Having A Success Mindset

What does the research actually show about a growth mindset?

The research backs the idea, with limits worth knowing. The largest test of it is the National Study of Learning Mindsets, reported in Nature in 2019. It randomly assigned more than 12,000 ninth-grade students across 65 US schools to a growth mindset exercise that took under an hour to complete online. Among lower-achieving students, core-course GPA rose by 0.10 grade points, and the share of those students carrying a D or F average fell by more than five percentage points.

Two details matter more than that headline. First, the gain sat with students who were already struggling, not with everyone. Second, the result depended on the school. In medium and lower-performing schools where peer norms supported taking on hard work, the gain for lower-achieving students reached 0.15 grade points in core courses and 0.17 in STEM courses. Where the surrounding culture pushed the other way, the same exercise did much less. Mindset is not a switch you flip on your own. The culture and leadership around you either reinforces it or cancels it out.

Carol Dweck has also written about how her work gets misapplied. In Education Week in 2015 she named the "false growth mindset", the version where people claim the label but their words and actions still treat ability as fixed. Her correction is that effort on its own is not the goal. Someone who is putting in effort but not learning needs new strategies and input from other people, not more praise for trying. She also states that we are all a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets, and that we probably always will be.

That changes how you use the tips above. Do not ask whether you have a growth mindset. Ask which situations trigger the fixed one, and what you will change about your approach the next time effort on its own stops working.

Key Takeaway: Growth mindset gains are real but narrow, because the National Study of Learning Mindsets raised grades mainly for lower-achieving students and only in schools where peer norms supported taking on hard work.

How does AI change what a growth mindset looks like at work?

AI changes the effort, not the goal. A growth mindset now means understanding the output a tool hands you rather than accepting it, because accepting it is always the cheaper option. Day to day work runs through AI assistants that draft code, tests and documents in seconds. Taking the generated answer without reading it looks exactly like a fixed mindset in practice: stick to what you know, skip the hard part, and let the tool set the limit of your ability.

Research points the same way. A study of 319 knowledge workers by Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University, published at CHI 2025, collected 936 first-hand examples of generative AI use at work. It found that higher confidence in the tool was associated with less critical thinking, while higher confidence in your own judgement was associated with more of it. Confidence in the machine and confidence in yourself pull in opposite directions.

Four habits keep the balance right. Read the output line by line before you use it. Use prompt engineering to ask why it chose an approach, not only what to type. Keep practising the skills you have started to hand over. Check your own understanding of a generated result before you ship it. The test is simple. If you could not explain the result to a colleague, you have not learned anything from it yet.

Key Takeaway: A growth mindset with AI tools means understanding the output rather than accepting it, because the CHI 2025 Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon study found higher confidence in generative AI tracked with less critical thinking.