Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (14 page)

Recent research has found no consistent findings pointing to one racial or ethnic group being more hopeful than any other. No single group of people can claim it as theirs and theirs alone. So a wealthy African-American business owner and a middle-class Hispanic college student and a poor laborer of any race or ethnicity have equal chances of being hopeful.
Yet hope is not left to chance.
What makes the difference in whether someone’s hope is turned on or left inert? It depends on your mindset.

When we’re in the sweet spot of hope, we know that our present does not determine our future. In the sweet spot we are able to evaluate our present circumstances, abilities, and resources realistically, without getting discouraged if they still need to be built up. We listen to our desires and dreams because they tell us who we are, and we notice innate talents that others might miss. (Remember, some class clowns do grow up to star on
Saturday Night Live
.) We also devote time and effort to the skills we need to develop our talents. In the sweet spot, we act as if the life script we are handed at birth can be edited and improved.

Hope is not a psychological silver spoon or an automatic by-product of IQ. Entitlement and passivity are hope killers. Our energy comes from excitement about what’s next and from the supporters we recruit.

Imagine you’re back in sixth grade, and your teacher has seated all the children in the classroom in order of their IQ. She makes it clear that for her, intelligence is the final word on character and potential. What’s more, the children who have the highest IQs are the only ones who get to wash the blackboard or carry the flag during assembly. How would this affect your performance in her class? In the long term would it make you more or less hopeful?

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck had that sixth-grade teacher. The experience sparked her career-long study of motivation, intelligence, and how we cope with failure. Although Dweck herself sat right at the front, she now believes that the effect on the kids at the top of the class was just as negative as it was for the kids at the bottom. As she recalls, “
It was an uncomfortable thing because you were only as good as your last test score. . . . So the students who had the best seats were always scared of taking another test and not being at the top anymore.”

Through her research, Dweck has defined two possible ways to think about intelligence and personality and how they relate to the future. “Mindset” is her word for these beliefs about ourselves. If you have a
fixed
mindset, you believe that your talents and abilities are set in stone—you have them or you don’t. If you have a fixed mindset, you are less hopeful about the future. You have an upper limit, and there’s nothing you can do to change it, so why try? (This was the belief of her sixth-grade teacher.) If you’re one of the “gifted,” you fear risk and failure because you might find out you’re less talented than you thought. You internal dialogue might be “These are the only resources I have or need to get to my goal.” You would start to miss cues about where you needed to make more effort or develop skills or resources to move ahead. On the other hand, if you have a
growth
mindset, you know that you can develop your talents and build your abilities. You have nothing to lose—and much to gain—if you try new ways to reach your goals.
Your inner voice tells you, “No matter what I start with, I can develop or find the resources I need as challenges pop up.”

In one New York City junior high school, Dweck and her colleagues taught practical study skills to a group of students, along with how they could learn to be smart. The brain is like a muscle, they told the kids, and it gets stronger with use. A second group of students learned only the study skills. In just two months, the students in the first group leaped ahead of the second in grades and study habits. “What was important was the motivation,” says Dweck. “The students were energized by the idea that they could have an impact on their mind.” She recalls one boy—a notorious troublemaker—who looked at her with tears in his eyes. “
You mean, I don’t have to be dumb?” he said.

David Yeager, one of Dweck’s former graduate students, now an assistant professor at the University of Texas, helped me make sense of that junior high boy’s question. “When those with more of a fixed mindset about their traits encounter an obstacle, they are more likely to predict that it will never get better, that their life will always be this way, that they’ll continue to be left out or excluded, and that their own deficient traits will cause their life to be less positive.” With more of a growth mindset, that young man will have a greater desire to learn and a tendency to seek challenges, rather than avoid them.

As Yeager’s comment suggests, mindset research has grown well beyond “smarts” to address all the labels we and others attach to ourselves. For example, he and his colleagues have shown that a growth mindset is key to reducing stress, depression, and aggression in adolescents who have suffered social rejection or bullying. Young teens easily think in fixed categories: They agree with statements like “Everyone is either a winner or a loser in life,” and they see people in black-and-white terms as “good” or “bad.” A teen who sees himself as a loser, or as someone who is just not likable, is stuck in his pain. Helpless and hopeless, he’s also more likely to seek revenge on the “bad” person who has humiliated him. Simple interventions that help teens see themselves and others as “works in progress” can jump-start the coping skills they
need in order to navigate high school—and give them hope for the people they will become.

