Debate Arises over Teaching “Growth

Mindsets” to Motivate Students

Research shows conflicting data on the impact of the intervention, but a major new study
confirms it can work

By Lydia Denworth on August 12, 2019

Credit: Getty Images

In her 2006 book Mindset, psychologist Carol Dweck of Stanford University identified the
power of beliefs. “They strongly affect what we want and whether we succeed in getting it,”
she wrote. “Changing people’s beliefs—even the simplest beliefs—can have profound
effects.” She then argued that people who possess “fixed mindsets” believe their intelligence
or personality cannot change. They are more likely to focus on performing well on familiar
tasks, to shy away from challenge and to be less resilient in the face of failure. By contrast,
those with a “growth mindset” believe their intelligence or personality is malleable. They see
challenge as an avenue to improvement and are better prepared to learn. Dweck cited
exemplars of growth mindsets, including Michael Jordan, Charles Darwin, photographer
Cindy Sherman and Lou Gerstner, who rescued IBM.

The idea quickly caught the public imagination, and the book became a best seller. Dweck’s
TED talk has nearly 10 million views. The mindset approach has been applied in stress and
mental health research, in conflict resolution and in corporate boardrooms. But it has been
especially influential in education as a way to help students, low achievers in particular, reach
their full potential. After the success of Dweck’s book, schools around the world began to
teach mindsets as a learning technique, and companies sprang up selling mindset materials to
teachers and parents.

Then came the pushback. Like several other major ideas from psychology, mindset research,
which began in the 1980s, has been reexamined in the current rigorous era of social science.
A soon-to-be published study that attempted to replicate two of Dweck’s most-cited papers
reported “little or no support for the idea that growth mindsets are beneficial for children’s
responses to failure or school attainment.” And while some mindset-based education
interventions had good results, others found no effect on student outcomes. A few
methodological questions about Dweck’s work have emerged (as have questions about the
replications and failed interventions), but the loudest criticism makes the claim that mindset
research overpromised and underdelivered. “Millions of dollars have gone into funding
mindset research. If it turns out this doesn’t work, that’s a massive lost opportunity,” says
psychologist Timothy Bates of the University of Edinburgh, senior author of the replication
study.

Even mindset’s proponents recognize that the concept was disseminated too far too fast.
“Any popular idea in education gets spread way ahead of how ready the science is,” says
psychologist David Yeager of the University of Texas at Austin. He is a leader among the
new generation of mindset researchers that has begun to refine the science underlying
interventions. Dweck says she used to think that growth mindset was a simple concept. “But
then we started becoming aware of all the ways that it might be misunderstood or not
implemented in a compelling way. One thing we’ve learned in the past five to 10 years is
how the nuances matter.”

Yeager and Dweck’s latest work takes these subtleties into account. A paper they and their
colleagues published on August 7 in Nature confirms that mindset interventions can work at
scale, especially for low-achieving students, but that context is critical. Exposure to two
short, low-cost online programs led to higher grades for lower-achieving ninth graders (the
average improvement was 0.1 grade point). Schools that fostered climates celebrating
academic success and curiosity saw the largest gains: some students got another half a grade
point or slightly more, and the likelihood of failure (a D or F average) fell by 8 percent. In
addition, high- and low-achieving ninth graders chose more challenging math courses in 10th
grade.

The study is notable not only for its findings but for its methods, which met today's exacting
scientific requirements and then some: It is a randomized controlled trial of more than 12,000
students from a nationally representative sample of public schools. The authors preregistered
their hypotheses and analysis plan (a step that prevents fishing for positive results), and the
intervention was administered by an independent research firm. And the statistical analysis
was reviewed independently, too. The work has also been replicated by a separate set of
researchers in a study of more than 6,500 students in Norway. (That replication will be
published separately.)

Some question whether this level of improvement—a mere 0.1 grade point boost, for instance
—is meaningful. “They’re claiming what most people think of as miniscule effects,” Bates
says. “This best case cannot be even a tiny part of a solution to the problems that need
solving in education.” That critique mirrors other reviews of mindset research. In two meta-
analyses, cognitive psychologist Brooke Macnamara of Case Western Reserve University and
her colleagues found what they considered “weak” effects that were similar to the findings in
the new national study. If the results are not going to be “profound,” Macnamara says, “the
companies that sell growth-mindset-intervention products should be clear about that in their
advertising.”

