The argument in brief
The question
What does it actually mean to have a growth mindset, and how can we tell whether we have one?
The claim
A growth mindset, the belief that ability can be developed through effort and practice, helps anyone working towards a goal. It rests on a few beliefs we can internalise, it can be faked by chasing metrics instead of effort, and managers can foster it in a team through education, mentoring and rewarding growth. Confidence: A personal view from my own thinking and experience, stated firmly. One meta-analysis is cited, and it found the measured effects of mindset on academic achievement to be weak overall.
The evidence
  • My own reasoning and experience of how beliefs about ability shape what I and others are prepared to try.
  • Norman Doidge's The Brain That Changes Itself, on brain plasticity, which I read and which challenged my idea that the brain is fixed.
  • Sisk and colleagues' two meta-analyses (Psychological Science, 2018), which found weak overall links between mindset and academic achievement and weak overall effects of mindset interventions, with some benefit for students from low-income backgrounds or at academic risk.
The best counter
The research on mindset is weaker than its popularity suggests: across large samples, mindset predicts little about achievement, and interventions do little on average. Effort is also not always rewarded, and some differences in ability are real.
What would change my mind
Good evidence that adults and teams who are taught a growth mindset do no better, persist no longer and learn no more than those who aren't, outside school as well as in it.
Open gaps
2 gaps. Statements I haven't verified yet. Each is marked in the text.

The questionWhat does it actually mean to have a growth mindset, and how can we tell whether we have one?Between where you are and where you want to get to is a growth mindset. It sounds fancy, “a growth mindset”, but I don’t think many people really understand what it means.

What is a mindset?

Much of your personality grows out of your mindset.Gap · needs evidenceThis is my own view of how personality and mindset relate. I haven’t checked it against research on personality. If you have a mindset that is overly negative, your personality will grow with a slant of being more negative. If you have a positive mindset, then your personality will grow to be more positive.

Whatever your mindset is, it can be a differentiator to help you fulfil your potential.

Fixed and growth mindsets

We can summarise a mindset into a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.

If you have a fixed mindset, you’ll generally assume:

  • Intelligence is something you cannot change, even if you learn new things
  • You tend to lean on doing things that you already have the skills for
  • It’s important to show how smart or talented you are
  • You value relationships that admire (or even desire) your intelligence and talent
  • You don’t like the idea of making mistakes or failure
  • You feel that if a task is hard, you’re not good enough

However, if you have a growth mindset, you can safely assume:

  • You can change your level of intelligence
  • The brain is changeable and what is hard today can be easy with deliberate practice
  • You can look at failure as a point of learning and not judgement
  • You orient towards learning to continue improving your self-awareness and skills
  • You do not seek approval from others and your growth is an intrinsic value
  • You believe that obstacles are an opportunity for you to learn

Why it matters

A competing explanationThe research is weaker than the idea’s popularity. Two large meta-analyses found that mindset is only weakly linked to academic achievement, and that mindset interventions have weak effects on average, though students from low-income backgrounds or at academic risk may benefit more.Let me make this clear. Claima personal view, firmly held; the research on mindset in school finds weak effects overallHaving a growth mindset is a valuable attribute to anyone who is striving towards some goal.SourceTwo meta-analyses (273 studies of mindset and achievement; 43 studies of interventions). Overall effects were weak in both, with some support for benefits to students from low-income backgrounds or at academic risk. It covers academic achievement, not adults at work.To What Extent and Under Which Circumstances Are Growth Mind-Sets Important to Academic Achievement? Two Meta-Analyses, Victoria F. Sisk, Alexander P. Burgoyne, Jingze Sun, Jennifer L. Butler and Brooke N. Macnamara (Psychological Science), 2018

It allows you to objectively see your ability and identify the path to improvement. It gives you the resilience to overcome negative feedback from peers. And it gives you the confidence and courage to do things that are out of your comfort zone and get you to be the person you aspire to be.

Where our mindset comes from

More often than not, our mindset is something passed down to us from a very young age.Gap · needs evidenceI haven’t checked this against research on how parents’ praise and attitudes shape a child’s mindset. If your parents value grades when learning, want you to win instead of improve or judge you when you are seen to fail, then there’s a high likelihood you have inherited a fixed mindset.

