A popular term these days, "growth mindset" refers to a certain attitude about life and abilities. It was popularized by psychologist Carol Dweck. This 8-minute video will summarize the main points.

Or, click here to watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/75GFzikmRY0

There is not a clear trend of college students; some of you naturally have a growth mindset, while others may at this moment still have a fixed mindset. Under this system, they are not morally equal; the idea is to move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

Thinking about your career as a student, a growth mindset will confer numerous advantages. Perhaps most importantly, you won't give up easily, because you will recognize that failure is part of the learning process (in fact, a necessary part in many cases). Your cheerfulness at all sorts of performance will make you an ultimately happier person just hour-by-hour, as well. Given your willingness to not give up, you are increasing your chances that you will ultimately succeed in your academic endeavors. Even work that seems daunting can, when approached with a growth mindset, be transformed into a win. Having a growth mindset makes you naturally motivated, since improvement is the name of the game.

Grit

Another researcher, Angela Duckworth, came to a different conclusion. She recognized that the dividing line between students that succeed and those that don't was not intelligence, but rather grit. This six-minute TED talk sketches the main ideas:

Or, click here to watch it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/H14bBuluwB8

Deliberate Practice

Many self-help books use an older academic finding that 10,000 hours of practice are needed to become an expert at any given thing: playing the piano, shooting free throws, identifying capital cities for all countries and states, or winning an e-sports video game tournament. Anders Ericsson's book "Peak" found differently; here's a summary of his view of deliberate practice:

Or, click here to watch it on YouTube directly: https://youtu.be/uoUHlZP094Q

Unification?

The various theories listed on this page could perhaps coexist in a single unified theory. Can we envision a student who has a growth mindset, which makes him gritty, intrinsically motivated, and unlikely to give up, and who has mastered making effective mental representations and purposeful practice? Sure we can.

But it's not strictly necessary that ALL of these be true. At the end of the day, one of these might "speak" to you more than the others, which is fine. The important outcome is that you explore your own motivations, examine whether you have moved beyond a fixed mindset, question how you could become grittier yourself, and investigate what purposeful practice looks like for you. Try them all out, in other words, and keep what works.

Transparency

One last topic related to motivation: assignments and projects that your professors give to you. A particular approach to teaching called "Transparency" urges teachers to provide several things with every assignment:

Purpose: students hear what the learning goals are and why the assignment is designed this way
Task: students see exactly which steps they have to take in order to complete the work
Criteria: students see the criteria/rubric for how it will be graded before they start work. Ideally they could also see examples and templates of successful work (such as from a prior semester)

Of course, not every professor knows of this method, and as students you have a limited ability to convince the faculty member to employ all these ideas. But the first one - a clear understanding of WHY we are doing the assignment - is perhaps the one to focus on the most.

If the professor provides the rationale, don't just glaze over it. Read it carefully and make sure you understand it. Knowing why you are bothering with an assignment radically increases your ownership and buy-in, which of course alters your intrinsic motivation.

If the professor doesn't provide the rationale, this is a reasonable topic to raise in an email to the professor. State your hope to understand the assignment fully and politely ask if the learning goals for the assignment could be made more clear. Even if you do not receive an answer that clears it up for you, it's worth dedicating mental energy to finding your own answer by extrapolating, applying, and even guessing. Clearly knowing the purpose, even if it's one you come to on your own, will help keep you motivated.