This is the last of four articles on why we need to change our attitude towards failure. It focuses on the personal characteristics of grit and mindset.  

A characteristic of top performers is something called ‘grit’.  This is defined as someone’s capacity for setting long term challenging goals and sticking to them.

The second characteristic is mindset.  The theory suggests that those with a fixed mindset believe their basic abilities, intelligence and talents, are fixed, inherited characteristics.  They can go up to a limit and no more, so they try to appear clever all the time by never tackling something they might get wrong.  Those with a growth mindset believe their talents can be developed through persistence and see failures as opportunities to learn.

In both cases, long term follow-up studies have shown people with grit or growth mindsets are more successful.