Growth Mindset
Your abilities aren’t fixed. They grow with effort, good strategies and feedback.
A growth mindset is the belief that your abilities can be developed through effort, good strategies and help from others. Its opposite, a fixed mindset, treats talent and intelligence as things you either have or don’t.
The difference shows up when something gets hard. With a fixed mindset, struggling looks like proof that you lack the ability, so you stop. With a growth mindset, struggling is part of learning, so you keep going. It doesn’t mean anyone can do anything, and circumstances differ, but far more is learnable than most of us assume.
The people whose work you admire got there the same way, by learning.
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again. — Steve Jobs, 1994
Origin
The term comes from Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who studied how students respond to failure and brought the idea to a wide audience in her 2006 book Mindset.