Research says praising kids for outcomes nudges them towards a fixed mindset. Acknowledging the process and the effort builds the growth mindset muscle instead.

Let’s get the definitions out of the way first.

Fixed Mindset is the belief that basic traits like intelligence, talent, and ability are static and unchangeable.

Growth Mindset is the belief that your talents and intelligence can grow over time through hard work, good strategies, and help from others.

If there was a single concept I could teach kids today, it would be growth mindset. That is a bigger indicator of success than anything else. And most of us adults never learned it either.

Roger Federer won only about 54% of the points he ever played. LeBron James is the all-time leader in missed shots. And from my own poker career, I lost one out of every three sessions I played, despite crushing the stakes I was at.

The key to peak performance is thus how fast you can turn your mindset around after a loss. And this is exactly what I did in my sessions with 13-year-olds.

The Bounce Back Workshop by TLR

Here is what we cover in class.

The Praise Experiment

Two groups of kids were given the same puzzle test. One group is told, “You’re so clever.” The other is told, “You worked hard.” Then both get to pick their next test. I ask the room to guess which group chose the easier one.

It was the clever ones. Being praised for their ability made them protect the label, so they played safe to keep it. Their scores went down. The kids praised for effort picked the harder test and got better.

The Brain Scans

Researchers put kids in an MRI and gave them hard problems. In the fixed-mindset kids, the brain activity went quiet the moment they got something wrong. It looked away from the mistake. In the growth-mindset kids, it lit up.

The Reframe

Then we practise. I hand them a scenario: say your friend scored higher than you.

The fixed mindset response: they’re just smarter than me. Then I make them find the growth version out loud - “they have better study habits than me right now, and I’m going to ask them what they do.”

We run it again for sports, for friendships, for the thing that went badly at home. Every fixed sentence has a growth translation.

The Obstacle is The Way

In the gym, lifting weights tears the muscle fibres. The body then repairs them slightly thicker than before. The damage is the reason you get stronger.

That is the whole idea. The struggle is not the thing standing between you and the learning. The struggle is the learning.

Failure is the path to success. You don’t have to circumvent it; you have to go through it.

How do you build a growth mindset?

The main idea is to shorten the gap between your best self and the battered, injured self after a beatdown.

1. Recognise Your Fixed Mindset Voice

   Notice when you think, “I can’t” or “I’m not good at this”

2. Reframe the Thought

   Challenge it: “What if I could learn this with practice?” Turn self-doubt into a question of potential.

3. Add “Yet”

   Transform impossibility into possibility with one powerful word: “I can’t do this yet.”

4. Make a Strategy

   Ask: “What’s one small, concrete step I could take right now to move forward?”

5. Celebrate Learning, Not Just Success

   Focus on effort and progress. Did you try? Did you learn something new? That’s always a win.

Mindset for Life: The Ongoing Journey

We end with this pledge:

• From Proving To Improving

  I’m not trying to LOOK smart. I’m trying to GET smart.

• From Judging To Learning

  This isn’t a bad mistake. It’s a useful mistake.

• From Fear To Possibility

  Not ‘what if I fail?’ but ‘what if I try?’

Does any of this stick? I honestly don’t know yet. Things like these need multiple reinforcements to become second nature. And I’m trying to figure out a mechanism for that. If you have ideas, I’d love to hear them.

A lot of the ideas in this workshop have come from the wonderful book Mindset by Dr Carol S. Dweck. Another book recommendation: The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday.

But there are two burning questions:

1. How do I make sure they retain this knowledge outside the classroom? I need to build a mechanism that can enable them to recall these concepts in moments of need 5, 10, or 20 years down the line.

2. How does this benefit our society? Sure, it helps these students become better thinkers. But how does that translate into a better life for the rest of us? That’s the most important question for me to answer, because it’s the whole reason I started TLR.

Over the last few weeks I ran the first experiment to answer it. It was a community project on the topic of Road Sense: how we drive on Indian roads, and how to make driving a less stressful experience for everyone.

The outcome we sought:

One person changes their own behavior and that of one person around them.

The Road-Sense Project - TLR Methodology

This is what we did in chronological order over a period of three weeks.

1. The Field Visit & Interviews

We selected 12 students from Grade 8 of an affordable private school in Medahalli, Bengaluru. After splitting them in 2 groups of 6 each, we took them to a street corner and counted traffic infractions for ten minutes: no helmets, wrong-side driving, triple riding, phone while riding, etc.

