In 2006, social psychologist Carol Dweck released her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. It became a massive bestseller — over two million copies in print — and turned the phrase “growth mindset” into something you’d hear in boardrooms, classrooms, and coaching sessions around the world.
For over a decade, the website MindsetOnline.com served as a companion to Dweck’s book. Then, around August 2019, it went offline. A number of articles were written speculating about what happened — most concluded the site was simply abandoned once it had outlived its usefulness as a promotional tool.
That conclusion was reasonable at the time. But it’s no longer the full story.
MindsetOnline.com didn’t disappear permanently. The domain changed hands, and today it operates as an independent editorial publication covering leadership, management, growth mindset, and professional development.
Here’s the full history.
What was the original MindsetOnline.com?
The original MindsetOnline.com was a relatively simple website built to support Dweck’s book. If you visited it between 2006 and 2019, you would have found sections explaining the growth mindset concept, how mindset affects areas like achievement, parenting, teaching, coaching, sports, business, leadership, and relationships, along with information about how to change your mindset and about Dweck herself.
The site also offered a mindset test — probably its most well-known feature — that helped visitors assess whether they leaned more toward a fixed or growth mindset. The new ownership team maintained this feature here, with a larger library of mindset tests.
It functioned primarily as a marketing tool for the book. The ideas were introduced at a high level, with the assumption that visitors would want to learn more and purchase the book. The mindset test gave people a reason to engage, and presumably, a reason to buy.
While ownership was never publicly confirmed, the site was likely maintained by either Dweck’s team or her publisher, Ballantine Books. That kind of promotional companion site is standard practice in publishing.
Why did the original site go offline?
From the day it launched until the day it disappeared, MindsetOnline.com changed very little. The design was never updated. No significant new content was added. It essentially ran as a static site for thirteen years.
Around August 2019, the site went offline. The most likely explanation is straightforward: whoever was maintaining it decided the cost of keeping it running wasn’t worth it anymore. The book was over a decade old, traffic had likely declined, and the site had served its original purpose.
Carol Dweck’s team moved their official web presence elsewhere, and the domain was eventually sold.
The controversy around growth mindset research
The timing of the site’s disappearance is worth noting because it coincided with a period of growing scrutiny around Dweck’s original research.
For years after the book’s publication, growth mindset theory was widely embraced. But two significant criticisms emerged.
First, researchers struggled to replicate Dweck’s results. Multiple teams designed studies similar to Dweck’s original experiments, and the outcomes were less impressive than what she had reported. That’s a serious concern in science — if other researchers can’t get the same results, it raises questions about the original findings.
Second, the evidence connecting growth mindset to real-world success turned out to be weaker than the book suggested. A pair of meta-analyses led by Brooke Macnamara at Case Western Reserve University examined hundreds of mindset studies and found that growth mindset accounted for roughly one percent of the variance in academic achievement. A follow-up systematic review in 2022 by Macnamara and Alexander Burgoyne looked at 63 intervention studies involving over 97,000 students. The overall effect was small, and it became statistically nonsignificant after correcting for publication bias.
Macnamara has described the evidence for mindset theory as limited, with a weak relationship between growth mindsets and academic achievement.
That doesn’t mean growth mindset is useless. Dweck and her collaborator David Yeager have argued that effects vary meaningfully depending on context, population, and how well an intervention is implemented. A large national study did find positive effects for lower-achieving students in supportive school environments. But that’s a much more qualified claim than the sweeping message of the original book.
The bottom line: having a growth mindset is probably a net positive, but it’s one factor among many — alongside things like experience, emotional intelligence, environment, resources, and education. We shouldn’t be surprised that success is more complicated than any single framework can capture.
What is MindsetOnline.com now?
After the original site went offline and the domain was sold, a new team acquired MindsetOnline.com and relaunched it as an independent editorial publication.
The site is now produced by The Mindset Group, with Jackie Riles serving as Editor and Lead Writer. It covers three main areas:
Leadership & Management — how to lead teams effectively, set goals, build accountability, navigate organizational challenges, and develop the skills that separate good managers from great ones.
Growth Mindset & Psychology — the science behind how people think, learn, and adapt, drawing on Carol Dweck’s foundational research alongside broader work in behavioral psychology, decision-making, and motivation.
Professional Development — negotiation, communication, productivity, and the practical habits that drive career growth.
The publication is explicit about an important point: it is not affiliated with Carol Dweck, Stanford University, or any official Dweck organization. It’s an independent editorial team that covers her ideas alongside a much wider range of leadership and management topics. Its contributors may explore perspectives that extend beyond — or even challenge — Dweck’s original framework.
How their content is created
According to the site, the editorial process starts with primary sources — academic research, books, and top journals — and works to translate those into actionable takeaways with real-world examples. Articles are reviewed for clarity and consistency, and the team says it updates content when new research becomes available.
The publication emphasizes a reader-first approach: accuracy over hype, clear distinctions between research summaries and editorial interpretation, original writing, and an open corrections policy. If readers spot an error, they’re invited to email the editorial team directly.
That positioning puts the current site somewhere between academic summary and practical business writing — grounded enough in evidence to be credible, but written for working professionals, not researchers.
So what actually happened to MindsetOnline.com?
The short version:
MindsetOnline.com launched in 2006 as a promotional companion to Carol Dweck’s bestselling book. It ran largely unchanged for thirteen years. Around 2019, it went offline — most likely because maintaining it was no longer worth the cost. The domain was later sold, and a new independent editorial team acquired it and built it into a broader publication covering leadership, management, mindset, and professional development.
It’s not a mystery. It’s just a domain that outlived one purpose and found another.
For people who remember the original site and its mindset quiz, the current version will look very different. But the domain hasn’t been abandoned. It’s been turned into something that reflects how the conversation around mindset, leadership, and professional growth has itself evolved — from one big idea into a much broader set of questions about how people lead, learn, and get better at work.
