“Not Yet”

What a growth mindset means in the second half of life — and why the brain is wired to reward you for pursuing it

I co-founded and built a company for 23 years until 2020. Those 23 years accounted for less than two-thirds of my working life, but they were most of what gave me direction and purpose.

That statement holds more weight than it seems at first glance. It also holds the early mornings, the late nights, the decisions that kept me up, and the decisions that turned out right.

It holds the people I hired and the ones I let go, as well as the many clients who trusted me with what mattered most. It holds a large portion of my identity — the story I told about myself when someone asked who I was.

When we sold the firm, and I rode the elevator down from Bentall One for the last time, I didn’t just leave a job. I lost the structure that had organized my drive, curiosity, and sense of forward motion for more than two decades. What I discovered in the months that followed was that the absence of that structure didn’t mean the absence of the underlying capacity. It meant I had to find a new direction for that capacity.

That process — redirecting the same drive that built a career toward building a different kind of life — turns out to be a ‘thing’. And the research on it, when applied to adults in the second half of life, is more robust than most people realize.

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Carol Dweck is a Stanford University psychologist whose 2006 book, ‘Mindset: The New Psychology of Success’, introduced a concept that has since become one of the most replicated findings in psychology. Her central distinction is between two ways of understanding ability.

A fixed mindset holds that intelligence, talent, and capability are essentially innate — you have a certain amount, and that’s that. The goal becomes proving you have enough. A growth mindset holds that abilities are malleable, that effort, challenge, and learning change what you are capable of, and that the goal therefore becomes getting better rather than looking good.

The phrase that captures the distinction most clearly for older adults is two words: not yet.

When someone with a fixed mindset encounters something they can’t do for any reason, they hear “I can’t do that”. Full stop. When someone with a growth mindset encounters the same thing, they hear “I can’t do that yet.”

The ‘yet’ is the difference between a ceiling and a horizon.

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But what if you are 69, not 21?

Dweck’s original research focused primarily on children and students. In the years since, a growing body of work has applied the same framework to older adults — and the findings are striking.

A 2025 study of community-dwelling adults aged 60 and older found that a growth mindset significantly improved both active health behaviours and subjective well-being.

Research compiled by Fleck, Sheffler, and Zeng found that a growth mindset in older adults is associated with greater psychological resilience, fewer depressive symptoms, higher life satisfaction, and better cognitive performance. These are not soft outcomes. They are the clinical markers of healthy ageing.

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Here is what you don’t know about retirement before you experience it: the problem is not the absence of work. It is the absence of the growth loop that work provided.

A career, particularly a demanding one, is a continuous environment for growth. There are problems to solve that have never been solved before. There are skills to develop to meet new demands. Some setbacks require recalibration and strategies that raise the bar.

Every year during a serious career, if you were paying attention, you were someone different at the end than you were at the beginning. Not better in every way. But changed. Extended. You had done things you hadn’t known how to do before.

By default, retirement removes all of that. Not because older adults can’t grow — the neuroscience is clear on that — but because the external structure that demanded growth is gone. If nothing intentional steps in, it is often replaced by a comfortable stasis. The life that looks full on the outside and feels oddly flat on the inside.

A fixed mindset about retirement sounds like this: my best work is behind me. My learning years are over. I am managing a long conclusion.

These beliefs, held implicitly rather than stated explicitly, shape behaviour in ways that become self-fulfilling. Research published in 2025 sheds light on the subject: misconceptions that aging leads only to decline and is uncontrollable undermine older adults’ autonomy and discourage active aging behaviours. The mindset is not just a feeling. It has measurable consequences for how people live.

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The psychology of a growth mindset connects, at the neurobiological level, to one of the most important findings in modern neuroscience: the role of dopamine in motivation and goal pursuit.

Most people think of dopamine as the pleasure chemical — the substance released when something good happens. The research tells a more precise and considerably more useful story. Neuroscientist Kent Berridge at the University of Michigan has spent decades distinguishing between two separate systems: wanting and liking. Dopamine, his research established, drives the wanting — the motivated pursuit of a goal — rather than the pleasure of arriving at it. It is the brain’s pursuit currency, not its reward currency.

Wolfram Schultz, whose dopamine prediction error research earned him the Brain Prize in 2017, showed that dopamine neurons fire most strongly not when a reward arrives, but when the brain anticipates progress toward one.

This distinction matters enormously for anyone in the second half of life, because it reframes what the brain actually needs. It does not need to arrive at the destination. It needs the experience of being on the way to one. The challenge itself — the not-yet-ness of a meaningful goal — is what produces the neurochemical state that feels like being alive and engaged.

There is also a counterintuitive but well-supported corollary: focusing only on the reward at the end of effort can undermine the process, making it feel more painful and time feel longer. The brain needs to learn to find dopamine in the effort itself, not just in its completion.

This is, when you think about it, a neurobiological description of what a growth mindset looks like in practice. The person with a growth mindset has learned to find something rewarding in the challenge. The person with a fixed mindset has not.

For older adults, this has practical implications. The dopamine system does not retire. It continues to require the same inputs — challenge, progress, and the sense of moving toward something that matters — that it has always required. What changes after 60 is not the brain’s need for growth. It is the absence of the structure that previously delivered it automatically.

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Research on growth mindset interventions in older adults has one consistent finding: mindset is teachable. A 2021 study from the University of California found that adults averaging age 69 who participated in a growth mindset intervention significantly increased their growth mindset over three months, whereas control participants did not. The brain responds. You are not locked into the mindset you currently hold.

