Growth Mindset Psychology: The Science of Self-Improvement
bySam Webster Harris | Growth Mindset Psychology
EducationSelf-ImprovementScienceSocialSocietyCulture
Most self-help advice is guesswork dressed up as wisdom. We dig into psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral science to find what actually changes lives. WHY LISTEN? Over 8 million downloads because we answer the questions that matter: How do I build mental strength? What creates lasting motivation? How can I understand my own mind well enough to work with it, not against it? This podcast is for curious skeptics who want frameworks backed by psychology studies, not Instagram quotes. Whether you're navigating procrastination, building self-discipline, or designing your own philosophy for a life well lived—we explore the hidden psychology behind real ch...
Episodes(40 episodes)
Designing Your Ambition Around A Life You Enjoy - w/ David Meltzer
Rethinking success and our approach to money, happiness and breaking free from a scarcity mindset.
You’ve upgraded your goals, your workload and possibly your spreadsheet. Has anyone remembered to upgrade your enjoyment?
This episode asks whether your approach to success is delivering a better life or merely a longer to-do list. David Meltzer joins Growth Mindset Psychology to discuss gratitude, priorities and the expectations we place on money.
You’ll explore why “enough” can remain frustratingly out of reach, how to distinguish useful ambition from chasing approval, and what to do when frustrat...
Published: Oct 23, 2026Duration: 22m 7s
How to Enjoy Your Imperfect Life
Simple mindset shifts to build more gratitude, without reworking your entire personality.
We imagine success as a destination where the problems finally stop. But the life we want brings its own friction: the garden needs tending, meaningful work fills the inbox, and intimacy means sharing life with another imperfect person. If we only notice the friction, we can miss the strange fact that some of our frustrations belong to things we once hoped for.
This episode considers gratitude as a shift in attention, not a demand to call everything good. We’ll look at how an...
Published: Oct 20, 2026Duration: 21m 7s
What Your Relationship With Food Is Trying to Tell You - w/ Toni Maranucci
Most people think healthy eating means following stricter rules: fewer carbs, fewer calories, fewer “bad” foods. But strict rules often create the exact behaviour they’re meant to prevent. Eat one cookie, feel guilty, decide the day is ruined, then eat three more.
In this episode, I speak with registered dietitian Tony Marinucci about how to build a healthier relationship with food—without obsession, punishment, or another fad diet.
We explore why extreme restriction backfires, how “good” and “bad” food labels damage your mindset, and why focusing on energy, confidence, and long-term habits beats chasing a number on the...
Published: Oct 16, 2026Duration: 23m 54s
AMA: Accountability and Procrastination, Lasting Enthusiasm and Auditory Processing Issues
Why we procrastinate, lose enthusiasm and struggle to process spoken information—and what actually helps.
In this listener AMA, I answer three questions: how auditory processing difficulties affect a child’s willingness to learn, why enthusiasm disappears even when nothing is objectively wrong, and how to stop procrastinating on projects that matter. I share my own experience of struggling with spoken instructions, language learning and getting a podcast off the ground. We look at why “just try harder” usually fails, why accountability often works better than willpower, and how to make difficult tasks feel less punishing.
Separa...
Published: Oct 13, 2026Duration: 38m 15s
How to Make Your Ideas Survive a Changing World
A life is brief. An idea can travel further than its inventor ever will. What determines which ones last?
We follow life’s story from the first organisms to the systems we build today, using three laws of biology as a lens: competition, selection and reproduction. These aren’t just rules for animals in a nature documentary. They also help us think about innovation, businesses, beliefs and the ambitions that shape our own lives.
Seen this way, success isn’t simply being clever or working harder. An idea must meet a real need, adapt when its en...
Published: Oct 9, 2026Duration: 36m 39s
How to Catch Your Brain Lying to You: A Practical Guide to Self-Awareness Over Ego
It's easy to spend our lives defending a story about who we are, instead of finding out who we could become.
This episode is an invitation to stop protecting your ego and start practising self-awareness as a craft. We look at how high intelligence can turn into a sophisticated self-deception machine, and how the stories we tell ourselves—“I’m the rational one”, “I learn from feedback”, “I’m different from those stubborn people”—are often the very things that keep us stuck.
