Growth Mindset

Your mindset is everything. The way you see the world shapes your actions, your decisions, your future.

Adopt a growth mindset

You can’t go wrong cultivating a growth mindset — a learning theory developed by Dr Carol Dweck that revolves around the belief that you can improve intelligence, ability and performance.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn. - Alvin Toffler, a writer, futurist, and businessman known for his works discussing modern technologies.

Cultivating a growth or adaptable mindset can help you focus more on your most desirable goals in life. It may influence your motivation and could make you more readily able to see opportunities to learn and grow your abilities.

The ability to keep an open-mind, acquire better knowledge and apply it when necessary can significantly improve your life and career.

Develop a Growth Mindset

• from the article “Top 10 Elon Musk Productivity Secrets for Insane Success”

There’s always room for improvement — in every area. There’s always a better, faster, or cheaper way to do things:

“You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.” - Elon Musk

This is what is called a growth mindset, an important skill that separates successful people from everyone else. When you have a growth mindset, you know you can learn anything if you put enough effort into it. And if you fail, you approach the problem from a different angle until you find a solution that works. You iterate until you get it right.

In Musk’s words:

“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

The opposite is known as a fixed mindset, where the status quo is rarely challenged. Things will always be the way they are because “that’s how we do things around here”. Preconceived notions are taken as universal truths, instead of being questioned. Thus, people stagnate.

On the other hand, developing a growth-oriented mindset brings progress to both our personal and professional lives. And even if you manage small gains each day are small, they compound over time. A 1% gain every day compounds to almost 3800% increase over a year.

Application in daily life

Growth comes from tackling difficult problems, questions, and challenges. In order to succeed, you need to train the brain to look at failures and struggles as progress, as getting closer to the solution.

Here’s how you can start developing a growth mindset:

1. Continual learning: expand your knowledge with books, learn from your personal challenges, and from others; loading your brain with fresh knowledge enables it to come up with new ideas and solutions that add value to your job and life
2. Be persistent: shift your perspective to look at failures as minor setbacks and learning experiences in the great scheme of things; adapt and iterate your ideas so you can be successful on the next try
3. Live for challenges: if you have two choices, choose the harder; look at challenges as an opportunity to expand your skills and grow
4. Embrace failure: at some point in life, everybody fails; learn from failures by understanding what went wrong and how it can be improved and use that experience in the next try
5. Open to feedback: effective and timely feedback on areas to improve is a critical component of success; be more open to receiving feedback, even the non-constructive one
6. Celebrate others: “no man is an island”, so start supporting other people successes because they won’t dampen yours; when it’s your time to shine, they will celebrate with you

Reading material

See soft-skills

A few books that pair perfectly with Mindset (help with developing a growth mindset), check out:

1. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol S. Dweck
2. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
3. The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How by Daniel Coyle
4. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth
5. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool