A growth mindset is the belief that your abilities can grow through effort, good strategies and help from others. A fixed mindset is the belief that they are set. The idea comes from Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. Below are 15 everyday growth mindset examples for adults, followed by the honest evidence: on average the effects on performance are small, they are larger for struggling students in some studies, and Dweck herself warns against a "false growth mindset" that is all slogans and no change.
You are 41, and you have just signed up for Spanish classes. In week three the teacher asks you to describe your weekend, and the sentence falls apart halfway through. A small voice says what it has said for years: I am just not a language person. Another voice, quieter, says: I am not a language person yet, and my past tense is a mess.
Which voice wins matters less than what you do next. That gap, between a belief about yourself and the action it leads to, is what a growth mindset is really about. This page is part of our guide on how to learn, and it is written for adults who are learning something new, not for classrooms.
What is a growth mindset?
A growth mindset is the belief that intelligence, talent and skills can be developed. A fixed mindset is the belief that they are basically fixed: you have a certain amount, and that is that. Carol Dweck and her colleagues began studying these beliefs in the 1970s and 1980s, first under the academic labels "incremental theory" and "entity theory" (Dweck & Leggett, 1988), and made them famous in her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
The theory's core claim is about behavior. If you believe ability is fixed, every hard task becomes a test of how much you have, so you avoid challenges, hide mistakes and give up when you struggle. If you believe ability grows, a hard task is a chance to get better, so you lean in, try new approaches and ask for help.
Two details often get lost. First, Dweck does not say anyone can become anything. She says abilities can be developed, not that everyone starts in the same place or ends in the same place. Second, nobody is one type. In her own words, we are all a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets, and probably always will be (Dweck, 2015).
Growth mindset vs fixed mindset at a glance
| Situation | Fixed mindset reaction | Growth mindset reaction |
|---|---|---|
| A hard new task | "What if I look stupid?" | "What is the first piece I can learn?" |
| A setback | "This proves I am not good at it." | "What went wrong, and what do I try next?" |
| Effort | "If I have to work this hard, I lack talent." | "Effort plus a better method is how anyone improves." |
| Criticism | Defensive, hurt, or crushed | Curious about what to change |
| Someone better than you | Envy and threat | "How did they get there?" |
Those last three rows come almost straight from the triggers Dweck lists for spotting your own fixed mindset: challenges, criticism, and meeting someone who is better than you at something you care about.
15 growth mindset examples from everyday life
Growth mindset examples usually come from classrooms. Here are fifteen from adult life, each with the fixed thought, the growth version and, most important, the action that turns the thought into something real.
At work
- The spreadsheet you dread. Fixed: "I am not a numbers person." Growth: "I have not learned pivot tables yet." Action: spend 20 minutes with one tutorial and rebuild last month's report yourself.
- A presentation that flopped. Fixed: "I am bad at public speaking." Growth: "That talk had a weak opening and too many slides." Action: ask one colleague, "What would you change first?" and fix only that.
- A colleague gets the promotion. Fixed: "She is just a natural." Growth: "She did something I can learn from." Action: ask her how she prepared for the role, and write down one habit to borrow.
- A mistake in a report your boss caught. Fixed: hide it, or blame the deadline. Growth: "This is a process gap, not a character flaw." Action: find the cause and add one line to your checklist so it cannot happen the same way again.
- The new software everyone has to use. Fixed: "I am too old for this." Growth: "Everyone is a beginner at a tool that launched last month." Action: learn the three features you will use every day, and ignore the rest for now.
When you learn something new
- Your accent in a new language. Fixed: "I will always sound terrible." Growth: "My accent is a skill like any other." Action: record yourself reading the same paragraph every Sunday and listen to week 1 after week 8.
- The guitar chord you cannot reach. Fixed: "My fingers just do not work like that." Growth: "I am trying too fast." Action: practice the change at half speed for two minutes a day. This is a change of strategy, not just more effort, which is exactly what Dweck says gets forgotten.
- A book that loses you on page 30. Fixed: "This is too smart for me." Growth: "I am missing a piece of background." Action: look up the one concept you stumbled on, then try explaining the chapter in plain words, the core of the Feynman technique.
- Forgetting what you learned last week. Fixed: "My memory is useless." Growth: "Everyone forgets fast at first. That is the forgetting curve, not a verdict on me." Action: test yourself tomorrow and again in a few days instead of rereading.
- Getting a quiz question wrong. Fixed: "I knew I was not good at this." Growth: "Now I know exactly what I did not know." Action: check the right answer, then try the same question again later from memory.
At home, with people and with your body
- Praising your child. Fixed: "You are so smart!" Growth: "You tried a different way when the first one did not work." Action: praise the strategy and the progress, not the label. In a classic series of six studies, fifth graders praised for being smart cared more about looking smart than about learning, and after a failure they persisted less, enjoyed the task less and did worse than children praised for their effort (Mueller & Dweck, 1998). A 2019 replication attempt in China did not find the same effect, and that disagreement is still being argued over (Li & Bates, 2019).