In short, mindset influences every aspect of your life, from work to sports, from relationships to parenting. If you believe you can change and develop, you know you can move beyond your present limitations. This makes a growth mindset the natural companion of hope.

Young Tererai was blessed with determination, curiosity, and intelligence, but in her birthplace, a small village in Zimbabwe, she was destined for poverty, illiteracy, and unending labor. Her father refused to send her to school. Girls get married, he said; boys are breadwinners. But after she did her chores, she taught herself to read and write from her brother’s schoolbooks, and soon she was doing his homework for him every night. It didn’t take the teacher long to notice that the homework was much better than the boy’s work in class, and he pleaded with Tererai’s father to let her attend school. Her father’s response was to beat her for shaming the family.

The teacher didn’t give up, however, and finally Tererai entered the classroom she’d longed to attend, shoeless and wearing her father’s shirt as a dress. Her time there was short. After only a couple of terms, she was married off at age eleven to a man who beat her if he caught her reading—and for almost any other reason. By the time she was eighteen, she had three children.

Then in 1991, when Tererai was in her twenties, Jo Luck, the head of an aid group called Heifer International, came to her village. Heifer’s mission is reducing poverty by promoting self-reliance, and Jo Luck asked the village women a question that astonished them: “What are
your hopes and dreams?” Tererai still recalls that moment. “My name is Tererai,” she answered, “and I want to go to America to have an education, and I want to have a B.S. degree, I want to have a master’s, and I want to have a Ph.D.” (She’d heard of these degrees in stories of famous African men.) Jo Luck just looked at her and said, “If you desire those things, it is achievable.”

Tererai’s mother encouraged her to write her goals on a piece of paper, wrap the paper in plastic, and put it in an old tin: “If you truly believe in those dreams, you’ll see them grow,” she told her daughter. “Cover those dreams with a rock, and they will call you back.” Tererai buried her list near where she had herded cattle as a child.

In 1998, Tererai was admitted to Oklahoma State University and moved to America with her children and husband. (Coming along was his price for allowing the children to leave.) She thrived academically despite working several jobs, but the family was living in a broken-down trailer, she and the children were barely eating, and her husband was still beating her. It was only when the university tried to expel her for late tuition that an administrator, Ron Beer, discovered what was going on. He organized support from the community and arranged housing through Habitat for Humanity. In 2001, Tererai received her B.A. in agricultural education. In 2003—the year her husband was deported—she received her master’s. She was working on her Ph.D. at Western Michigan University, happily remarried and writing a dissertation on AIDS prevention in Africa, when she got a surprise call from Oprah Winfrey to appear on her television show.

On October 1, 2009, millions watched as Tererai described her passion for education and her effort to end generations of poverty in her family. Then the scene shifted to Zimbabwe, and the camera showed Tererai being greeted in her home village. There she went searching for the rock that had protected her dreams for so long. Digging deep into the dirt with her hands, she unearthed the tin and unfolded the paper on which she’d written her goals. It was nearly time to check off the last one. She received her doctorate in December 2009.

Statistically speaking, Tererai is an outlier, an anomaly, an exception to every rule. Yet many people have her potential, but are not recognized and supported at crucial times in their lives. Many cut off their own future because no one has ever asked, “What are your hopes and dreams?”

In October 2011, Tererai Trent returned again to her village—this time to visit the site of the new Matau Primary School. Thanks to a grant of more than a million dollars from the Oprah Winfrey Foundation, administered by Save the Children, the school Tererai attended for less than a year will have new classrooms for 850 students, as well as new latrines and homes for teachers. It will also anchor early childhood education and literacy programs for neighboring villages. Tererai’s current dream is to promote education for poor children, and particularly girls and women in sub-Saharan Africa. Her message to the children who gathered to meet her at her old school: “You have to be strong and value education and do not rush into marriage.”