But educational economists such as Susan Dynarski of the University of Michigan have
argued that educational interventions must be judged in real-world settings, where small
effects can be important. Matthew Kraft, an educational economist at Brown University, has
reviewed almost 800 randomized controlled trials of education interventions and found a
median effect size of 0.1 standard deviation on student achievement outcomes. By
comparison, the mindset study’s intervention was more effective than half of those
interventions, which is particularly impressive for such a short, inexpensive program, says
Kraft, who was not involved in the work but is part of the Mindset Scholars Network. That
small bump in grade point average, he argues, could be the difference between a student
passing or failing exit exams or being eligible for an Advanced Placement course.

In Praise of Effort

The concept of mindsets was a direct response to the self-esteem movement. A seminal series
of Dweck’s studies, published in 1998, concerned the effect of praise on motivation. Dweck,
then at Columbia University, and one of her colleagues administered a series of puzzles to
about 400 fifth graders. After completing the first puzzle, children praised for their effort
(“You must have worked hard”) as opposed to their intelligence (“You must be smart”) were
far more likely to choose a more challenging puzzle to do next. In 2007, after moving to
Stanford, Dweck and psychologist Lisa Blackwell, then at Columbia, conducted another
important study. They followed 373 seventh graders to see whether mindset predicted grades
two years later. With a subset of students, they also performed the first mindset intervention,
explicitly teaching kids about the brain and that intelligence can be developed. Having a
growth mindset predicted higher grades, while a fixed mindset predicted a flat-grade
trajectory. Compared with those who did not receive the intervention, those who did showed
greater motivation in the classroom.

Like many mindset researchers, Yeager encountered Dweck’s work as a graduate student at
Stanford. He had taught middle school and wanted to use mindsets to improve education.
During graduate school, he worked at the nearby Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching, where he became interested in the challenge of effectively implementing
academic theories at scale. He was encouraged by a Carnegie project called Statway, which,
in part, used growth mindset instruction to help community college students pass remedial
math courses (a barrier for many in getting their degree.)

In 2015 Dweck, Yeager and others co-founded the Mindset Scholars Network, an
interdisciplinary group dedicated to furthering research on learning mindsets. Yeager also
began organizing the ambitious national study he and Dweck have just published. That meant
developing an effective, brief intervention that could be delivered directly to students. Larger,
longer interventions with trained instructors had been found to work well and might have
produced stronger results, but they would not be feasible in thousands of schools with many
competing demands for classroom time. The final materials, which will be free to educators
and researchers, consist of two 25-minute online sessions. They describe the brain as a
muscle that grows stronger with use and include a letter-writing activity to help kids
internalize the message.
At the same time, Dweck realized that there were problems with how mindsets were being
used. Pinning a poster about growth mindset on the wall of a classroom does not help if the
teacher creates an environment where kids are afraid of making a mistake, she says. “The
environment has to support the belief change and the behaviors that come with it.” She began
to warn of “false growth mindset” and included a new chapter to address the subject in an
updated edition of Mindset. “The important thing is learning in progress,” she says. “That is
brought about not only by effort but by trying new strategies and by seeking appropriate help
and input.” Dweck also divested her interest in Mindset Works, a company that sells mindset
materials under the brand Brainology. (Her former colleague Blackwell remains involved
with Brainology, and there is still a link to the company on the Web site for Dweck’s book.)

The attempted replication of Dweck’s work that is about to be published concerned the 1998
study on praise and part of the 2007 study. Bates and his student Yue Li conducted a series of
studies in a group of more than 600 Chinese students. Their results were mixed but mostly
found no effect. The positive effects they found were of much smaller magnitude than in
Dweck’s studies. “It just wasn’t working strongly enough or reliably enough to be anything
other than an artifact,” Bates says. Yeager and Dweck question some of Bates’s findings, and
Dweck reanalyzed her data and made it publicly available. The debate is likely to continue in
the coming months in academic journals. For now, Dweck is proud of her work on praise and
stands by it, and she notes that praise is not part of the mindset intervention in the national
study.

