What is a growth mindset, anyway?

You may have heard a lot about having a growth mindset recently. It's good for business! It's good for parenting! It's good for relationships!

But what the hell is it?

First, let's define "mindset." Your mindset is the set of attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions that shape how you perceive and respond to the world - how you make sense of what is happening to you. It impacts your thoughts, behaviors, preferences, and decisions in various aspects of life. In other words, it’s the filter that turns “rain” into either “a peaceful afternoon” or “the universe personally attacking me.”

Your mindset sneaks into everything—how you think, what you do, and even how you decide what to have for dinner. Sometimes it shifts day-to-day (one moment you’re an unstoppable boss, the next you’re wondering if you'll ever get promoted), and often it runs on habit. The good news? Like a questionable haircut, your mindset can be reworked, rebuilt, or totally redesigned with some effort and intention.

For example, if you believe you're not good at writing, when you sit down to write something, your negative mindset kicks in, and the task becomes much harder. If you believe you're a great baker, you won't obsess over every teaspoon of sugar. The truth is, mindsets don’t always show you reality—they show you your own remix of it, based on old experiences, loud inner monologues, and habits you didn’t even realize you had.

According to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, your mindset plays a critical role in what you want from life and whether or not you get it. If you can see success for yourself in life, you'll be more likely to find it. If you can't, it will be much harder to imagine it and create it.

The growth mindset and fixed mindset are two ends of a mindset continuum, and it's unlikely that you'll have just a fixed mindset or a growth mindset for all things. For example, you may have a mostly fixed mindset about your musical ability ("I just can't learn this song") and have a growth mindset about your technical abilities ("I can't wait for the new iPhone to come out so I can figure out all the new upgrades!") Or maybe you're regularly in a growth mindset about work ("that feedback will really help make round two better") and in a fixed mindset about relationships ("She said I don't communicate well. I'm such a loser.")

The main positive advantage of the growth mindset is that it believes you can't possibly know who you'll be or what your true potential is until you try. It believes in effort, experimentation, failure, and growth. A fixed mindset believes you have a set (or fixed) amount of knowledge, value, and skills, and that you constantly have to demonstrate those or others will find out you're not as great as you seem. (Which, trust me, is exhausting.)

Four key facets of the growth mindset:

Love of challenge.

For the growth mindset, any challenge gives you an opportunity to learn, whether that's because your effort succeeded or it failed. The growth mindset isn't afraid of "failure" because it doesn't focus on the outcome of the effort, it focuses on the learning. For example, when a fixed mindset is asked to do something it's never done before (create a budget, bake a pie, give difficult feedback), it gets worried that it will do it wrong and "fail," whereas the growth mindset may get nervous (it's not perfect) but if things don't go well, it will focus on what it could do differently next time to get better results.

This is neatly captured in Edison's famous line, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Belief in effort

A fixed mindset believes that people are inherently blessed or cursed with certain traits or given talents - "I'm just not good at math" or "I'm a great negotiator" - but the growth mindset believes that you can develop any skills or talents as long as you give them attention, care, time, and effort. As a result, your intelligence, smarts, talent, and worth are really a product of what you do, not who you are.

Resilience in the face of setbacks

The ability to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and say, "Well, that didn't work, let's try again," is central to the growth mindset. Your ability to ideate, innovate, and be creative doesn't get shut down by something going off the rails. Whereas, in a fixed mindset, where your worth is dependent on your demonstration of your excellent skills, when something goes sideways, the fixed mindset can experience shame, fear, embarrassment, or other creativity-killing emotions.

"Failure" is not learning or growing

The growth mindset doesn't really believe in "failure." But if there's a concept that comes close, it's not learning from what went before. Your report came back with hundreds of edits from your manager? The fixed mindset says, "I'm no good at this, I'm a failure." The growth mindset says, "What do I need to do differently next time?" If next time comes and I don't do anything differently, then that's what the growth mindset sees as "failure."

When we're in our growth mindset, we look to the future with possibility, openness, and potential, and we don't see ourselves tied to who we are in this moment. The growth mindset believes that who we can be, who we can turn into, is limitless. Contrast that to the fixed mindset, which believes that who I am right now is all I'll ever be - I just have to keep proving that it's good enough.

Which one would you rather believe?

(Want to know where you tend to land? Put yourself in a situation - at work, on a date, at home - and then take this assessment. Then see if it's different in another situation. Knowing where your mindset is more growth-oriented already will help you lean into that growth mindset in other areas of your life where it's more fixed.)