Conversely, if your parents value objective understanding of why something you tried didn’t work and what you can do next time, and that the opinion of others is a measure, not a goal, then you are more likely to have a growth mindset.

Can you change your mindset?

This is a trick question. If you have a fixed mindset, you’ll ultimately resign yourself to saying that it can’t be changed. If you have a growth mindset, then you’ll believe that change is indeed possible.

As the saying often attributed to Henry Ford goes:SourceThe earliest attribution to Ford found is a Reader’s Digest filler from September 1947, months after he died, with no source given. The idea goes back to Virgil, and the site judges the Ford attribution uncertain.Quote Origin: Whether You Believe You Can Do a Thing or Not, You Are Right, Quote Investigator, 2015, updated 2025

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

The more valuable question is: how can you develop a growth mindset?

The beliefs that unblock growth

Whether we logically think we are in control of how we feel, our beliefs will often undermine our efforts and hold us back. Let’s look at what beliefs you need to internalise to unblock your growth.

You are average

It’s quite liberating to admit that you’re average. It takes the pressure off being considered special. After all, you don’t want to be chasing status as a measure of your success.

The truth is, you are average. There will always be people better than you and people not as good as you. And that’s perfectly fine.

Giving yourself the pressure to always be perfect and above average is a trait of a fixed mindset. Thinking you’re above average will prevent you from trying new things, as the idea of failure will hurt your self-esteem.

Your efforts will be rewarded

Often you limit the amount of effort you are prepared to put in if you don’t believe that it will be rewarded. You hedge your bets to minimise the loss if you fail. You don’t go all in. You don’t believe that your success is proportional to the amount of effort you put in.

LimitsEffort isn’t always rewarded in proportion. Luck, timing, money and circumstance play a part, so I offer this as a belief that keeps you going, not a guarantee.To have the grit to continue for years before success ultimately comes down to whether you believe your efforts will be rewarded.

Who you are today is not who you will be tomorrow

It’s important to not judge yourself on your current abilities. If you find yourself saying “I can’t do that”, then you will only prove yourself right. You must switch the narrative to “I can’t do that… yet”. It gives you permission to internalise the change needed to make it happen.

Those with a fixed mindset tend to side with the notion that the brain is unchangeable and intelligence is static. This limits the scope of what they will be prepared to do.

The book The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge explains how brain plasticity works. This challenges many preconceived ideas that the brain’s ability is fixed and unchangeable. When you understand this, you start to believe how much of a transformation you can make in your mindset and skills.

Your self-esteem

Self-esteem will play a major role in your growth mindset journey. How you view yourself and the narrative you tell yourself will be a huge differentiator.

Beware a false growth mindset

It’s possible to start developing the traits of a false growth mindset, which can keep you from truly improving. At its very core, a false growth mindset is where you think you have a growth mindset, but in reality don’t, and there are a few traits that can help you identify if this is happening to you.

Praise effort and not outcome

Be mindful about what you praise. For example, on social media you may find yourself paying attention to the quantity of likes and using that as a measure of your success.

Anything that produces metrics can trick you into feeling that you’re growing by some arbitrary measure of success. YouTube followers, watchtime hours, Instagram likes, retweets. These are all things you can obsess over, or even worse, use as a goal.

If your goal is to have 100,000 YouTube subscribers, then this is simply a consequence of the effort you put in. What happens if your number of subscribers drops? How do you feel now? Are you a failure, or did you stop putting in the effort?

A competing explanationOutcomes carry information. If the numbers never move, that may be telling you the effort is going into the wrong thing, so ignoring them entirely has its own risk.Claima practical recommendation from my own experience; no studies citedTo have a growth mindset, you need to praise the effort you put in and not the outcome. Success is not whether you have 100,000 YouTube subscribers, but whether you produce a high-quality video every week.

Dealing with failure

A growth mindset takes the emotion out of your assessment of whether you’ve succeeded or failed. If you find that you have to resort to phrases like “at least I tried”, then you are not objectively looking at your effort and how to improve it for next time.