Attempted interventions in the U.K., Peru and Argentina are more comparable. In Peru, there
were positive effects in one out of three school districts. In the U.K. and Argentina, there
were none. Alejandro Ganimian, an assistant professor of psychology and economics at New
York University, who led the Argentina study, says, “It seemed to me at the start that it would
be more simplistic. It’s humbling.” He isn’t giving up yet and plans to do some smaller pilot
tests and to investigate possible reasons the program did not work, including the intervention
design or the age of the students (he studied 12th graders).

Dweck and Yeager’s recent Nature findings underscore the realization that successful
mindset interventions appear to require finesse. “The national study showed us how much
more there is to learn,” Yeager says. They spent years fine-tuning the materials they used and
are confident in their appropriateness for ninth graders but cannot be sure about other
populations or about the materials used in other interventions. “Just because it’s easy to
deliver doesn’t mean it’s easy to develop,” Yeager says.

Education is not the only field where mindset interventions are being tested. Clinical
psychologist Jessica Schleider of Stony Brook University studies the effectiveness of brief
interventions in treating adolescent depression and anxiety.* In mindsets, she saw parallels
with cognitive-behavioral therapy, which teaches individuals they have agency over their
thoughts and behaviors. With John Weisz of Harvard University, Schleider created a short
intervention that generated significant improvements in both parent- and youth-reported
levels of depression. Mindful of the backlash against mindsets in education, Schleider intends
to proceed slowly. “I want to really understand what we’re doing, why exactly it’s working
and what the component parts are before heading to dissemination,” she says.

The new motto for mindset science, then, seems to be this: tone down the hype and hone the
details. Dweck and Yeager hope to build on their national study to learn more about what
makes for a fertile learning environment and how to create supportive conditions elsewhere.
“We have really good evidence that under the right conditions, you can lift a portion of that
burden of the fixed mindset from students,” Yeager says. “That is a valid thing to be working
on as a school. The treatment gives students a hypothesis about their own learning and what
high school is like. It is up to us to create an environment in which that hypothesis is true.”

*Editor’s Note (8/12/19): This story was edited after posting. It originally described Jessica
Schleider as a cognitive psychologist.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Lydia Denworth

Contributing editor Lydia Denworth is author of Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and
Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond (W. W. Norton, 2020).

Credit: Nick Higgins

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Is it Time for a Personal Growth Mindset?
Our focus on competition, grades, and standardized test performance is
actively robbing children of the opportunity for the sort of personal growth that really
matters.

By Scott Barry Kaufman on November 30, 2015

In education circles, the phrase "growth mindset" is everywhere.

According to Carol Dweck, those with a growth mindset believe that intelligence can be
developed over time, whereas those with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence remains
stable across the lifespan. 

To test whether people have a growth mindset, Dweck uses items such as:

 "No matter who you are, you can significantly change your intelligence level."
 "You can always substantially change how intelligent you are."
 "No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit."
 "You can change even your basic intelligence level considerably."

Dweck and her colleagues have found that fostering an academic growth mindset can
raise school grades, and reduce racial, gender, and social class gaps in academic achievement
(see recent review). 
Clearly this work is important. But here's the thing: Dweck's growth mindset really isn't a
mindset. It's a set of beliefs,  specifically about intelligence. And as it turns out, some of the
growth mindset beliefs are far too simplistic.*

The reality is that intelligence (as traditionally defined in an academic context) doesn't really
budge all that much in our predominant educational paradigm. The research shows that the
school a person attends, and the quality of education they receive in fact plays little role in the
growth of general intellectual functioning, whereas schooling does impact the growth
of standardized test scores (see here). So yes, we can teach to the tests. And having an
academic growth mindset may cause growth in standardized testing, but it doesn't actually
show growth in general intellectual functioning. 

What's more, while general intellectual functioning is associated with growth in standardized

test performance (those with higher levels of working memory, processing speed, and
abstract reasoning show the greatest growth in test scores), growth in standardized test
performance does not improve general cognitive ability. Standardized tests are so superficial
from a learning perspective that any growth that one makes on the test rarely generalizes to
general intellectual functioning, or even longer-term retention.

But isn't there a bigger picture here? Don't we care about more than just grades, test scores,
and yes, even general intelligence? What about deep, meaningful learning that students will
remember the rest of their lives, that connects the material to their own personal dreams and
strivings? What about helping students learn about themselves and their identity? Or helping
them find their unique passions and inclinations, and cultivating that through engagement in
personally meaningful projects?

I believe it's time to move beyond an academic growth mindset (beliefs about
intelligence) and embrace a personal growth mindset.** In her 1989 seminal paper
"Happiness Is Everything, or Is It?", Carol Ryff argues that the drive to actualize oneself and
realize one's potentialities is critical to well-being. The person with a high drive for personal
growth "has a feeling of continued development, sees self as growing and expanding, is open
to new experiences, has a sense of realizing his or her potential, sees improvement in self and
behavior over time, [and] is changing in ways that reflect more self-knowledge and
effectiveness."

Ryff argues that too much emphasis has been placed on "happiness" (short-term positive
emotions) at the expense of more enduring life challenges such as gaining a sense of self-
realization. Indeed, many great thinkers throughout history have made the case that the
highest of all human goods may not be happiness, or even achievement, but the realization of
one's full self.

Ryff has found that those who report a sense of continued growth and development as a
person also tend to score higher in self-acceptance, purpose in life, positive relationships with
others, the capacity to manage effectively one's environment, and a sense of autonomy in life
(see here). In fact, all of these components of well-being are interrelated because they
reinforce each other.

Ryff has also found that the drive for personal growth decreases with age, most strikingly
between midlife and old age. As Ryff notes, opportunities for continued growth and
development and for meaningful experiences may be limited for people as they age. Which is
unfortunate considering that older people report that they value personal growth and humans
are living much longer today than ever before.

I haven't done the research yet, but I'm willing to bet that a personal growth mindset is
correlated not only with well-being, but also predicts the kind of deep, meaningful learning
we really ought to care about in school. In fact, I believe our focus on competition, grades,
and standardized test performance is actively robbing children of the opportunity for the sort
of personal growth that really matters.

Imagine that instead of asking children their beliefs about intelligence, we instead asked them
the following questions about their personal growth mindset:***

1. Are you interested in activities that will expand your horizons?

2. Do you think it's important to have new experiences that challenge how you think about
yourself and the world?
3. Do you feel as though you have really improved yourself as a person over the years?
4. Do you have the sense that you have developed a lot as a person over time?
5. Do you enjoy being in new situations that require you to change your old familiar ways of
doing things?
6. Has life been a continuous process of learning, changing, and growth for you?

I think these sort of questions more directly get at what educators really like about Dweck's
theory. This shift from an academic growth mindset to a personal growth mindset offers the
opportunity for schools to cultivate the whole person, not just intelligence. Each one of us has
our own unique set of potentialities, and our current standardized testing climate is
squelching all children from becoming who they really could be.

Not just in school, but in life, one of the most important things we can all cultivate for
optimal well-being and success is a personal growth mindset. How many of us are truly open
to new experiences and are courageous in pursuing challenging activities that make us feel
alive? That make us feel like we are contributing to the actualization of our deepest selves?

There's no doubt: Dweck's growth mindset theory has been incredibly influential in
education. I just see so many more possibilities. Not just for education, but for all of us.

© 2015 Scott Barry Kaufman, All Rights Reserved

Image credit:  iStock

Note: For more on how schools can foster self-actualization, see Maslow's beautiful book
"The Farther Reaches of Human Nature".

