Does the 2018 meta-analysis mean growth mindset interventions are useless?

No, but it does mean their effects are small in the typical case. Sisk and colleagues found an average effect of d = 0.08 across mindset interventions, which is small enough to be practically negligible for most students. They also found larger effects for low-achieving students and students in low-resource contexts. The honest read is that mindset interventions can help, especially in specific populations, but they are not the powerful lever the popular version of the theory often suggests. The takeaway is to combine mindset work with structured practice methods, not to abandon the mindset framing.

What is the difference between practice and deliberate practice?

Ordinary practice is repetition of something you can already do. Deliberate practice is repetition with five specific components: a well-defined goal, full attention, immediate feedback on the gap between current and target performance, repetition with adjustment, and sustained engagement at the edge of current ability. Most informal practice fails on at least two of those components. The distinction matters because deliberate practice produces measurable improvement and ordinary practice often does not, even when the time invested is identical.

Was Ericsson's '10,000 hours' a real rule?

Not in the way Gladwell popularised it. The 10,000 hours figure came from a 1993 study of violinists at the Berlin Academy of Music and described the average practice time of the top performers by age 20. Ericsson himself emphasised that there is nothing magical about 10,000 hours, that the figure varies enormously across domains, and that the kind of practice matters more than the number of hours. He explicitly disagreed with the way the figure was simplified into a universal rule.

How do I apply deliberate practice if I cannot afford a coach?

The most valuable function of a coach is supplying immediate feedback on the gap between your current performance and the target. You can approximate this without a coach using three substitutes. First, recordings. Record yourself and compare to a reference. Second, structured benchmarks. Define a measurable target every two to four weeks and check your progress against it. Third, peer feedback. Find one or two people working on the same skill and review each other's work systematically. None of these are as good as a strong coach, but together they cover most of the feedback function and make deliberate practice possible at low cost.

Why Growth Mindset Alone Is Not Enough: The Case for the Deliberate Practice Mindset

The Half-Story Most People Inherit

The popular version of growth mindset, as it has filtered into self-help books, leadership decks, and school curricula, often goes something like this. People who believe their abilities can grow do better than people who believe their abilities are fixed. Therefore, change your beliefs and your performance will follow.

Carol Dweck's original research, which began at Stanford in the late 1980s and crystallised in her 2006 book Mindset, is more careful than that summary. But the summary is what most people inherit. And the summary, taken alone, has produced a wave of disappointment over the last decade as researchers have looked closely at whether mindset interventions actually move outcomes.

The most rigorous answer so far is from a 2018 meta-analysis by Sisk, Burgoyne, Sun, Butler, and Macnamara, published in Psychological Science. The meta-analysis pooled results from 53 studies on mindset interventions. The average effect size was d = 0.08. To translate that, an effect size of 0.08 moves the average student from the 50th percentile to roughly the 53rd percentile in academic performance. That is small enough that, in educational research, it is conventionally considered negligible.

A separate analysis published in 2023 by Burnette and colleagues in Psychological Bulletin found somewhat larger effects, but only in specific subgroups, particularly low-achieving students and students from low-resource contexts. For typical learners in typical settings, the effect remained small.

The honest interpretation of these results is not that growth mindset is wrong. It is that mindset alone is doing a fraction of the work that the popular version implies it should do. Something is missing.

The missing piece, according to a research tradition that ran in parallel to Dweck's for decades, is the structure of the practice that mindset is supposed to enable. That research tradition is most associated with K. Anders Ericsson, and the concept it converges on is deliberate practice.

What Deliberate Practice Actually Means

Ericsson, until his death in 2020, was the leading scientific authority on how expert performance develops. His career, summarised in his 2016 book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (co-authored with Robert Pool), studied chess masters, classical musicians, surgeons, and athletes to identify what separates ordinary performance from exceptional performance.

The popular shorthand for Ericsson's work is "10,000 hours," a phrase popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. Ericsson himself rejected that framing. The number was an average across one specific study of violinists, not a universal threshold. More importantly, the hours alone were not what produced expertise. The kind of practice was.

Deliberate practice has a specific structure. Ericsson identified the components in a series of papers beginning in the early 1990s. The components are:

A specific, well-defined goal. Not "play the piano better," but "play this passage at 120 beats per minute without errors."

Full attention, not background activity. Watching a tutorial while cooking dinner is not deliberate practice. Sitting at the instrument with the metronome on is.

Immediate feedback on the gap between current and target performance. Either from a coach, a teacher, or a structure that makes the gap visible to you (a recording, a checklist, a measurable benchmark).