What does applying a growth mindset to the second half of life actually look like? Not as a slogan, but as a practice.

Find the goal that requires you to grow.

A goal that doesn’t challenge you won’t trigger the dopamine loop that sustains motivation. The research is specific: goals must balance challenge with attainability. Too easy, and the system doesn’t engage. Too hard, and it shuts down. The sweet spot is the edge of your current capability — the thing you cannot yet do but could plausibly do. For some people, that is a physical pursuit: a Gran Fondo, a masters swimming competition, or a return to a sport abandoned decades ago. For others, it is intellectual: a certification, a second language, or a body of writing. The domain matters less than the genuine stretch required.

Separate the goal from the identity.

One of the traps of a career identity is that the goal and the self become merged. When the goal ends, the self feels diminished. A growth mindset requires reframing the goal as something you are working toward rather than something you are. The career was not who you were. It was what you were doing with who you were. The capacities it drew on — the discipline, the problem-solving, the tolerance for uncertainty, the ability to build something from nothing — did not retire with the title.

Embrace the not-yet.

The most practically useful aspect of Dweck’s framework for this stage of life is permission to be a beginner again. The high-achieving professional who spent decades being competent in their field has often lost the muscle memory for not knowing things. Growth mindset recovers it. Not knowing something yet is not a failure of intelligence. It is the starting position of every meaningful learning experience you have ever had.

Let the process be the point.

The brain’s reward system is not primarily activated by achievement. It is activated by progress. The daily training session, the completed chapter, the skill improving incrementally — these are not means to an end. They are, neurochemically, the point. Learning to find dopamine in the effort, not only in the outcome, is the practice that sustains motivation over the long arc of a second chapter.

Measure differently.

Career success has clear metrics: revenue, headcount, deals closed, and market position. The second half of life requires a different measurement system, and most people haven’t consciously built one. Applying a growth mindset here means defining what progress looks like in the domains that matter now — health, relationships, contribution, and learning — and tracking progress in those areas with the same rigour once used to track business outcomes. What gets measured gets pursued. What gets pursued produces the growth loop the brain requires.

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I have drawn on this concept personally in ways both connected and not.

When I signed up for photography courses to learn how to take beautiful photographs rather than mediocre ones, I was surrounded by younger, talented people pursuing careers in media. I was not comfortable putting myself out there in that unfamiliar environment after a long business career. That discomfort, I now understand, was exactly the point.

When I started studying for my NASM certification at 69, I was not the most natural student in the room. I was learning material I had no prior framework for, being tested on content that required genuine effort to absorb, and frequently experiencing the discomfort of not knowing something that younger classmates seemed to grasp more quickly.

And when I returned to cycling after cancer to see if I could be competitive again, I was dropped on every hill during a 120 Km gran fondo and arrived at the finish in the bottom 25% of riders. The satisfaction of completing the race and every KM of that ride to Whistler, British Columbia kept me coming back each year anyway.

It is the most alive I have felt in years up to that point.

That sensation — of being genuinely stretched, of being in the not-yet space of something I was working toward — is what the neuroscience of dopamine and the psychology of growth mindset describe from different directions. The brain at 69 craves challenge for the same reason the brain at 35 did. It has simply, in many cases, lost the structure that used to provide it.

The growth mindset is not a framework just for younger people. It is, the evidence now suggests, more important in the second half of life than in the first — because in the first half, the environment provides challenge automatically. In the second half, you must go looking for it.

Not yet is not a consolation. It is an invitation.

The research on growth mindset in older adults is developing rapidly. If you are working with a therapist, coach, or occupational therapist, the framework described here is increasingly being applied in clinical settings and is worth discussing in that context.

Research & sources referenced in this piece

Dweck, C.S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine Books.

Xiao, X. et al. (2025). Growth mindset, active health behaviours and subjective well-being in community-dwelling older adults aged 60+. Journal of Happiness Studies. DOI: 10.1007/s10902-025-00980-7

Heslin, P.A. et al. (2021). Does a Growth Mindset Enable Successful Aging? ResearchGate / Psychology and Aging.

Fleck, Sheffler, Zeng et al. (2024). Growth mindset in older adults: psychological resilience, depressive symptoms, life satisfaction, and cognitive performance. Cited in Heslin et al. review.

Sheffler, P. et al. (2021). The Impact of Growth Mindset on Older Adults’ Cognitive Functioning in a Multi-Skill Learning Intervention. Innovation in Aging. PMC8679252. DOI: 10.1093/geroni/igab046.1200

Yang, Q. & Xiao, X. (2025). Group Psychological Counseling-Based Growth Mindset Intervention to Promote Active Aging Behaviour

s in Older People. Innovation in Aging. DOI: 10.1093/geroni/igaf122.814

O’Brien, K. (December 2025). Cultivating a Growth Mindset: Why Productive Aging Isn’t Just About Activity but Attitude. American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA).

Berridge, K.C. & Robinson, T.E. (1998). What is the role of dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience? Brain Research Reviews, 28(3), 309–369.

Schultz, W. (1997). A neural substrate of prediction and reward. Science, 275(5306), 1593–1599.

Schultz, W. (2016). Dopamine reward prediction-error signalling: a two-component response. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(3), 183–195.

AARP Research (October 2024). Second Half of Life: Optimism and Happiness Among Adults 50+.