- Your child brings home a bad grade. Fixed: worry out loud about what it means. Growth: "Okay, what can we learn from this?" Action: treat the mistake as information. One study found that parents who see failure as harmful tend to raise children with a more fixed view of intelligence, whatever the parents believe about intelligence itself (Haimovitz & Dweck, 2016).
- "I am just not a runner." Fixed: quit after one painful jog. Growth: "Nobody's first run feels good." Action: follow a walk-run plan that adds a minute at a time, and log every session so you can see the trend.
- A dinner that went wrong. Fixed: "I cannot cook." Growth: "The sauce split because the heat was too high." Action: cook it again next week and change one thing only.
- The same argument with your partner, again. Fixed: "I am just bad at conflict." Growth: "Listening under pressure is a skill." Action: next time, repeat back what you heard before you answer. Our guide to active listening breaks it down.
Notice the pattern. In every example the growth version is more specific than the fixed one. "I am bad at this" is a verdict. "My past tense is a mess" is a to-do list.
What the research actually says
Growth mindset became one of the most popular ideas in education. Schools put up posters, companies built training around it. The evidence is more modest than the posters, and worth knowing in some detail.
The early studies looked impressive
In one well-known study, Lisa Blackwell, Kali Trzesniewski and Dweck followed 373 seventh graders. Students who believed intelligence could grow saw their math grades rise over the two years of junior high, while those with a fixed view stayed flat. In a small follow-up experiment, 48 students who were taught that the brain grows with learning reversed a slide in grades that their 43 classmates in the control group kept on showing (Blackwell et al., 2007). A small experiment, a big promise.
The meta-analyses found small average effects
In 2018, Victoria Sisk, Brooke Macnamara and colleagues published two meta-analyses in Psychological Science. The first pooled 273 studies with 365,915 students and found only a weak link between mindset and academic achievement: a correlation of about .10, which means mindset accounted for about 1% of the differences in performance. The second looked at 43 studies of growth mindset interventions with 57,155 students and found an average effect of d = 0.08, which is small. The authors did find support for one part of the theory: students from low-income families and students at high risk of failing may benefit more, though only a few studies fed into that analysis (Sisk et al., 2018). The link between mindset and achievement was also weaker for adults than for children and teenagers.
The big US trial: real, but targeted
The strongest single test is the National Study of Learning Mindsets, published in Nature in 2019 by David Yeager and a large team including Dweck. It covered 12,490 ninth graders in a nationally representative sample of US high schools. The intervention was tiny: two online sessions of about 25 minutes each. For lower-achieving students, grades in core subjects rose by 0.10 grade points, and the estimated share of them with poor grades fell from 46% to 41%. Across all students, enrollment in advanced math the next year rose from 33% to 36%. Higher-achieving students saw no change in grades, and the effect was larger in schools where peers supported taking on challenges (Yeager et al., 2019).
A tenth of a grade point is not a transformation. But for under an hour of online material, delivered to thousands of students, it is a real and cheap gain for the students who need it most.
The debate is still running
Two newer meta-analyses, both in Psychological Bulletin in 2023, reached different conclusions from overlapping studies. Macnamara and Alexander Burgoyne looked at 63 studies with 97,672 students and found an average effect of d = 0.05, which disappeared after correcting for publication bias. Among the six highest-quality studies it was d = 0.02 and not significant. They also found that authors with a financial stake in the interventions reported larger effects (Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023). Jeni Burnette and colleagues, analysing the variation between groups, found a small effect on achievement, d = 0.14, when interventions were well delivered to the students expected to benefit most, and larger effects on mental health (Burnette et al., 2023).
The fair summary: a growth mindset is not a magic switch for performance. Teaching it briefly to everyone produces small average gains at best. It seems to help most for people who are struggling, in settings that back it up. For an adult learner, that is still useful. The belief will not do the learning for you, but it can keep you in the game long enough for the learning to happen.
The false growth mindset Dweck warned about
In 2015, as growth mindset spread through schools, Dweck wrote a commentary in Education Week about how it was being misunderstood. Her colleague Susan Mackie had noticed an outbreak of what she called "false growth mindset": people who claimed the label without changing what they did. Her piece points to three common ways it goes wrong.
- Equating growth mindset with effort. Effort matters, but trying harder at the wrong method does not help. Dweck stresses trying new strategies and asking others for input when you are stuck.
- Praising effort that is not producing learning. "Great effort, you tried your best!" can become a consolation prize. She argues it should be followed by a look at what was tried and what to try next.
- Treating it as an identity. Declaring "I have a growth mindset" while reacting to setbacks the same old way. As she put it, "the path to a growth mindset is a journey, not a proclamation."
Her fix is surprisingly gentle: accept that everyone has fixed-mindset moments, notice what triggers yours, and work with those reactions instead of pretending they are gone (Dweck, 2015).
How to use a growth mindset when you learn something new
Here is what the evidence and Dweck's own corrections add up to for an adult picking up a language, an instrument, a new field or a new job.
