The Plasticity Principle: Why Some Excel While Others Plateau

What is the question your life is trying to answer? It’s not always apparent because it’s often not even conscious, which makes it all the more interesting to ponder.

While I’ve always been fascinated by the questions we spend our lives trying to answer, what I find even more interesting is what inspired the pursuit. Some of us can’t pinpoint that moment, and some never even think about it.

Carol Dweck, an American psychologist who pioneered the study of human motivation, has spent her career trying to answer this question—researching the origins of people’s self-conceptions, learning how their beliefs influence their motivation, guiding their behavior, and sense of self.

Dweck can even pinpoint the exact moment the seed of this interest was planted.

Born in 1946 and raised in Brooklyn, Dweck recalls that when she entered Mrs. Wilson’s sixth-grade class at PS 153 in the late 1950s, the seats were arranged not by the students’ names, but by their IQs.

Mrs. Wilson believed IQ is a fixed trait—a carefully calibrated measure of a person’s intelligence and character. Therefore, Mrs. Wilson’s spurious logic showed that the kids with high IQs should be rewarded with the best seats.

But that’s not all! The kids with the highest IQs were also allowed to erase and clean the blackboard. Only the smartest kids could carry the flag during assembly or bring a note to the principal. (Not for nothing, but if I were a low-IQ kid, I’d consider these perks.)

So what of the students with low IQs? Mrs. Wilson thought they were dumb and must have believed that people should be punished for their “stupidity.”

Dweck was, not surprisingly, a high-IQ kid and had the best seat: seat one, row one. But good seats came with a price; if she did poorly on a state test, her seat assignment would change.

Yet, within Mrs. Wilson’s eugenics-leaning framework, Dweck was quite successful. Positioning IQ as the defining marker of intelligence cast a strong impression on the sixth-grader.

When we benefit from something, regardless of whether we buy into it or not, it can’t help but shape our worldview. It went even further for Dweck, becoming the focal point of her academic and professional life.

The experience of being in Mrs. Wilson’s sixth-grade class planted the seed that germinated Dweck’s interest in intelligence and people’s ability to cope with failure and setbacks. Yet, due to Mrs. Wilson’s influence, she also carried the belief that intelligence is fixed and that the IQ’s role is to capture that fixed intelligence by grading it on a scale.

Not only is that a warped misconception of IQ, but it’s also in direct opposition to its original intention, which was to identify and help struggling students—Big Ups, Alfred Binet!)

After high school, where she excelled, Dweck studied psychology at Barnard. She got her Master’s at Columbia and then went to Yale for a Ph.D. in social and developmental psychology.

It was the late 1960s, and the trending theory in psychology at Yale was Learned Helplessness, a concept developed by Martin Seligman (one of the leading authorities in Positive Psychology) that saw people falling back on maladaptive childlike behavior during stressful situations.

Instead of relying on their problem-solving skills, they simply dissolved and waited to be saved by others.

Learned helplessness is anchored in self-limiting beliefs about one’s ability to control what happens to them—because they believe they are helpless, they act helpless.

Learned helplessness called to Dweck. She wanted to know how our beliefs about our intelligence impact our performance, whether there was a relationship between learned helplessness and poor academic performance.

And do people’s beliefs influence the way they deal with failure? While researching this issue, she discovered the theory about human behavior that would define her career.

While at Yale, she studied fifth-grade students to see how they dealt with failure. She gave them a series of puzzles that were purposefully too difficult. As the kids struggled to solve the puzzles, she was surprised by their responses.

My most profound insights don't go in the free version—they're distilled from my 27 years in therapy, decades of independent study, and work as a mental health advocate. These deeper dives are reserved for readers committed to going deeper.

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