Footnotes:

* The truth about ability is that we all differ in our unique pattern of abilities, and all abilities
develop through a complex interplay of nature and nurture. That's a more nuanced view than
the binary fixed vs. growth dichotomy. I believe one can have realistic (but optimistic) beliefs
about his or her pattern of strengths and weaknesses while at the same time holding a
personal growth mindset that allows us all to be a better version of our selves. These need not
be incompatible with each other.
** I think a personal growth mindset is what Dweck really means by the term today anyway--
at least when she steps outside of the educational realm. For instance, in Mindset, Dweck
talks about how a growth mindset can inform parenting, business, and relationships, in
addition to education. When she talks about the importance of cultivating a growth mindset in
these other domains, what she describes sounds a lot more like a personal growth mindset
than beliefs about intelligence. I think part of the issue here is that in her early work, she
focused on beliefs about intelligence, and only later started referring to the beliefs as a
"mindset". But her measurement never really caught up with her concept. Unfortunately, I see
educators focus on the beliefs about intelligence aspect, and miss out on the bigger picture.
That's of course not all Dweck's fault. See here for Dweck's thoughtful clarification to
educators.

*** Items adapted from Ryff's scale.

Intelligence and Other Stereotypes: The
Power of Mindset
By Maria Konnikova on April 3, 2012

Walter Mischel was nine years old when he started kindergarten. It wasn’t that his parents
had been negligent in his schooling. It was just that the boy couldn’t speak English. It was
1940 and the Mischels had just arrived in Brooklyn; they’d been one of the few Jewish
families lucky enough to escape Vienna in the wake of the Nazi take-over in the spring of
1938. The reason had as much to do with luck as with foresight: they had discovered a
certificate of U.S. citizenship from a long-since-dead maternal grandfather. Apparently, he
had obtained it while working in New York City around 1900, before returning once more to
Europe.

But ask Dr. Mischel to recall his earliest memories, and chances are that the first thing he will
speak of is not of how the Hitler Youths stepped on his new shoes on the sidewalks of
Vienna. Nor will it be of how his father and other Jewish men were dragged from their
apartments and forced to march in the streets in their pajamas while holding branches in their
hands, in a makeshift “parade” staged by the Nazis in parody of the Jewish tradition of
welcoming spring. (His father had polio. He couldn’t walk without his cane. And so the
young Mischel had to watch as he jerked from side to side in the procession). Nor will it be of
the trip from Vienna, the time spent in London in an uncle’s spare room, the journey to the
United States at the outbreak of war.

Instead, it will be of the earliest days in that kindergarten classroom, when little Walter,
speaking hardly a word of English, was given an IQ test. It should hardly come as a surprise
that he did not fare well. He was in an alien culture and taking a test in an alien language.
And yet—his teacher was surprised. Or so she told him. She also told him how disappointed
she was. Weren’t foreigners supposed to be smart? She’d expected more from him.

Carol Dweck was on the opposite side of the story. When she was in sixth grade—also,
incidentally, in Brooklyn—she, too, was given an intelligence test, along with the rest of her
class. The teacher then proceeded to do something that would today raise many an eyebrow
but back then, was hardly uncommon: she arranged the students in order of score. The
“smart” students were seated closest to the teacher. And the less fortunate, further and further
away. The order was immutable—and those students who had fared less than well weren’t
even allowed to perform such basic classroom duties as washing the blackboard or carrying
the flag to the school assembly. They were to be reminded constantly that their IQ was
simply not up to par.

Dweck herself was one of the lucky ones. Her seat: number one. She had scored highest of all
her classmates. And yet, something wasn’t quite right. She knew that all it would take was
another test to make her less smart. And could it be that it was as simple as all that—a score,
and then your intelligence was marked for good?

Years later, Walter Mischel and Carol Dweck both found themselves on the faculty of
Columbia University. (As of this writing, Mischel is still there and Dweck has moved to
Stanford.) Both had become key players in social and personality psychology research
(though Mischel the 16-years-senior one)—and both credit that early test to their subsequent
career trajectories, their desire to conduct research into such supposedly fixed things as
personality traits and intelligence, things that could be measured with a simple test—and in
that measurement, determine your future.

It was easy enough to see how Dweck had gotten to that pinnacle of academic achievement.
She was, after all, the smartest. But what of Mischel? How could someone whose IQ would
have placed him squarely in the back of Dweck’s classroom have gone on to become one of
the leading figures in psychology of the twentieth century, he of the famous marshmallow
studies of self-control and of an entirely new approach to looking at personality and its
measurement? Something wasn’t quite right – and the fault certainly wasn’t with Mischel’s
intelligence or his stratospheric career trajectory.