- Learn your triggers. Notice the moment you want to quit: a hard exercise, feedback, someone who is better. Naming it ("there is my fixed-mindset voice") takes some of its power away.
- When stuck, change the method before you add more effort. Slow down, break the task into smaller parts, find a different explanation, or ask someone who has done it.
- Collect evidence of progress. Beliefs follow proof. Record your accent, time your runs, test your recall. A growth mindset is much easier to hold when you can see the line going up.
- Make mistakes cheap and frequent. Low-stakes self-tests turn errors into information. They also happen to be one of the best ways to remember things, as the research on the forgetting curve shows.
- Use "yet" honestly. "I cannot do this yet" only works if it comes with a plan. Otherwise it is the false growth mindset in one word.
- Pick a small, learnable piece. Not "become good at math," but "understand percentages by Friday." Small wins are what keep a belief alive.
- Be realistic about time. New skills usually take longer than we hope. Our article on how long it really takes to learn something new has the numbers.
Where NerdSip fits
We will not claim an app can change your mindset. What NerdSip can do is make the growth-mindset loop of trying, getting feedback and adjusting very small and very frequent. Type any topic you want to get better at, and NerdSip generates a fact-checked five-minute course on it. Every lesson ends with a question, so you find out right away what stuck and what did not, and a wrong answer is just the next thing to learn. NerdSip's spaced repetition system brings courses you finished back for review later, so progress is something you can see, not just something you hope for.
The bottom line
A growth mindset is a useful belief with a modest track record. On its own, it moves grades and performance a little on average, and more for people who are struggling. It is not effort for its own sake, it is not a label you claim, and it is not a promise that anyone can do anything. It is the habit of treating "I cannot do this" as "I cannot do this yet, and here is what I will try next." Pair that habit with good learning methods and the proof will follow.
Read next
References & Further Reading
- Dweck & Leggett (1988), A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality, Psychological Review
- Dweck (2006), Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Random House
- Dweck (2015), Carol Dweck Revisits the 'Growth Mindset', Education Week
- Mueller & Dweck (1998), Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Li & Bates (2019), You can't change your basic ability, but you work at things, and that's how we get hard things done, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
- Haimovitz & Dweck (2016), Parents' Views of Failure Predict Children's Fixed and Growth Intelligence Mind-Sets, Psychological Science
- Blackwell, Trzesniewski & Dweck (2007), Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition, Child Development
- Sisk, Burgoyne, Sun, Butler & Macnamara (2018), To What Extent and Under Which Circumstances Are Growth Mind-Sets Important to Academic Achievement? Two Meta-Analyses, Psychological Science
- Yeager et al. (2019), A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement, Nature
- Macnamara & Burgoyne (2023), Do Growth Mindset Interventions Impact Students' Academic Achievement? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, Psychological Bulletin
- Burnette et al. (2023), A systematic review and meta-analysis of growth mindset interventions: For whom, how, and why might such interventions work?, Psychological Bulletin
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a growth mindset?
A growth mindset is the belief that your abilities, including intelligence and talent, can be developed through effort, good strategies and help from others. The term comes from Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. Its opposite, a fixed mindset, is the belief that abilities are basically set.
What are some examples of a growth mindset?
Saying "I have not learned pivot tables yet" instead of "I am not a numbers person" and then doing one tutorial. Asking a colleague what to change after a weak presentation. Practicing a hard guitar change at half speed. Treating a wrong quiz answer as a map of what to learn next. In each case the growth version is specific and leads to an action.
What is the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset?
With a fixed mindset, challenges feel like tests of how much ability you have, so you tend to avoid them, hide mistakes and give up early. With a growth mindset, challenges feel like chances to improve, so you try new strategies and ask for help. Dweck stresses that everyone is a mixture of both.
Does a growth mindset really work?
Modestly. A 2018 meta-analysis of 43 intervention studies found a small average effect on academic achievement (d = 0.08). A large 2019 US trial found that a short online program raised grades by 0.10 grade points for lower-achieving students but not for high achievers. A 2023 meta-analysis that corrected for publication bias found no reliable average effect, while another found small effects for the students expected to benefit most.
What is a false growth mindset?
It is Carol Dweck's term, borrowed from her colleague Susan Mackie, for claiming a growth mindset without acting on it. Common forms are equating it with effort alone, praising effort that does not lead to learning, and treating growth mindset as an identity rather than a practice.
How can adults develop a growth mindset?
Notice what triggers your fixed-mindset reactions, change your method before adding more effort when you are stuck, collect visible evidence of progress, make mistakes cheap with low-stakes self-tests, and break big goals into small, learnable pieces.
Every NerdSip course clears a four-layer fact-checking pipeline before it reaches the app: grounded in live sources, scored nightly, gated on failure, and reviewable by a person at one tap. Articles on this blog are drafted with AI assistance, then researched, verified, and edited by our team.
Editorial responsibility: ai51 UG (haftungsbeschränkt). Responsible editor named in the imprint.
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