Simply believing you can improve turns out to be a weaker lever than the popular version of this idea suggests, especially once you're past childhood. The more useful research isn't about adopting a belief, it's about catching the specific, checkable habits that belief is supposed to produce, how you explain a setback, what you credit a success to, and changing those directly. This piece separates what's actually well evidenced from what's been oversold, and gives five practical ways to work with it.

Two leaders can go through the same difficult year and learn very different amounts from it. Experience gives you opportunities to learn, but it doesn't automatically tell you what the lesson is, whether you've drawn the right one, or where else it applies. This article shows you how to get more learning from the experiences you're already having by extracting lessons, testing them, exposing them to other perspectives and updating them when the evidence changes.