For many years, Carol Dweck has been researching exactly what that “not quite right” thing
may be. Her research has been guided by two main assumptions: IQ cannot be the only way
to measure intelligence, and there might be more to that very concept of intelligence than
meets the eye.

I’ve written before about Dweck’s theories of intelligence, but let me briefly reiterate the
concept here. According to Dweck, you can believe that intelligence is either incremental or
that it is a fixed entity. If you are an incremental theorist, you believe that intelligence is fluid
and can be changed. In other words, you think that Walter Mischel’s original IQ score is not
only something that should not be a cause for disappointment, but that it has little bearing on
his actual ability and later performance. Not only is he starting from a much higher base than
what was captured by a test he could not have possibly been expected to understand, but his
performance on other intelligence-related measures can improve with work, with application,
with motivated dedication. Or, to put it in terms of that classroom, being put in the last seat
doesn’t mean much except that you didn’t do so hot on a single test. As for the future, it can
be far brighter—and far closer to the proverbial front of the room.

If, on the other hand, you are an entity theorist, you believe that intelligence cannot be
changed, that it is given at birth and remains constant throughout life. This was the position
of Dweck’s sixth-grade teacher—and of Mischel’s kindergarten one. It means that once in the
back, you’re stuck in the back. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Sorry, buddy, luck of
the draw.

In the course of her research, Dweck has repeatedly found that a person’s performance
depends in large part on which of the two beliefs he espouses. If you believe yourself to be
capable of improvement, believe that your mind can learn, can become better, can overcome
setbacks, you are setting yourself—and your brain—up for exactly that path. And if you
don’t? You may find yourself living in a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy, where you prove
those elementary school teachers right simply by believing that what they say is the way
things are—instead of, like Mischel and Dweck, challenging the very assumption at its core.

But here’s the thing: mindset isn’t predetermined, just as intelligence isn’t a monolithic Thing
that is preset from birth. We can learn, we can improve, and we can change our habitual
approach to the world. Take the example of stereotype threat, an instance where others’
perception of us—or what we think that perception is—influences how we in turn act, and
does so on the same subconscious level as all primes. Being a token member of a group—for
example, a single woman among men—can increase self-consciousness and negatively
impact performance. Having to write down your ethnicity or gender before taking a test has a
negative impact on math scores for females and overall scores for minorities. On the GREs,
having race made salient lowers black students’ performance. Asian women perform better
on math tests when their Asian identity is made salient—and worse when their female
identity is. White men perform worse on athletic tasks when they think performance is based
on natural ability—and black men, when they are told it is based on athletic intelligence. In
other words, how we think others see us influences how we subsequently perform.

But that performance isn’t the end of the story. Just as our mindset can hold us back, it can
move us forward. Our mindset can change, and with it, our self-perception and our
subsequent ability to take on various tasks. Women who are given examples of females
successful in scientific and technical fields don’t experience the negative performance effects
on math tests. College students exposed to Dweck’s theories of intelligence—specifically, the
incremental theory—have higher grades and identify more with the academic process at the
end of the semester. In one study, minority students who wrote about the personal
significance of a self-defining value (such as family relationships or musical interests) three
to five times during the school year had a GPA that was 0.24 grade points higher over the
course of two years than those who wrote about neutral topics—and low-achieving African
Americans showed improvements of 0.41 points, on average. Moreover, the rate of
remediation dropped from 18% to 5%.

Intelligence, or IQ, is just one piece of the puzzle – and Dweck’s incremental-entity divide
just one instance of a far broader phenomenon: mindset may begin in the head, but its
repercussions are far wider. And as we change our thinking, so too are we changing our
performance and, in a very real way, our abilities.

Our brains never stop learning, never stop changing, never stop growing new connections and
pruning unused ones. And they never stop growing stronger in those areas where we
reinforce them, like a muscle that keeps strengthening with use (but atrophies with disuse),
that can be trained to perform feats of strength we’d never before thought possible—indeed,
that we’d never even thought to imagine.

