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Concept

The growth mindset

The growth mindset is Carol Dweck's term for the belief that ability is developed through effort, strategy and help rather than fixed at birth, so that a task is practice, a failure is information and effort is the method.

Dweck's research found that the belief people hold about ability predicts how they respond to difficulty better than the ability itself. Those who believe it is developable seek challenge, learn from mistakes, are not threatened by others' success and persist, because none of those things is a verdict on them. The belief is not a personality type: most people hold it in some domains and its opposite in others, and it was usually planted early, by praise for effort or for talent. It can be changed, and Dweck's studies show changed beliefs change behaviour within weeks. The switch begins with the sentence you say about yourself after a failure. 'I am not a maths person' is a verdict; 'I have not got this yet' is a description of every skill anyone has ever built, and it comes with an obvious next step, which is practice.

A real-life example

A software engineer in Izmir rewrites 'I am not a presenter', a verdict from a school play at ten, as 'I am not a presenter yet', and adds the practice: a five-minute update to his own team on Thursday.

How to use it

  1. 1Catch the verdict sentences: 'I'm not a numbers person', 'I'm bad at this'.
  2. 2Add 'not yet' and one concrete act that would count as practice this week.
  3. 3Treat effort as the method, not as evidence you lack the talent.