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Mindset
A book on how believing your ability can grow changes the way you meet criticism and setbacks
Why it’s worth your time
Carol Dweck's Mindset gives a name to the difference between treating ability as fixed and treating it as something you can grow, and that difference shows up whenever your work gets judged. It tends to help most in the hour after a review or a hard comment.
How to take criticism without hearing a verdict
The book · About 6 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Read the book.
Watch for how Dweck applies the two mindsets to work and to leading others, and, in the updated edition, for what she says about false growth mindset.
- Write down what the fixed-mindset voice said.
The next time a comment or a review stings, note what you first told yourself about it. Then write one thing you'll try differently and one person you could ask for advice on it.
Good moments for this: after a review that stungwhen a colleague's success ranklesbefore tackling something you're not good at yet
Keep going with Truest
Small actions add up. Truest helps you find the next thing worth doing, make the space to do it, and keep a record of your progress. It’s a private place to work on your career, and it’s yours, not your employer’s.
- It actually happensWe’ll put it on your calendar and remind you before it starts.
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Dweck wrote in 2015 that people are a mix of the two and probably always will be, and that trying to banish the fixed one tends to produce a fake version of the other. Noticing it, she says, is where the real change starts.
What might make this harder
Check it with one person you do trust before deciding how much weight to give it. You can take the useful part without accepting all of it.
Questions people ask
What is Mindset by Carol Dweck about?
A book by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, first published in 2006, arguing that people who believe abilities can be developed tend to flourish more than those who believe abilities are fixed. It draws on decades of her research, applied to school, work, sports and the arts.
What is a false growth mindset?
A term Dweck's colleague in Australia, Susan Mackie, used for educators who claimed a growth mindset while what they said and did didn't reflect it. Dweck took it up in her 2015 essay and in the updated edition of the book. In the same essay she calls equating a growth mindset with effort alone perhaps the most common misconception.
How do I take criticism at work without getting defensive?
Give yourself a moment before replying, then ask for one specific example of what they'd do differently. A specific example is easier to act on, and harder to hear as a verdict on you.
What it says, and how it holds up
Nine years after Mindset came out, Carol Dweck wrote an essay in Education Week about how the idea was going wrong in practice. Teachers were praising effort that wasn't producing learning, and some were explaining a struggling child away with the label of a fixed mindset. In many quarters, she wrote, a growth mindset had become an identity people claimed rather than a way of working.
The book's core is simpler than the slogans. Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, describes two beliefs about ability, that it's fixed or that it can be developed, and argues that the second helps people learn, take on challenges and keep going after setbacks, in school, sport, the arts and work. The updated edition adds false growth mindset and stretches the idea to the culture of groups and organizations, which is where it may touch your job most.
In the same essay Dweck turned the idea on her own message: perhaps they had leaned too hard on effort and made a growth mindset sound too easy to reach. That self-correction is a good guide to reading the book, and so is the research since. A 2018 pair of meta-analyses led by Victoria Sisk found weak effects overall, both for the link between students' mindsets and their academic achievement and for mindset interventions. A large 2019 US study led by David Yeager, with Dweck among its co-authors, found that two short online sessions, under an hour in all, lifted grades modestly for lower-achieving ninth graders. Both concern students, not adults at work. The book works best as a way to notice your reactions, and less well as a promise that believing in growth will change results by itself.
Some feedback stings because it's wrong, or because the process behind it is. A rating squeezed by a fixed budget, or a review written by someone who barely saw your work, isn't a mindset problem, and treating it as one can let a broken process off the hook. In that case, asking how ratings are decided tends to do more than working on your reaction.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.