Have you ever wondered what is the No1 quality that is absolutely necessary for your success in life?
What all millionaires and billionaires have in common and which separates them from the average person?
Why people who grew up in similar social and economic backgrounds can end up worlds apart and some ending up poor and some ending up filthy rich?
This has been something I have been curious and passionate for a very long time.
What is it, why is it important and most importantly how do we get it, so that we can benefit from it.
| When we begin exploring a new subject, the first thing we need to do is to define it. Let’s take a look at how Carol Dweck defines this, and by the way Carol Dweck is a lead researcher on the topic of mindset with multiple awards under her belt and who has taught in Harvard, Columbia and Stanford universities. Fixed mindset: “In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort.” (Dweck, 2015) Growth mindset: “In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.” (Dweck, 2015) According to Dweck, all humans operate with both a fixed and a growth mindset at the same time and for a very good reason. To explain this better, she gives the example of a cliff. “Most humans have a fixed mindset about jumping (unaided) off a cliff. No amount of belief in your ability to fly; no amount of “hard work and practice” (e.g. jumping off a stair, a table, etc.) will prepare you to fly. Knowing that you cannot fly and that no amount of work will change your ability to fly, is a normal, appropriate (life-saving) fixed mindset. WHY DEVELOPING A GROWTH MINDSET IS SO IMPORTANT? Mindsets are an important part of our personality, over which we can have control. Even by just knowing about the two mindsets and the characteristics of each, we can start taking control of many subconscious processes and learn to react in new ways. Mindset changes the meaning of failure Someone with a growth mindset, will say “I failed” which is an action, while someone with the fixed mindset will say “I am a failure”, which is a statement. Make no mistake, even in the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience, but since we defined the failure as an action (“I failed”), we treat it as a problem to be faced, an obstacle to be overcome and an experience to learn from. On the other hand, in a fixed mindset, failing can be a permanent, self-defining trauma and even worse it doesn’t give you a solution to the problem. In other words, if failing means that you are not competent enough, where do you go from there? So, what ends up happening to people with a fixed mindset is that they try to repair their damaged self-esteem, by comparing themselves to people who are worse than them. And we all know that we can only get better by comparing ourselves to people who are better than us, as we set a goal higher than our current state and we have something to strive forward. At this point of course, I want to remind us all what Jordan Peterson often says “Don’t compare yourself to who someone else is today, but to who you were yesterday.”, which basically boils down to “keep improving yourself and don’t worry too much about comparing to other people”. And this is very helpful to avoid feeling inadequate all the time, because the more we compare ourselves to people who are better, the more our self-image suffers. So, how do we bridge those 2 mindsets? I believe that we should compare ourselves to better people, only as an inspiration. After all, those people are showing us what is possible to achieve, but at the same time keep in mind that none of us had the same life path. Some may have been born more or less lucky, having various advantages (stable family, higher income or academic level, physical and mental potential etc). So, at the end of the day, what really matters is comparing ourselves to who we were yesterday. Mindset changes the meaning of effort What do you think? – If we are talented in something, do we also have to work hard in it? Or to ask this question in a different way: -If we have to work hard on something, does it mean that we lack the innate talent or charisma? Most of our society seems to be revolving around an either – or way of thinking about this. Either you have the talent, or you have to work hard to compensate for the lack of it. Our society seems to think that things come easy if you are a genius. And this could not be further from the truth. Think of Michael Jordan and his clear talent for basketball. He still had to work out harder than most of his teammates to cultivate this innate talent. At the same time, something we need to keep in mind, is that by not putting in the effort to cultivate our innate talent, we may still be the best in that thing in our micro-environment (school, village etc), but we would not be even near the top, compared to someone else who has the talent + put in the effort to develop it. And the world is much larger than our village. Another way on how the fixed mindset affects effort, is that people who are labeled as prodigies, don’t want to fail. Let me give you an example on this: Let’s say that there is a young student who has a clear talent for math. He is the best in his class, perhaps even in his entire school. But when the time comes to take part in a nation-wide competition in math, he doesn’t participate. Why did this happen? Because that student is afraid that he will take part in the competition and he will compete with other people of similar abilities, and if he fails, he will lose the “prodigy” label assigned to him. So, it is fear of failing that is holding him back, as this would shutter his self-image and at the same time he will not be able to maintain the expectations imposed on him by his environment. Now the fixed mindset affects effort in 1 more way: If you don’t try, you have an excuse for whenever you fail. If you fail, you will say “I didn’t even try that hard, and that’s why I failed”. But one of the hardest things you can say to yourself is “I did my very best, and still I was not good enough.” And still the 2nd way of thinking is the only way to develop and become better, as we can only grow beyond our current limits and capacity. It easily understandable from what we previously said that people with a growth mindset take responsibility for their success. The fixed mindset negatively affects achievement, with its limiting beliefs. Those with a growth mindset realize that important achievements require focus, hard work and strategy. It is the above way of thinking that helps people with a growth mindset do so much better in life than those with a fixed mindset. At the same time, our mindset affects our happiness. We all have internal monologues, things that we say to ourselves every day. People with a fixed mindset focus on “statements”, while people with a growth mindset focus on “questions”. And remember what Robert Kiyosaki says about this: “A statement closes the mind, a question opens the mind”. People belonging to different mindsets react differently to the same negative information. If 2 people fail on something, then: -the person with the fixed mindset will say “I am not good enough. I never had it in me. This is for other people and not me, etc”., while the person with the growth mindset, will say “ok, I failed this time, what can I learn from my mistakes and how can I improve to achieve the thing I wanted, next time”. So, having a growth mindset positively affects our happiness. HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MINDSET Practically, there 3 things we can do to help us cultivate a growth mindset: Step1: Accept that we all operate with a fixed and growth mindset at the same time. We saw earlier, in the example with the cliff, that having a fixed mindset also has some positive outcomes. Step2: Recognize what triggers the Fixed mindset. When do we hear that inner voice telling us that we are not good enough? Is it when we come face to face with a failure? When we encounter criticism? Deadlines that we failed to reach? The more time we spend learning ourselves, the better and faster we will be to detect that “Fixed mindset” voice. Step3: After we learn to recognize the triggers of the fixed mindset, we can counter what that little voice tells us. For example, when we fail to achieve something (which we have already identified to be the trigger for the fixed mindset), we can expect to hear that inner voice telling us “You are a total failure for not achieving X” and we can respond internally that “I am not a total failure. Indeed, I failed this time, but here is what I learned and this is how I will succeed next time”. To sum up: The longer we do this process, of learning our triggers, discussing and countering the fixed mindset’s arguments, the faster and with less effort we will be able to respond to it and stay in the zone of “growth mindset”. Important Note: Although growth mindset is the belief that abilities can be cultivated, it doesn’t tell you how much you can develop them or how long it is going to take. So, the real question is: “can you reach greatness if you are born average?” The following story sheds some light onto this and it is the story of Thomas Edison, as described by his biographer Paul Israel, who thinks that Edison was: “…more or less a regular boy of his time and place. What eventually set him apart was his mindset and drive. He never stopped being the curious, tinkering boy looking for new challenges.” I just need to add here that Darwin and Tolstoy were considered ordinary when they were children. People with a growth mindset don’t believe that anyone can be anything with the proper mindset or education. Not all of us can become the next Einstein. But what we know is that a person’s true potential is unknown and it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, and training. |