Take the case of the artist Ofey. When Ofey first started to paint, he was a middle-aged
physicist who hadn’t drawn a day in his life. He wasn’t sure he’d ever learn how. But learn he
did, going on to have his own one-man show and to sell his art to collectors all over the
world.

Ofey, of course, is not your typical case. He wasn’t just any physicist. He happens to have
been the Nobel-Prize winning Richard Feynman, a man of uncommon genius in nearly all of
his pursuits. Feynman had created Ofey as a pseudonym to ensure that his art was valued on
its own terms and not on those of his laurels elsewhere. (The name itself is a play on words,
from the French au fait, which usually means ‘by the way’ or ‘informed’ but was used by
Feynman in the sense, ‘it is done.’) And yet there are multiple other cases. While Feynman
may be unique in his contributions to physics, he certainly is not in representing the brain’s
ability to change—and to change in profound ways—late in life.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses—better known as Grandma Moses—did not begin to paint until
she was 75. She went on to be compared to Peter Bruegel in her artistic talent. In 2006, her
painting Sugaring Off sold for $1.2 million. Vaclav Havel was a playwright and writer—until
he became the center of the Czech opposition movement and then, the first post-Communist
president of Czechoslovakia, at the age of 53. Harlan David Sanders—better known as
Colonel Sanders—didn’t start his Kentucky Fried Chicken company until the age of 65—but
went on to become one of the most successful businessmen of his generation. The Swedish
shooter Oscar Swahn competed in his first Olympic games in 1908, when he was sixty years
old. He won two gold and one bronze medals—and when he turned 72, became not only the
oldest Olympian ever, but the oldest medalist in history after his bronze-winning performance
at the 1920 games.

And just think of the countless examples in literature. Richard Adams did not publish
Watership Down until he was 52. He’d never even thought of himself as a writer. The book
that was to sell over 50 million copies (and counting) was born out of a story that he told to
his daughters. Bram Stoker’s Dracula wasn’t published until he was 50. Daniel Defoe wrote
Robinson Crusoe, his first novel, just before he turned 60. Karen von Blixen-Finecke, better
known by her pen name of Isak Dinesen, didn’t write her first book until she was 49.
Raymond Chandler—one of my all-time favorites—didn’t write his first story until he was 45
– and it wasn’t until six years later that The Big Sleep introduced Philip Marlowe to the
world. The list is long, the examples varied, the accomplishments all over the map. (Take a
look at the New York Times from April 1, 2012, detailing the story of Kathy Martin.)

And yes, there are those to whom talent seems to come effortlessly. But though the talent is
real, the effortlessness is an illusion. Nothing just happens out of the blue. We have to work
for it. And how can we work at something if we don’t believe it can happen in the first place?
It all begins with a deceptively simple thing. A mindset.

Not only is intelligence not fixed, but neither are any number of abilities that we may think
we either have or don’t have, be they as straightforward-seeming as math skills or as complex
as musicality. Walter Mischel and Carol Dweck may have been labeled when young, but at
the end, it was their attitude towards those labels and not the labels themselves that ended up
determining the course of their lives.

It is a remarkable thing, the human brain.

This post is adapted from a draft of my forthcoming book on Sherlock Holmes, to be

published by Viking in 2013.

Dweck, C. (2008). Can Personality Be Changed? The Role of Beliefs in Personality and
Change Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17 (6), 391-394 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-
8721.2008.00612.x

Steele, C. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and
performance. American Psychologist, 52 (6), 613-629 DOI: 10.1037//0003-066X.52.6.613

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific
American.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Maria Konnikova

Maria Konnikova is a writer living in New York City, where she works on an assortment of
non-fiction and fiction. Her first book, MASTERMIND (Viking, 2013), was a New York
Times bestseller. She previously wrote the popular psychology blog Artful Choice on Big
Think. Her writing has appeared in publications that include The New Yorker, The Atlantic,
The New York Times, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, Salon, and The New
Republic, among many others. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University,
where she studied psychology, creative writing, and government, and received her PhD in
Psychology from Columbia University. Most mornings, Maria can be found in a yoga studio.
Most afternoons, she can be found writing, reading, or conducting definitive explorations into
the workings of the human mind. Follow Maria on Twitter @mkonnikova

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