Then they interviewed shopkeepers and people on the street and asked them two questions: why do people break rules and what can be done to stop them?

Interviews at Home: They took the same two questions to their own families and neighbors, and recorded the answers.

2. Road Data

In classroom sessions, I taught them some verified data on traffic and accidents on Indian roads.

Example 1: Start stacking ₹500 notes, one on top of the other. Keep going. Go up to four and a half times the height of Mount Everest.

Can you guess how much money that is?

₹20,000 crore - That is roughly what Bengaluru loses to traffic congestion every year.1

Example 2: India has 1% of world’s vehicles, but 11% of world’s road deaths. 2

Example 3: Road accidents kill 20 people an hour in India.3

The intention behind this exercise was to give them the “WHY” of the project.

3. The Mental Models

Models we studied: Game theory, Second-order thinking, and Broken Windows Theory.

Do you think building a flyover in a busy area will reduce traffic?

Not necessarily. Because when the flyover seems to reduce travel time, everybody starts using the same route, which increases the load at that one spot. Earlier, people were spread across many different routes, distributing the load. This is Braess’s Paradox.

And it isn’t just a theory. In 2003, Seoul demolished a six-lane elevated expressway through the middle of the city. They spent 27 months restoring the stream buried underneath it, Cheonggyecheon, as a public park and opened it in October 2005.

There were no gridlocked roads, travel times in the surrounding area did not take a hit. People started taking more public transport, and used multiple other routes. It helped that Seoul overhauled its bus system at the same time.

That’s second-order thinking and game theory in one story. How long your commute takes depends on the route choices other people make. How safe you are on the road depends on how well other people follow the rules. Ride on the wrong side and you might save five minutes. But if everybody rides on the wrong side, nobody gains anything and everybody is in more danger. Individually tempting, collectively terrible.

Broken Windows Theory came in because we kept hearing the same sentence in the interviews, over and over:

A small infraction, like riding without a helmet, normalizes bigger ones. So to solve the big problems, you have to solve the small ones first.

Then we discussed solutions and put every solution they generated into one of four boxes.

• Change the prize: Rewards, fines.

• Change what people see: Cameras, signboards.

• Change the road: Speed breakers, zebra crossings.

• Change the norm: One person starts a new habit and nudges others to do the same.

4. Rules of the road

Tell me you’re an Indian without telling me you’re an Indian.

This is an actual question from the official driving license question bank.

When a cow is standing across the road, you should:

1. Wait until it clears the road

2. Pass it from the front

3. Pass it from behind

There are dozens of rules like this that none of us ever learned, because our license testing system is perfunctory. So we taught them 20 real rules from the official rulebook, cow included. And we ended on defensive driving - what it means, and why it’s worth doing.

5. The Showcase Prep

The plan was to bring all of this together and present it to an audience as a showcase. We spent one week creating a set of tactile and interactive artifacts to explain what we discussed.

The rules of design were:

1. Show, don’t tell. Let the audience discover the concepts through touch and play.

2. No preaching. We present what we know and let the audience make up their own minds.

3. Mental Models explanation. Everything is showcased through play rather than jargon.

6. The Showcase

On a Friday morning, we invited parents, teachers, and students.

The visitors were led through the journey of what the students learnt over the last few weeks. We even made them produce their own things.

The Stations:

1. Hidden Broken Windows Theory Experiment - The audience unknowingly participated in an experiment about following norms.

2. Road Data Quiz - Nine questions asked using tangible items.

3. Field Visit Reveal & The Excuse Wall - Questions on why people break rules.

4. Solution Four-Boxes - Asking audience how to solve this.

5. Rules of the road - A True or False format of common, yet tricky rules of the road.

6. Home Interviews Reveal & Pledges

They wrote down their own excuses of why they (or others) break rules. They wrote down solutions. They wrote down pledges. They participated in game theory simulations through fun group activities.

7. The Pledge and the Ripple Line

The showcase ended with every visitor and every student choosing their one person who has a rule-breaking habit. Their job over the next four weeks is to get that person to change it, and to be able to explain why, using the data, the models, the interviews and the rules.

They wrote it down on a paper and put it up on the Ripple Line.

