course not—she loved her daughter, and the little girl was bright and curious and learning something new every day. The opposite was obviously true . . . and yet, Rae was aware that there was some belief buried deep inside her that whispered, “No, she is the way she is.” Rae was struggling with a fixed mindset about her daughter’s intelligence.
These beliefs are incredibly subtle. Few of us consciously think about our restrictions or the restrictions we believe others have. But it leaks out in places that deeply affect our happiness—in our work, in our home life, and with our children. If we believe that it’s not possible to improve, then in reality it won’t be possible to improve. It’s extremely difficult to accomplish something when you don’t believe it can be done in the first place.
Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, describes the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset:

In a fixed mindset, students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset, students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.¹

Like Rae, most of us don’t think about whether we have a fixed or a growth mindset. Most of us have carried on thinking in the same patterns that our family did, without even knowing it. As subtle as this is, the adoption of one or the other deeply affects the way we approach life. With

the fixed mindset, things are the way they are—we are powerless to change them. With the growth mindset, we have the ability to improve anything.
If Rae thinks, even on a very subtle level, that her daughter can’t improve or grow, what does she do instead of teaching her? Probably a number of things—placating, giving time-outs, diverting attention. All of those work to alleviate the stress of the moment, but they don’t contribute to her child’s growth. In the same way, if as adults we believe that we don’t have the capacity to learn, what do we do instead of taking the responsibility to teach ourselves what we want or need to know? We tell ourselves it isn’t necessary, we make excuses, we blame other people or circumstances, and then we distract ourselves with things that make us feel good.
The genesis of this limiting belief is likely one that you either don’t remember or that came from your early years. And it has a deep effect on the way you view intelligence and your capacity to learn. IQ scores and testing were created in the early 1900s to better assess which students would experience the most difficulty in school. French psychologist Alfred Binet and his student Theodore Simon were some of the first scientists to come up with a test that measured intelligence after they were commissioned to do so for the French government.² They were able to devise a test that took into consideration age as it related to competency. They were also lauded for the fact that the test was easily adaptable to other languages and cultures.³
More than 100 years later, it’s still hotly debated whether these tests have the ability to measure intelligence, which is the ability to acquire and assimilate knowledge and information. Interestingly, Binet himself was not happy with the way his test was used because it didn’t measure creativity or emotional intelligence.⁴ Furthermore, our cultural understanding of these tests means we give these scores undue weight. We tend to think of IQ scores as a fixed reflection of our intelligence, but this isn’t the case. The IQ test actually measures current academic capabilities, not innate intelligence.⁵ To this day, IQ tests still don’t measure creativity or practical intelligence (which you can think of as “street smarts”), and they certainly don’t measure emotional intelligence⁶—all three of which are increasingly more important in the workplace and in life.
The important distinction here is to remember the difference between test scores and your ability to learn. “Those who claim that IQ is fixed for life
are in fact referring to our IQ test scores, which are relatively stable—not to our intelligence levels, which are constantly increasing,” says Bryan Roche of the National University of Ireland.⁷
David Shenk furthers this idea in his book, The Genius in All of Us. He writes that everyone has the potential for genius, or at the very least, greatness. But the reason we prefer to believe that we’re either a genius or we’re not, or that we’re either talented or not, is because it relieves us from the responsibility of taking control of our own life. “A belief in inborn gifts and limits is much gentler on the psyche: The reason you aren’t a great opera singer is because you can’t be one. That’s simply the way you were wired. Thinking of talent as innate makes our world more manageable, more comfortable. It relieves a person of the burden of expectation.”⁸
Your intelligence is not only malleable but dependent on your ability to cultivate a growth mindset. Start looking at your attitude. Listen to the way you talk; a fixed mindset usually shows up in your language. Maybe you say to yourself, “I’m not good at reading.” This kind of statement implies that you believe this is a fixed situation and that your skills can’t be improved. Instead, try saying something like “This is something I’m not good at yet.” This shift in language can be applied to anything you want to improve.
Test scores do not determine your future. They don’t determine what you’re capable of learning and accomplishing. Take your education into your own hands.
Here’s the truth: It’s not how smart you are; it’s how you are smart. There are multiple types of intelligence (more on this later). Like so many things, intelligence is a combination of attitudes and actions, and is dependent on context.