Change your life: choose the right mindset

We’re all born with hereditary traits and this brings up an important question:

Are our talents and intelligence defined as we’re born as well?

The vast majority of people would argue that yes, talent is something you’re born with. Michael Jordan was born to be a basketball icon and Jimi Hendrix a legendary guitar player, just like apples are apples and not oranges, they just “had it in them” as they say. After all, if you have to work at something, you must not be good at it, right?

The answer is a big fat juicy No.

As you read this post you’ll learn about a new mindset which has the potential to change your life. As you digest more of the growth mindset through this article, you’ll be able and have the desire to learn anything you want, hard or not.

Hold on to your seatbelt, here we go.

The two mindsets

As Carol Dweck, Ph.D. and Psychology professor at Standford University explains it in her book mindset: the new psychology of success, there are two types of people.

People with a fixed mindset—those who believe that abilities are fixed and people with a growth mindset—those who believe that abilities can be developed.

Identify your mindset

In order to get to the moon, we need to know we’re on Earth and then how much of a distance is between both spheres. Meaning, in order to get where you want to be, you first need to know where you are right now.
In other words, which mindset have you adopted for the past few months/years of your life.

Let’s first answer these questions about intelligence. Read each statement and decide whether you strongly agree or strongly disagree with it.

1. Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much.
2. You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are.
3. No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.
4. You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.

Questions 1 and 2 are the reflections of a fixed mindset. Questions 3 and 4 reflects the growth mindset. Now you might have agreed to one fixed mindset and one growth mindset question, thus meaning you are a mixture of both world, but as Carol Dweck mentions it in mindset,

Most people lean toward one or the other.

Let’s repeat the same exercise, but this time, with statements about personality and character.

1. You are a certain kind of person, and there is not much that can be done to really change that.
2. No matter what kind of person you are, you can always change substantially.
3. You can do things differently, but the important parts of who you are can’t really be changed.
4. You can always change basic things about the kind of person you are.

Questions 1 and 3 reflect the fixed mindset.

The Fixed Mindset in a nutshell

According to Carol Dweck, someone with a fixed mindset is someone seeking validation through success easily attainable with their current knowledge of the world.
Someone with this type of mindset will try to get validation by doing things he knows he’ll succeed in because failure would mean for that person that he’s a failure, thus dragging down his self-esteem.

The fixed mindset limits achievement. It fills people’s minds with interfering thoughts, it makes effort disagreeable, and it leads to inferior learning strategies.

The Growth Mindset in a nutshell

Someone with the growth mindset knows that challenges make you grow smarter and better so they persevere until they get the hang of it. Yes it can be hard from time to time, but they don’t give up, they’ll constantly readjust their way of attacking the problem in order to find the solution.
If they can’t do something, they simply believe they cannot do it yet.

There are so many examples, in mindset, of people sucking at something but sticking to their guns and years later ending up as rock stars and millionaires. It truly is inspiring and is why I recommend that everyone should read the book.

How to make the transition

By now you must have come to the conclusion that the growth mindset is THE mindset that will enable someone to go from simple dabbler to master in his domain by sheer determination et perseverance.

Some people think they are in the growth mindset but in reality, it’s just their fixed mindset ego telling them so. And don’t get me wrong a lot of people are also instinctively in the growth mindset which is awesome but what if by doing the exercises above you found out you were in the fixed mindset?
Well, that’s what we’re going to see here, how you can transition from fixed to growth as effortlessly as possible.

Change your self-talk

A good way to make the transition is to ask yourself growth mindset inducing questions. Instead of having the typical fixed mindset talk in your head, “I can’t do it”, “I must not be really good at it” and all that crap, you want to ask yourself, “what can I learn from this?”, “what can I improve to be better next time?”

Repetition is key

Whenever you find yourself being discouraged because things are not working how you would like them to be, remind yourself that it’s not because you’re not good at it, but rather that you haven’t learned the required set of skills, yet.
And the keyword here is yet, know that if you keep going at it, you’ll eventually succeed.

Avoiding the trap of fixed mindset

If you have had parents like mine or born in the 90’s there is a humongous chance that you’ve felt in this mindset.

Since the day I was born, my parents did not stop showering me with compliments as if I had come to this world with a list of talents to my name.
I still remember dunking on my mini basketball set with my tongue out as MJ would, in my living room, listening to Space Jam’s intro on repeat and hearing my parents say how good I was at basketball.

The 90’s generation has been too much praised for “innate talent” and good behavior, showing up in class, participating in a school event.

Hey guess what little Jimy, it doesn’t matter if you win first place or end up 34th, you’ll still get a participating trophy!

Like what the fuck. We actually teach our children to be lazy turds.

So basically we get all this validation for things we did not even have to work very hard for instead of getting praises for our effort, tenacity, and resilience.
And that’s exactly what professor Dweck recommends, give praise for effort instead of smartness as it’ll ingrain a sense of accomplishment with the action of actually trying something, thus leading the person to the growth mindset.

So guess what happened a few years later, as I’m making new friends in primary school, I get to know Charles, who also plays basketball. We play together and I see he’s way better than me. Believe me, when I say I was so deep in the fixed mindset that I did not even try to get even with him, poor me, there was just no point. If I couldn’t beat him, it must have been because I wasn’t good enough, right?
I never saw basketball the same way.

Maybe something similar happened to you, so—the next time someone cheers for your talent in something, remember all the time, all the work you’ve put in it and don’t sheeple take these, good intended, but empty praises.

And remember,

Greatness isn’t born. It’s grown.