Why this works? Based on a study called “Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention”, a committed 25% minority can turn the whole group. The exact number moves with circumstances, how entrenched the behavior is, how much people interact, so 25% isn’t a magic constant. But the shape of the finding is what matters. A norm doesn’t shift gradually as more people join. It holds, and holds, and then it goes.4

This reframes what a twelve-year-old convincing their uncle to wear a helmet actually is. It isn’t just a nice gesture. In a small enough network, one street, one apartment block, one extended family, it’s a meaningful fraction of the way to a tipping point.

What I don’t know yet

This is where I want to be very clear, because it would be easy to end this post on the showcase photos and let you assume it worked.

I don’t know if it worked. A showcase measures showcase-day performance. But the only honest test is whether they apply these tools, in a situation that has nothing to do with roads, weeks and months after the program ends.

The most basic check is an MCQ-based situational judgement assessment after four weeks, with the same students. It’ll test their progress in the ability to reason beyond slogans that came up in the pre-work.

Beyond that, there needs to be something more rigorous, like this project itself. That part, I have to build.

Beyond the Roads

Road Sense was a test run of what Community Project plus Mental Models can look like in action. I was testing a template:

• A real civic problem

• Field data the students collect themselves

• Named thinking tools

• Public defense of their reasoning

• Behavior pledge by students and audience

• Delayed check

Roads happen to be a great first case, because the game-theoretic structure is obvious. But the same template should run on waste segregation, water, queues, public etiquette, corruption. Anywhere a collectively terrible outcome is made up of individually reasonable decisions, which, if you look, is most of what’s broken in everyday India.

That’s the actual thesis: a thirteen-year-old who has once traced a bad collective outcome back to its individual incentives, with data they gathered themselves, will recognize that in a different context again for the rest of their life.

A question for you

On the field visit day, one girl told the group that her father, who never wore a helmet, had been in an accident. And that it was only after that, that he started wearing one regularly. He’d been converted, by the worst possible teacher. The entire project is an attempt to answer one question - can we do that conversion without the accident?

And that’s my question to you. I would like your suggestions on how to design more such mechanisms that help bring the timeless wisdom that these mental models hold for the betterment of our society.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to your suggestions.

These are the exact concepts we discussed in a recent workshop I did with teenagers in schools.

So what really is Game Theory?

It is a situation where your outcome depends on someone else’s choice. So how do you decide what to do in a way that gives you the best result regardless of what they do?

That’s business. Politics. Friendship. That’s living in a society.

Defect or Cooperate - An Example

Imagine two cars driving straight at each other. The rule of the game: whoever swerves first loses. What should your strategy be?

There are two strategies in this game - defect (keep going straight) or cooperate (sway early).

The possible scenarios:

1. Cooperate-Defect - P1 sways, P2 stays straight (P1 loses reputation, P2 wins)

2. Cooperate-Cooperate - Both swerve (decent outcome - both come out with reputation somewhat intact)

3. Defect-Defect - Both stay straight (worst outcome - both crash)

An extreme move would be to rip out your steering wheel, show it to the other driver, and throw it out of the window. Now you can’t swerve. The other person has to, unless they want to die.

You’ve locked yourself into defection. You’ve removed your ability to swerve, and in doing so, forced the other person’s hand into cooperation.

In a one-off game, it works. You win. But we don’t live in a one-off world.

An Iterative Society

Now imagine you have to play this game again tomorrow. And the day after. What stops the other driver from also ripping out their steering wheel? Now both of you are locked into defection. Both of you crash and both of you lose. And you lose far worse than if one of you had just swerved.

This is the key insight of Game Theory: in a single isolated game, defection can be optimal. But we don't live in isolated scenarios. We live in an iterated society. The same situations play out over and over again. And when you account for that repetition, cooperation for both sides is the better choice. Not just for the group but for each individual too.

Back to Nuclear War

The game that we played is called the Chicken game. And that’s exactly what explains why we haven’t had a full-blown nuclear war.

The defect move in nuclear game theory is to bomb the other nation. The cooperate move is to not bomb. If one country defects and drops a nuclear weapon, sure, the other country is at a disadvantage initially. But a single nuclear bomb doesn’t end a country. And after that, nothing stops retaliation.

Because this is an iterated scenario, the game doesn’t end with one move, both sides know that defection leads to mutual destruction. Cooperate–cooperate is the only outcome where both sides survive. This is nuclear deterrence in a nutshell. This is why it’s held for over 80 years.

There’s one assumption baked into this, though: that all parties are rational, thinking agents. That they weigh outcomes, pick the one that serves their long-term interest, and aren’t swayed by ego. I don’t know if that still holds up today. So… yeah. That’s where we are.

