5 Audiobooks About Growth Mindset

Your approach to life matters. With a fixed mindset, you believe you can only improve up to a certain point—but the growth mindset is more forgiving. It promotes the perspective that you only fail when you stop trying. As long as you put in the hard work, the heights you can reach are limitless. 

That can give you the headspace you need to learn from your mistakes. According to a 2024 , people who adopt a growth mindset are more likely to continue engaging with a learning task, even after failure. That’s what makes it so helpful as you move forward in life. The belief that you can get back to where you were and even go further can give you the strength you need to get back on your feet—even if you’ve hit rock bottom.

However, adopting a growth mindset is easier said than done. Healing requires you to acknowledge the negative emotions you’re feeling to address them, and that can only bring up more pain. That’s why it can help to have some expert guidance along your journey. To get the support and motivation you need, the easiest, most low-effort, and ultimately most doable thing you can do is put on your headphones and listen to an insightful audiobook. 

Here are five of the best ones that can help you foster a growth mindset.

Make Your Bed: Small Things That Can Change Your Life… and Maybe the World

Feelings of pain and sadness can make it challenging to recover from major life events that negatively impact your well-being. That’s why it’s important to address these feelings gradually. By setting the realistic goals touted by the growth mindset, you can start by tackling tasks you find the most doable, and that can help you prove to yourself that you can heal and are capable of doing better each day. That’s the perspective Make Your Bed encourages you to adopt. 

Among the New York Times bestsellers for self-help written by William H. McRaven, which also includes works like The Hero Code: Lessons Learned from Lives Well Led, this audiobook draws on his experiences as a retired US Navy admiral and senior financial advisor to share life lessons aimed at inspiring you to start small. He encourages you to build the habit of simply making your bed in the morning, then work your way up by finding a support system, accepting the unfairness of life, and driving on anyway by learning from your own experiences. Each bite-sized chapter is designed for gradual listening, great for pacing your journey to recovery—so consider giving this work a listen if you want to ease yourself into healing.

The 10X Rule

Ready to put more effort into yourself? Pick up The 10X Rule. This audiobook is perfect if you need a pep talk for tackling the bigger goals on your recovery to-do list—because its advice comes from successful businessman Grant Cardone. Having consulted for major companies like Google, Toyota, and Morgan Stanley, he knows just how much work goes into achieving what you set out to do. Cardone finds that people tend to underestimate how much effort is needed to reach success, which is why he believes you need to put in 10 times more work than you think you need to do to attain your goals. 

In line with the growth mindset, he thus encourages you to think in abundance. Instead of asking yourself how you’ll ever get something done, tell yourself you have an endless capacity to learn, grow—and, ultimately, heal. More importantly, The 10X Rule asks that you focus on yourself. As we similarly note in , doing so can undermine your self-worth by negating the fact that everyone is different. You have unique strengths and weaknesses, and comparing the speed and effectiveness of how you progress through life to others doesn’t take those differences into account. By solely focusing on yourself as you heal, you’ll give yourself a better chance of recovering in line with your needs. 

How to Be Better at Almost Everything: Learn Anything Quickly, Stack Your Skills, Dominate 

Progress isn’t linear. Even with the best strategy, you’re likely to hit challenges throughout your daily life that cause you to think you’ve taken one step forward but multiple steps back. That can be discouraging—but with a growth mindset, that doesn’t need to stop you. Self-discipline is a skill you can easily learn, which is why it’s worth listening to How to Be Better at Almost Everything. There’s a good reason it’s one of the top titles in Everand’s collection of self-improvement audiobooks. Here, it trends alongside other great listens promoting the growth mindset, like Winning the War in Your Mind and 101 Essays that Will Change the Way You Think—but stands out because author Pat Flynn wrote this book to be more all-encompassing. 

In How to Be Better at Almost Everything, Flynn promotes the mindset that you can actually learn anything as long as you follow these two key components of the growth mindset: repetition and resistance. Deliberately practicing strategies like acknowledging your feelings, taking your time to recover, and finding someone to lean on—and doing so often despite setbacks—is the best path to sustainably learning the self-discipline you need to form the strong habits that can best help you heal over time. 

The Happiness Advantage

Healing requires you to tackle negative emotions head-on, and that constant exposure can make it easy to give in to those feelings on your journey to recovery. As you get yourself back on the right track, however, it’s important to continue nurturing your well-being. That’s why you may want to listen to The Happiness Advantage. This work on positive psychology from Shawn Achor, a Harvard psychologist, popular TED speaker, and New York Times bestselling author, argues that happiness is the true key to success. 

It isn’t enough to just work hard—Achor cites studies that find that because of how we as humans innately react to certain situations, you’re more likely to perform better when you’re feeling content. The seven principles in The Happiness Advantage will help you train yourself to see the good in every situation, putting you in a better state of mind to try the advice offered by the other audiobooks on this list and helping ease the challenges you face as you progress in finding happiness and contentment.

The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough

Most importantly, don’t be too hard on yourself. Upholding perfectionism as you heal will only put unnecessary pressure on yourself, and that can significantly impact how well you recover. That’s because you’re not holding yourself up against high standards, but impossible ones. If you want to do right by yourself, it’s thus vital to gradually let go of the belief that you need to do everything right all the time. 

That’s why it’s worth looking into this audiobook. In The Perfection Trap, psychologist Thomas Curran finds that perfectionism is the defining condition of our times. However, those who adhere to it are more likely to feel defensive and insecure, fear failure, and burn out. By listening to this work, you’ll learn more about the real-world studies that prove it’s okay to be good enough and go about living your life in your own way—not by following societal expectations on what recovery should look like.