Repetition with adjustment. Not the same repetition over and over, but a cycle of attempt, observe gap, adjust, attempt again, in tight loops.

Sustained engagement at the edge of current ability, in a zone Ericsson called the zone of proximal development, borrowing the term from Vygotsky. Practice that is comfortable does not produce growth. Practice that is overwhelming does not either. The target is the narrow band where current ability is being stretched but not broken.

Most of what people call "practice" lacks several of these components. Playing songs you already know is not deliberate practice. Watching educational videos is not deliberate practice. Doing the same calisthenics routine for two years is not deliberate practice. All of these are forms of activity, and activity is not the same thing as the kind of structured, feedback-driven, edge-of-ability work that produces measurable improvement.

Why Mindset Without Deliberate Practice Underperforms

Once you put the two ideas next to each other, the meta-analyses on growth mindset start to make more sense.

A growth mindset intervention, in most studies, is a brief educational message: a video, a reading, sometimes a short series of lessons explaining that intelligence is malleable. The intervention changes what students believe about their abilities. It does not change how they study. It does not equip them with deliberate practice methods. It does not give them feedback structures. It does not put them in coaching relationships.

What you would expect, in advance, from such an intervention is a small effect on motivation and persistence, with effects on actual performance only to the extent that motivation and persistence are the limiting factors. The 2018 Sisk meta-analysis result of d = 0.08 is roughly what theory would predict. The effect is real but bounded.

The interesting follow-up question is whether the same students, given the mindset message and also taught how to practice deliberately, would produce a larger effect. There is preliminary evidence suggesting yes, including studies on what is sometimes called the "deliberate practice mindset" or "mastery-oriented practice." Ericsson and colleagues argued in Peak that the productive frame is not just "I can grow" but "I can grow if I structure my practice this way." The belief is the prerequisite. The method is the lever.

In an interview shortly before his death, Ericsson made this point directly. The growth mindset is half of the picture. The other half is the deliberate practice mindset. Without it, the belief that you can improve has nowhere productive to go.

What This Means for How You Approach a New Skill

The practical implication of putting the two frameworks together is that committing to a new skill is a two-step act, not a one-step one.

The first step is the mindset work. You do, in fact, have to believe that the skill is learnable for someone with your starting point. Without that belief, you will not invest the time to begin, and you will not persist through the early plateau where progress is slow and effortful. The growth mindset literature, even at its modest effect sizes, is correctly identifying a necessary condition.

The second step is the deliberate practice structure. Once you have committed to learning the skill, the next question is not how much time will I spend, but what does the practice loop look like. Specifically:

What is the smallest unit of the skill I can practise in isolation? In language learning, that might be a particular grammar pattern in 10 example sentences. In coding, that might be implementing a specific algorithm without reference. In writing, that might be revising a single paragraph for a specific quality, like rhythm or precision.

What is my feedback source? A coach is ideal. Failing that, a structured reference. Failing that, a recording or output you can compare to a target. Practice without feedback is rehearsing what you already do, not learning what you do not.

How do I know I have moved my edge? Define a small measurable benchmark every two to four weeks. If you cannot tell whether you have improved, you cannot tell whether your practice is producing improvement.

How do I keep the practice at the edge? When something becomes comfortable, the practice has stopped working. The deliberate practice frame requires a willingness to repeatedly find the next thing that is hard.

This sounds demanding because it is. Ericsson's research consistently found that experts in any domain practice differently from amateurs in ways that amateurs find unpleasant. The most striking finding from Ericsson's violinist studies was not the hours. It was that elite-track violinists rated their practice sessions as the least enjoyable part of their day. The practice was working precisely because it was uncomfortable.

The Honest Reframe of "You Can Improve"

Combining the two ideas produces a reframe that is more useful, if less inspirational, than either alone.

The growth mindset version says: you can improve, so try.

The deliberate practice version says: you can improve at almost any skill, but the rate at which you improve depends almost entirely on how you structure the practice. Most practice is not deliberate. Most improvement is therefore slower than it could be.

The combined version says: believe you can improve, then take the harder step of designing the practice that produces the improvement, then sustain that practice across enough repetitions for the skill to compound.

This is harder to write on a poster. It is also closer to what the research actually supports. The 2018 meta-analysis on mindset is not a refutation of the value of believing you can grow. It is a reminder that belief is the entry point, not the engine. The engine is the structured practice that the belief enables.

For more on the cognitive structure that supports sustained practice, see our article on the two-minute rule and habit formation, which covers the friction-reduction side of the same problem. And for a related angle on how mindset operates at work, The Leader's Table covers the application of these ideas to professional skill development across a career.