An early, high-profile failure or rejection is often treated retroactively as an inspiring footnote to eventual success, but the more useful lesson isn't the failure itself — it's the specific response to it. A fixed-mindset response to being told you're not good enough treats the judgment as accurate and permanent; a growth-mindset response treats it as one data point about a specific moment, answerable with more deliberate effort rather than acceptance.
The distinction is what separates a story that's genuinely instructive from one that's just a feel-good anecdote: what mattered wasn't that someone was cut or rejected, it's specifically what they did in the months immediately afterward, which is the part most retellings skip past in favor of the dramatic reversal.
Michael Jordan, now remembered as one of basketball's defining talents, was cut from his high school varsity team and wasn't regarded by coaches or teammates at the time as an obviously dominant future star. What Dweck highlights isn't the cut itself — plenty of players are cut and never make it back — it's what teammates and coaches specifically describe about Jordan's response: a level of competitiveness that pushed him to outwork essentially everyone else in practice afterward, treating the rejection as information about where he currently stood rather than a verdict on where he could end up.