You need to be comfortable with the hard truths about your ability to tackle hard challenges. A growth mindset is about developing a self-esteem about being a learner, and you cannot learn if you’re afraid to hurt your feelings.

Focus on what you can do differently, not whether you’re any good at it.

For managers

Creating a growth mindset company isn’t something that happens by chance. It comes from understanding what the differences are between having a fixed or growth mindset, and then educating and mentoring your employees to adopt a growth mindset. This section is for any manager who is responsible for the personal development and growth of their employees.

As a manager your goal is to enable the best out of your team. You want to create a healthy, enjoyable working experience for your employees. You want them to have a sense of purpose and direction which can be something they value as they progress through their own career.

In order to achieve this, as a manager, you need to understand and adopt a growth mindset. This means you want to foster the attributes and thinking that lead to having a growth mindset. It’s not easy, but the benefits are worth it.

In addition, you can look to your team and embrace your employees who already exhibit growth mindset attributes. You also want to recognise those who are exhibiting fixed mindset attributes and work with them to help steer their progression to being more growth oriented.

So what does it mean to be a growth mindset manager? You need to foster the following attributes:

  • Embrace a growth mindset within yourself and your team
  • Have a zest for learning and teaching and be a model for your team to follow
  • Be open to giving and receiving feedback
  • Look at problems as obstacles to overcome, and not problems that you wish didn’t exist
  • Reward employees for taking initiative and working hard to see a difficult task through
  • Reward employees for growth, learning something, overcoming setbacks and being open to and taking action on criticism

As you can see, to be a growth mindset manager, you need to build the communication and support structures for your employees. You need to create a safe space for them to flourish and make mistakes, but have the guidance to look at adversity with a growth mindset. This means you must teach your employees about the growth mindset through effective communication and provide the right support through mentoring.

A growth mindset programme

Create a growth mindset programme for your team. Make it a tangible thing that you and your team can work towards. Use it as a way to create the growth culture your team deserves.

When creating such a programme, consider the following:

  • Educate your team why it is important and how they can assess where they are on a fixed-vs-growth mindset scale
  • Help employees individually reflect on where they once had a low ability in an area, but still managed to perform well
  • Work with individual employees who you see are struggling and communicate with them how their abilities can be developed
  • Let your team reflect on times where people have overcome scenarios that they thought weren’t possible, but managed to learn how to overcome it

Such a programme should help your employees bring out the discussion of what it means to have a growth mindset. Let them explore examples of where they have experienced it. You want them to learn by examples of past behaviour that shine a light on the specific traits you want to reward.

Once everyone has a baseline understanding of a growth mindset, the hard work begins. Set regular check-ins with your employees and open the discussion to where they have assumptions in their belief about their performance and the performance of their peers, and observe if they have a fixed mindset. Reward examples of a growth mindset and encourage them to view challenges and failures as opportunities for learning, and not a reflection of their own worth.

LimitsI describe this programme as a starting point. I haven’t yet had the chance to run it with a team, so I give no results from it, and the research I cite is about students, not teams at work.It’s hard work, but Claima hope, not a tested resultthe results will be incredible to the performance and happiness of your team. Good luck!

The ah-ha moment

What would change my mind?Good evidence that adults and teams who are taught a growth mindset do no better, persist no longer and learn no more than those who aren’t, outside school as well as in it.The ah-ha takeaway is that you must not measure your success on empty outcomes, but rather on the effort you put in.

Sources

  1. To What Extent and Under Which Circumstances Are Growth Mind-Sets Important to Academic Achievement? Two Meta-Analyses, Victoria F. Sisk, Alexander P. Burgoyne, Jingze Sun, Jennifer L. Butler and Brooke N. Macnamara (Psychological Science), 2018
  2. Quote Origin: Whether You Believe You Can Do a Thing or Not, You Are Right, Quote Investigator, 2015, updated 2025

Books behind this essay

Not sources for any claim here. These are books I have finished that shaped how I think about this question. Where I rely on evidence, it is cited in the text.

The whole shelf