Carol Dweck remembers exactly where she sat in Mrs. Wilson's sixth-grade classroom at PS 153 in Brooklyn: seat one, row one.

It was the best seat in the house.

This wasn't luck. Mrs. Wilson didn't arrange her classroom by last names or height or who arrived first on the first day of school. She arranged it by IQ scores. The smartest kids got the best seats. The dumbest kids—and Mrs. Wilson considered them dumb—got the worst.

But the seating chart was just the beginning. Only the high-IQ students were allowed to carry the flag during assembly. Only they could take notes to the principal's office. Only they could erase the blackboard—a privilege that sounds absurd now but felt significant to a sixth-grader in the late 1950s.

Dweck, born in 1946, was a high-IQ kid. She got the perks. She got the good seat. And because she benefited from this system—regardless of whether she believed in it—it shaped her.

When you're rewarded for something, even something you didn't ask for, it can't help but influence how you see the world.

But there was a dark side to being seat one, row one.

If Dweck performed poorly on a state test, her seat assignment would change. Her position in the classroom hierarchy wasn't just about intelligence—it was about proving that intelligence, again and again, never making a mistake, never slipping up. The pressure was constant.

Mrs. Wilson believed IQ was fixed—a permanent measure of a person's intelligence and character. You were either smart or you weren't. The number didn't lie, and it didn't change. This belief, which young Carol absorbed whether she wanted to or not, would become the very thing she'd spend her entire career trying to disprove.

Many people grew up with this warped misconception of IQ—that it’s inherited and fixed. Even today, people believe that intelligence can be measured. Yet, when Alfred Binet created the very first IQ test in 1905, to identify and help struggling students, by determining their mental age, he was clear that intelligence was rooted in experience; it wasn’t linear or inanimate: it could not be measured.

The Questions That Follow Us

As Russian graduate student Bluma Zeigarnik proved in the early 20th century, it’s the unanswered questions—the open loops—that occupy us.

Everyone has a question their life is trying to answer, whether they realize it or not.

Sometimes we can trace our question back to a single moment—a classroom, a parent's comment, a failure that shifted who we thought we were. Sometimes the question grows slowly, accumulating through years of small experiences. And sometimes we never think about it at all.

For Dweck, the question crystallized in Mrs. Wilson's classroom: What makes some people smart and others not? And more troubling: If intelligence is fixed, what happens to those of us who aren't smart enough?

She carried these questions with her through high school, where she excelled, then to Barnard College, where she studied psychology. She got her Master's at Columbia and continued to Yale for a Ph.D. in social and developmental psychology, arriving in the late 1960s when the trending theory was something called "learned helplessness."

Martin Seligman, one of the leading figures in positive psychology, who coined the term Learned Helplessness, observed that people sometimes fall back on childlike, maladaptive behavior during stressful situations. Instead of problem-solving, they simply dissolve and wait to be rescued. They believe they are helpless, so they act helpless.

This called to Dweck. She wanted to know: How do our beliefs about intelligence impact our performance? Is there a relationship between learned helplessness and poor academic performance? And do people's beliefs influence how they deal with failure?

She decided to study fifth-graders.