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belief that everyone is born with only a certain amount of intelligence and a certain amount of talent. If invited on a journey to creative confidence, people with a fixed mindset will prefer to stay behind in their comfort zone, afraid that the limits of their capabilities will be revealed to others.

      Dweck explored the self-limiting nature of a fixed mindset in studying the behavior of freshman students at the University of Hong Kong. Since all classes and exams at the university are in English, incoming students who struggle with the English language are at a distinct disadvantage. After assessing the students’ language skills and their mindset, Dweck asked the incoming students a question: “If the faculty offered a course for students who need to improve their English skills, would you take it?” Their answers revealed the power of mindset. “Students with the growth mindset said an emphatic yes. But those with the fixed mindset were not very interested.” In other words, those under the influence of a fixed mindset were willing to sabotage their long-term chances for success rather than expose a potential weakness. If they let the same logic guide their choices throughout life, it’s easy to understand how their perception of their own abilities as permanently limited can become a self-fulfilling hypothesis.

      A growth mindset, on the other hand, is a passport to new adventures.

      When you open your mind to the possibility that your capabilities are unlimited and unknown, you already have your running shoes on and are ready to race forward.

      In reality, we all have a little of both mindsets. Sometimes the fixed mindset whispers in one ear: “We’ve never been good at anything creative, so why embarrass ourselves now?” And the growth mindset whispers in the other ear: “Effort is the path to mastery, so let’s at least give this a try.” The question is, which voice are you going to listen to?

       MAKE YOUR DENT IN THE UNIVERSE

      With creative confidence comes the desire to proactively guide the course of your life, or your organization, rather than be carried along on the prevailing winds. Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, once told us that what stuck out to him about designers is that they always act with intention. While others may unconsciously go with the default option, design thinkers make everything a conscious and original choice: from how they arrange their bookshelf to how they present their work. When they look around the world, they see opportunities to do things better and have a desire to change them. Once you start creating things, whether it’s laying out a new garden or starting a new company or writing a new piece of code, you start to realize that everything has that intention behind it. Everything in modern society is the result of a collection of decisions made by someone. Why shouldn’t that someone be you?

      When you unleash your creative confidence, you start to see new ways to improve on the status quo—from how you throw a dinner party to how you run a meeting. And once you become aware of those opportunities, you have to start seizing them.

      To us, that focused “intentionality” was one of Steve Jobs’s defining characteristics. David met Steve back in 1980 when we designed the first Apple mouse. They became friends during a dozen subsequent projects for Steve’s ventures at Apple, NeXT, and Pixar. Steve never took the path of least resistance. He never accepted the world “as is.” He did everything with intentionality. No detail was too small to escape his attention. He also pushed us beyond what we thought we could do—we experienced his “reality distortion field” firsthand. He just kept raising the bar, even when it seemed unreasonable. But we would try, and we would get three-quarters of the way there, which was always farther than we would have gotten by ourselves.

      Once you start creating things, you realize that everything has intention behind it.

      After Steve was forced out of Apple and was planning the startup that would become NeXT Computer, he stopped by David’s office one day to talk about his vision for the new machine. Always seeking Zen simplicity, Steve asked David, “What’s the simplest three-dimensional shape in the world?” David was sure that it was a sphere. But that didn’t matter, because the answer Steve was looking for was a cube. And so began our project of helping Steve with the engineering design of his cube-shaped NeXT computer.

      During that intense project, Steve often called David at home in the middle of the night (in the era before e-mail and texting) to insist that we make some change. What kind of pressing issue couldn’t wait until morning? One night, the call was about whether the plating on some screw on the inside of the cast magnesium cube should be cadmium or nickel. David’s response was something like “Jeez, Steve, it’s on the inside of the box.” But Steve still cared—and we of course changed it. We don’t know if any NeXT customer ever cracked open the machine and saw those perfectly plated fasteners, but Steve left no such details to chance.

      Steve had a deep sense of creative confidence. He believed—he knew—that you can achieve audacious goals if you have the courage and perseverance to pursue them. He was famous for his exhortation to “make a dent in the universe,” which he expressed this way in a 1994 interview:

      The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will … pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it, that’s maybe the most important thing … Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

      Steve’s message was that we all have the ability to change the world. That was certainly true of Steve, a visionary who impacted so many people’s lives and urged us all to “Think Different.”

      From Doug Dietz to Steve Jobs, all of the creatively confident people we’ve crossed paths with have found a way to apply extraordinary energy and exert remarkable influence. And we know that as you gain creative confidence going forward, you will have the chance to make your own dent in the universe. Start with a growth mindset, the deep-seated belief that your true potential is still unknown. That you are not limited to only what you have been able to do before. In subsequent chapters we’ll offer practical tools that will help you to acquire new skills, find new inspiration, and unleash more of your creative capacities. To do so, you will need to act, and to experience your own creativity firsthand. But to act, most of us must first overcome the fears that have blocked our creativity in the past.

      (photo/illustration credit 2.1)

      CHAPTER 2

       DARE

      

       FROM FEAR TO COURAGE

      Picture a boa constrictor, draped casually around a man’s neck. In the next room, a woman in a hockey mask and leather gloves stands warily behind a one-way mirror, watching them. Her heart is pounding. She has been terrified of snakes for as long as she can remember. Gardening and hiking have been out of the question, lest a garter snake slither across her path.

      Yet here she is, about to walk into the next room and touch the snake of her nightmares.

      How does she do it? How does she move from fear to courage?

      The mastermind behind her phobia cure—leading the way for thousands more like her—is psychologist Albert Bandura. A Stanford researcher and professor, he has had a profound impact on the world of social learning and has been called the greatest living psychologist. Only Sigmund Freud, B. F. Skinner, and Jean Piaget ranked higher on a published list of eminent twentieth-century psychologists.

      Bandura, now a professor emeritus at age eighty-seven, still works from his office at Stanford.

      One day we got to talking about how to cure snake phobias. Basically

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