Being Good vs. Getting Better — What the Super Bowl Says About Mindsets

All the discussion about Super Bowl this week has me thinking about a key finding in motivational psychology: If you want to succeed at something, you should focus on getting better rather than on being good. It’s a little counterintuitive. Isn’t everyone's ultimate goal to be good? Or even great? That’s certainly what football players hope they’ll be when they step onto the field. But focusing solely on the end result leads people and organizations to perform worse and quit earlier when faced with extremely challenging tasks than those who focus on the process of improving.

Motivational psychology has
a few lessons for this guy

Focusing solely on the end result is evidence of something Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls a "fixed mindset." This is the belief that the reason you are going to succeed is because of your innate talents and abilities. (Think, for example, of a football team that believes it will win because it’s bigger, stronger, and better than the opposition.) But when people with a fixed mindset encounter truly major road blocks, or begin to fail, they don’t know what to do. They often give up altogether. After all, if you think you’re not smart enough or strong enough to do something, there’s no point in continuing to try.

Contrast a fixed mindset with people and organizations that have what Dweck calls a "growth mindset." They believe that talents and abilities are malleable and can be improved over time. When doing work, people with a growth mindset focus more on the process of getting better than on the end result. They are likely to look at each challenge as an opportunity to improve. They are likely to look at each failure as something they can learn from for the next time. Another motivational psychologist, Heidi Grant Halvorson, has conducted experiments showing that people can be taught to have a growth mindset. And those who have it are less likely than their fixed mindset brethren to get stymied by tough tasks. They persevere. Over time, they can learn to be gritty and resilient.

How does this relate to football? Good question. Maybe you can guess where I’m going with this.

Living in New England—and with the Super Bowl nearly upon us—I know much more about the Patriots than the Giants. The Patriots are dominated by their coach, Bill Belichick, and players learn quickly to align themselves with Belichick’s way of doing things or they’re shown the door. During the 2011 season, Belichick jettisoned experienced veterans and former pro-bowlers, giving their jobs to castoffs, unknowns, and free agents. (Other times, he gave no-names starting jobs due to injuries.) These changes have been particularly common on the defensive side of the ball. During the regular 2011 season, the defensive results were pretty clear: They were terrible. Much of the time, the no-names performed like no-names. The Patriots’ regular season defense was second to worst in the entire league in terms of yards allowed. In fact, the team nearly set an all-time NFL record for passing yards allowed. During the regular season, they were basically bailed out by their high-powered offense, led by quarterback Tom Brady.

It’s only been during the playoffs that the defense started to play better. When Brady, in his own words, sucked in the AFC championship game against the Ravens, it was actually the defense that bailed out the offense. One Patriots player in particular, a definite no-name, Sterling Moore, got beaten for a touchdown earlier in the game. But at the end, with the Ravens threatening take the lead, Moore made two consecutive game-turning plays, one of them knocking the ball out of the hands of a receiver who would have scored the winning touchdown.

Have the Patriots
been reading this book?

The week before the Super Bowl, Belichick was asked to characterize his team. He definitely didn’t talk about their talent, he just said he liked them because of their consistency:

They come to work every day and they're ready to work....I respect their consistency, their mental toughness, their physical toughness and their ability to put things behind them and move ahead to the next challenge.

Daily, weekly or after a bad play and moving on to the next play....They get over it, they move on to the next thing, try to make the next thing better and don't get bogged down by something that didn't go well.

That’s definitely a growth mindset kind of answer. And it seems like he’s brainwashed the whole team to think the same way. I could cite dozens of quotes from different players during the year talking about consistent, steady improvement. (Honestly, they begin to sound like they’re preprogrammed robots.) Here’s just one sleep-inducing quote from their injured tight end, Rob Gronkowski, talking to a press mob the Tuesday before Super Bowl.

The only thing I’m worried about is Tuesday, which is today, to get better today. Keep on improving today. Keep on getting stronger today, keep on progressing today. Just keep on moving forward, going in a positive direction. That’s what counts.

While you could just say Gronkowski (who is only 22 years old) is spouting the company line, I think the truth is Belichick has taught this particular team to have a growth mindset. It makes them awfully boring to interview. But I doubt they would have gotten this far otherwise.