Through real examples from science, travel, and building (and misbuilding) companies, you’ll see how ego hides i...
Published: Oct 6, 2026Duration: 30m 49s
Faster Than Normal - Living well with ADHD
The peculiar thing about attention deficit is that everybody seems to have it these days, whether they've earned it through proper diagnosis or simply absorbed it from an enthusiastic TikTok video filmed in someone's bathroom.
What I've learned, from my own escapades, and partly through reading Peter Shankman's excellent book Faster Than Normal, is that whatever your brain does, you need to learn how to drive it.
This conversation covers the four rules Shankman uses to turn a supposedly defective brain into rather useful equipment, none of which involve medication or particularly virtuous behaviour.
<...
Published: Oct 2, 2026Duration: 38m 50s
The Deep-Thinking Habits That Quietly Change Your Life
Train your brain to resist distraction, form your own opinions, and think like an intellectual.
When every answer is one click away, we’ve forgotten how to enjoy the struggle of figuring things out. This episode explores the radical act of thinking more slowly in a fast-paced world.
Modern life has made us intellectual snackers: we graze on headlines, notifications, and other people’s opinions until our minds feel full on intellectual candy floss.
Drawing on ideas from Cal Newport, Charlie Munger, and curious historical figures, we unpack why boredom, better information, and stro...
Published: Sep 29, 2026Duration: 36m 22s
Can Psychedelics Really Help You Change Your Patterns?
Have you ever wonder if the thing keeping you stuck is yourself? Invisible rules your brain runs on that you have no choice over... In this episode, we go inside guided psilocybin retreats to see how people actually change deep mental patterns.
As they say the “trip” is only the start.
We talk with Gabriel Charalambides, founder of Odyssey, about what happens in the brain during these experiences: the default mode network quiets down, old self-stories lose their grip, and the mind becomes unusually open to new connections.
But the real work shows up a...
Published: Sep 25, 2026Duration: 56m 35s
34 Unconventional Life Lessons That Changed My Definition of Success
Beyond money, status, and attractive partner where do we find meaning, and happiness?
Across 34 unconventional life lessons, we explore the inner machinery behind a meaningful life: why status can behave like a sugary breakfast cereal, why exercise is cheaper than many illnesses, and why some of our finest ideas arrive only after we stop staring aggressively at a blank page.
Along the way, we consider discipline, creativity, money, identity, empathy, confirmation bias, and the possibility that society is held together with rather more metaphorical duct tape than anyone would like to admit.
We...
Published: Sep 22, 2026Duration: 37m 53s
Why So Many People Secretly Struggle With Porn Addiction
An honest conversation on addiction, depression, and identity with recovery coach Powerful Eric.
This week we talk about the strange modern epidemic of porn addiction, an affliction so quietly widespread that roughly one in nine men wrestle with it, yet almost nobody mentions it at dinner.
Eric explains how the brain mistakes novelty for reward, why the "disease model" of addiction may be doing more harm than good, and how a golden Buddha buried under centuries of clay became his favourite metaphor for the human mind. It is a hopeful, occasionally hilarious, thoroughly researched conversation...
Published: Sep 18, 2026Duration: 49m 47s
Psychology of Mistakes: 7 Lazy Thinking Habits You Don't Notice You Have
Human beings, it turns out, are magnificently good at fooling themselves.
Sadly the mind has developed an elaborate way of hiding our worst thinking mistakes from us. Our shortcut-taking so instinctive we rarely notice it happening.
This episode explores seven of these habits and on the way answers a lot of questions. Why do we blame the referee and ignore our own missed shots? Why does a friend's anecdote beat a mountain of statistics? Why do the people who commit history's worst atrocities rarely think of themselves as villains?
I find it oddly...
Published: Sep 15, 2026Duration: 32m 13s
8 Questions I asked Myself after 30
The World Record Breaking Jack Cai is back on the show. Asking Sam some of the deep life questions he asks himself a lot.
To say this was a discussion on a single topic that stayed focused would be a big old lie. We discuss various random things: from making the most of your time on earth or with your grandparents to youtube thumbnail strategies.
Should Sam keep building a podcast in a crowded market, or walk away entirely? Is a rootless, nomadic life actually freedom, or a disguise for avoiding commitment?
The...