Why This Matters for Kids

These are the kinds of concepts we discuss in our game theory workshops at The Little Rationals.

War is just one example. We use other examples to drive home the point.

We talk about traffic signals. You don’t stop at a red light because a cop is watching. You stop because traffic is an iterated game. If everyone cooperates (stays in lane), follows signals, the system works. Else, there is mutually assured chaos.

Space exploration and sharing findings with each other, cleaning up after yourself in public bathrooms, group projects - we discussed all of these as well.

We also question ‘Sharing is Caring.’ Can we prove it is so by math? In game theory terms, sharing is cooperation. If you cooperate now and share your resources, the other person has an incentive to cooperate with you later. The common pool grows. If everyone defects, i.e. acts greedy, the pool shrinks. And we all lose.

I’ve spent almost a decade using game theory as my daily bread and butter.

As a professional poker player, I used GTO or Game Theory Optimal as my primary strategy. I used it to guide my play in a game where I don’t know what my opponent is going to do. And it helped me answer the same question we now ask kids in a classroom:

Given that you can’t control what the other person does, what’s the smartest thing you can do?

I feel very strongly about Game Theory as a concept to teach young kids how to live responsibly in a shared society. That is what’s missing in our education system today. And that’s what I want to solve with The Little Rationals.

The stress isn’t just from traffic or crowds or long workdays. It’s from constant friction caused by small, unnecessary conflicts layered on top of each other.

People cutting queues. Aggressive driving. Loud, obnoxious behavior in public. Zero-sum thinking in everyday interactions. A sense that everyone is out for themselves, and cooperation is optional.

We usually label this as poor civic sense. But I don’t think that’s the real problem.

The Deeper Issue: How We Learn to Think

Most of us were never taught how to reason about shared systems.

We weren’t taught:

• how individual incentives create collective outcomes

• how cooperation often beats short-term self-interest

• how misunderstanding intent fuels unnecessary conflict

• how to sit with uncertainty instead of reacting emotionally

So we improvise. And when millions of people improvise poorly inside shared spaces, daily life becomes stressful for everyone.

These are system-level thinking problems, not character flaws.

Why I Started with Children

This realization led to The Little Rationals (TLR).

In TLR, we teach children decision-making, game theory, and human behavior through interactive workshops – both online and offline.

In recent workshops, students explored ideas like:

• The Prisoner’s Dilemma - why rational individuals often create worse outcomes by acting alone

• Occam’s Razor - why simpler explanations are usually better

• Hanlon’s Razor - why we should avoid attributing malice where incompetence or misunderstanding will do

The aim is to help kids become clear-thinking, emotionally resilient individuals who understand how to live responsibly in a shared society.

Our Hypothesis

Teaching these skills at scale creates better thinkers. Better thinkers grow into better citizens and leaders of our country. At scale, this improves decision-making across families, schools, and communities, thus improving the quality of life for everyone.

But Why Stop with Kids?

While working on TLR, a question kept coming up for me: Why should children be the only ones learning these ideas?

Most adults are navigating complex social systems every day in offices, families, cities, and institutions. They do that without ever having the right tools to reason about them properly. We’re expected to “just know” how to cooperate, regulate emotions, and resolve conflict.

That expectation is unrealistic. Which brings me to Little More Rationals (LMR).

What is Little More Rationals?

LMR is an extension of the same ideas behind TLR, but for everyone.

It’s a space dedicated to:

• improving how we think

• building emotional resilience

• understanding human behavior

• learning how to live well in shared systems

Same concepts. Same intellectual foundations. Just expressed in age-appropriate, real-world language.

This blog is where we’ll explore:

• mental models that reduce friction in daily life

• frameworks for clearer thinking under stress

• ideas from game theory, psychology, and philosophy

• reflections on cooperation, conflict, and responsibility

Not as academic theory, but as tools for everyday living.

Why This Matters

We often talk about fixing systems, policies, and infrastructure. All of that matters. But systems are ultimately downstream of the people who operate them.

If we want a calmer, fairer, more functional society, we need to start upstream, i.e. with how individuals think.

LMR is an attempt to do exactly that.

If these ideas resonate with you and if you’ve felt that daily life doesn’t have to be this hard, I invite you to stick around.

We’re just getting started. There’s a lot to unpack. And a lot to build.

See you next time.