# Examples of growth mindset or practice in fiction

As people who care about rationality and winning, it's pretty important to care about training. Repeated practice is how humans acquire skills, and skills are what we use for winning.

Unfortunately, it's sometimes hard to get System 1 fully on board with the fact that repeated, difficult, sometimes tedious practice is _how we become awesome._ I find fiction to be one of the most useful ways of communicating things like this to my S1. It would be _great_ to have a repository of fiction that shows characters practicing skills, mastering them, and becoming awesome, to help this really sink in.

However, in fiction the following tropes are a lot more common:

1.  hero is born to greatness and only needs to discover that greatness to win \[I don't think I actually need to give examples of this?\]
2.  like (1), only the author talks about the skill development or the work _in passing_… but in a way that leaves the reader's attention (and system 1 reinforcement?) on the "already be awesome" part, rather that the "practice to become awesome" part \[HPMOR; the [Dresden Files](http://www.jim-butcher.com/books/dresden), where most of the implied practice takes place between books.\]
3.  [training montage](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TrainingMontage), where again the reader's attention isn't on the training long enough to reinforce the "practice to become awesome" part, but skips to the "wouldn't it be great to already be awesome" part \[[TVtropes examples](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TrainingMontage)\].
4.  The hero starts out ineffectual and becomes great over the course of the book, but this comes from personal revelations and insights, rather than sitting down and practicing \[[Nice Dragons Finish Last](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20426102-nice-dragons-finish-last) is an example of this\].

_Example of exactly the wrong thing:_  
[The Hunger Games](http://smile.amazon.com/dp/0439023521) \- Katniss is explicitly up against the Pledges who have trained their whole lives for this one thing, but she has … something special that causes her to win. Also archery is her greatest skill, and she's already awesome at it from the beginning of the story and never spends time practicing.

_Close-but-not-perfect examples of the right thing:_  
[The Pillars of the Earth](http://smile.amazon.com/dp/045123281X) \- Jack pretty explicitly has to travel around Europe to acquire the skills he needs to become great. Much of the practice is off-screen, but it's at least a pretty significant part of the journey.  
The [Honor Harrington](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_Harrington) series: the books depict Honor, as well as the people around her, rising through the ranks of the military and gradually levelling up, with emphasis on dedication to training, and that training is often depicted onscreen – but the skills she's training in herself and her subordinates aren't nearly as relevant as the "tactical genius" that she seems to have been born with.

I'd like to put out a request for fiction that has this quality. I'll also take examples of fiction that fails badly at this quality, to add to the list of examples, or of TVTropes keywords that would be useful to mine. Internet hivemind, help?