Published: Sep 11, 2026Duration: 25m 19s
How To Solve Complex Problems
This episode asks a simple question: what if the way forward isn't a bigger vision, but a smaller unit of thought? We trace this idea through history, biology, and the quiet architecture of the mind, showing how growth rarely comes from grand gestures. It comes from identifying the one reliable piece worth repeating. The paradigm shift isn't thinking bigger. It's thinking smaller, on purpose, until the small thing becomes unstoppable.
Find the smallest version of the idea worth trying
Repeat what works instead of chasing what's new
Let simple, boring reliability replace the...
Published: Sep 8, 2026Duration: 33m 17s
How to Shift Your Mindset and Take Control of Your Life - w/ Kyle Livingston
Scarcity whispers that there isn't enough. Ego insists you deserve more anyway. Abundance is the quiet third option nobody mentions.
Most of us were handed scarcity as a default setting. This episode sits with that tension: what scarcity actually protects us from, why ego is so loyal to it, and what shifts when abundance becomes a practiced choice instead of a lucky feeling.
It's less about having more and more about needing less from the wrong things.
Ask what your ego is really protecting when it demands "more"
Treat abundance as...
Published: Sep 4, 2026Duration: 49m 2s
7 Painful Paradoxes of Self-Improvement (And what they teach us)
You know that feeling when you try so hard to seem normal that you become a weirdo? Self-improvement works the exact same way.
The more you chase happiness, the further it runs. The more validation you seek, the emptier you feel. This episode breaks down 7 painful paradoxes when we take on personal growth — psychological traps where trying harder makes things worse.
We dig into King George VI's stutter, Carl Jung's shadow work, and why Steve Jobs getting fired was the best thing that happened to him. You'll learn why over-planning destroys resilience, why self-help books ca...
Published: Sep 1, 2026Duration: 29m 26s
Seeking Difficulty: The Habit System Behind Three World Records and a Remarkable Life – Jack Cai
What if the thing you're avoiding is exactly what you should pursue?
Jack Cai broke three world records solving Rubik's Cubes blindfolded, for teh same reason America suppsoedly went to the moon. "Not because it is easy, but because it is hard"
This episode explores the mindset shift that happens when you stop asking "How can I make this easier?" and start asking "What's so hard that almost no one else is doing it?"
Jack shares his five-year journey from curiosity to world record, the habit systems that made elite performance possible, and...
Published: Aug 28, 2026Duration: 46m 32s
Psychology of Mental Strength: 3 Habits to build resilience, Inner toughness & Growth Mindset
We've been sold a myth: that mental toughness means gritting your teeth and pushing through, disregarding their emotions entirely.
The people who actually build lasting resilience do something different. They get honest with what they feel and investigate it. They notice when their mind drifts into yesterday's mistake or tomorrow's fear, understanding why helps them choose the present instead.
They learn to tell the difference between what they want right now and what they actually value and focus on what matters to them.
Practice radical honesty with your own feelings, not just others'<...
Published: Aug 25, 2026Duration: 25m 14s
A Growth Mindset Alone Won’t Make You a Better Leader: The psychology principles that will /wRyan Gottfredson
Explore the psychology of effective leadership and the hidden mental patterns that influence how you handle fear, failure, and change.
A leader can learn new skills, adopt ambitious goals, and proudly claim a growth mindset—yet still remain trapped by the way they interpret the world.
Sure, you might believe people can change, but... Are you willing to hear what you do not want to hear, pursue what matters instead of merely avoiding loss, and see the people around you as human beings rather than instruments.
In this episode, Ryan Gottfredson explores the fo...
Published: Aug 21, 2026Duration: 51m 58s
Master Finishing Things - Psychology vs Productivity, Perfectionism & Creative Constipation
Productivity gurus insist we must engineer ourselves into completion machines. This is nonsense, rather like insisting everyone should enjoy opera.
The truth, as behavioral psychology reveals, is delightfully simple: we finish what we're motivated and able to do. Everything else is self-sabotage mistaken for ambition. Perfectionism, is a whole side mission that gets in the way of anything causing creative constipation.
We can start working smarter by abandoning the unrewarding, delegating the tedious, and valuing time so highly that saying no becomes second nature.
Identify what you reliably finish and do more of...
Published: Aug 18, 2026Duration: 34m 28s