But isn’t potential someone’s capacity to develop their skills with effort over time? And that’s just the point. How can we know where effort and tim… - Carol S. Dweck

George Dantzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved.

...when people already know they're deficient, they have nothing to lose by trying.

What did they know? They knew that human qualities, such as intellectual skills, could be cultivated through effort. And that’s what they were doing — getting smarter. Not only weren’t they discouraged by failure, they didn’t even think they were failing. They thought they were learning.