From Fixed Mindset, to Growth Mindset. How I Learned to Fail.
Dealing with mistakes isn’t easy. After all, it can be humiliating to show our flaws and imperfections.
However, truly successful people see mistakes in the opposite light.
They accept mistakes as opportunities to grow faster.
So if you want to improve faster, you need to fail more.
My Story
10 years ago, I took badminton lessons every Friday. One day, my coach brought in his other student, who was smaller and skinnier in comparison to me.
Long story short, I lost. Badly.
It was humiliating to say the least. I think I had trauma after that. That kid probably thought I was pathetic.
Fast forward to earlier today. I played tennis and was challenged again by a 13 year old varsity player.
Long story short, I lost. Badly.
But I wasn’t humiliated. I was smiling the whole time. It wasn’t traumatic… I enjoyed every second of it.
So what changed my attitude?
I transformed my fixed mindset to a growth mindset.
Growth Mindset
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck is one of the few books that changed my life. The main philosophy is to focus on improvements, instead of thinking we can’t grow.
Your mindset — how you see yourself — shapes how you respond to people and events, to affect your outcomes. In this book, Carol Dweck draws on 20 years of research to explain how you can recognize, understand and change a fundamental mindset to impact all aspects of your life.
You can reach your potential, even if you’re bad at something.
The only thing stopping you is the limiting belief that you’ll never improve.
Of course, there are things you can’t control like your circumstances, your parents, your nationality and your age. But there are things you absolutely can control to achieve what you want.
If you’re a student… you can’t change your IQ but you can train your brain, read more books and learn to solve complex problems.
If you’re a basketball player… you can’t change your height (for the most part), but you can train to jump higher, get more Vitamin D and develop other skills to compensate for your height disadvantage.
The list goes on. Successful people don’t give up because of the circumstances they’re given. They embrace them. And focus their efforts on what they can control.
Fixed Vs. Growth Mindset
The fixed mindset is the belief that your qualities cannot be changed. Since you believe these qualities are a permanent part of who you are, you feel the need to constantly prove yourself. The growth mindset is the belief that your qualities can be changed and nurtured through effort. You believe that people may be born with different gifts, interests, or temperaments, but everyone can change and grow through experience and practice.
Fixed mindset focuses on validation. Growth mindset focuses on learning.
Fixed mindset seeks certainty. Growth mindset seeks challenges.
Fixed mindset hates effort. Growth mindset accepts effort as a key to success.
Let’s dive into what makes a growth mindset, so you can implement them as well.
Learn to Fail
Failure is key to learning. If you have a negative outlook on failure, then you have been conditioned by school and your parents to think that failure is unacceptable.
If you’ve been excessively scolded for simple mistakes, then most likely you’re anti-failure.
On the bright side, it’s never too late to change your outlook on making mistakes.
When things go wrong, everyone feels bad to some degree. The difference is in how they respond. People with a fixed mindset allows the failure to define them permanently (“I’m a failure”) give up, or try to protect their image by hiding their deficiencies, finding blame or excuses.
Those with a growth mindset may also feel upset, but they see the mistake as an incident and a problem to be overcome (“I failed this time”). They try to identify their shortfalls, confront the challenges, and seek alternative routes to success.
To people with the growth mindset, failure is something to celebrated. It’s a stepping stone to future successes, because at its core:
Failure = Learning
In school you’re thought success = learning.
When you get an A on a test, it means you learned a lot.
But did you really?
By failing, you get to learn about:
- Your weaknesses
- Your habits
- Your character
By failing, you learn more valuable thi
Not only that, by failing a lot in life and embracing failure, you become unreactive.
Yes, while the average person gets miserable from a simple mistake… you no longer get moved by it.
For example, person A asks out 1 woman and gets rejected. He’s devastated. He hates his life. He eats ice cream and plays PS4 to cope.
What about person B who asks out 100 women and gets rejected 99 times…
He’s used to the pain. He no longer fears it. He uses each approach to improve his skills. He knows about what to do and what not to do. Then, on the 100th try, he succeeds.
When you don’t learn to fail, you fail to learn. Mistakes are how you grow not just because it gives you experiences to learn from. Mistakes help you grow because maturity is accepting you’re imperfections.
Person B is imperfect, yet he accepts it. That’s what makes him stand out. That’s what makes him confident and not need validation. This is how he succeeds on his 100th try — his confidence.
Effort Matters
In the book, the author compares two groups of students.
The first group was told they were very smart.
The second group was told they worked hard.
Which do you think kept going as the challenges increased in difficulty?
The second group.
If you praise someone for being smart, they will think their results are the only things that matter.
If you praise someone for being hard working, they will think their efforts and attitude matter.
Remember: your career isn’t always going to be easy. If you have a fixed mindset, you might get eaten alive. Instead of focusing on your results, praise yourself for putting in the effort.
As cliché as it sounds, never give up.
To do so, you must focus on the efforts.
For me, personally, I’ve just started writing on Medium.
I have 15 followers and made $0.
Not so sexy isn’t it?
Of course, there are times where I worry about the views, but I also accept that I can’t control it.
I can only control:
- The ideas I give to the world
- The quality of the writing
- My consistency (1 Medium Article/Day)
By letting go of what I can’t control, and instead prioritizing my efforts on my system, I feel more relieved and alive. The growth mindset is about effort. There is no shame in trying hard and not winning.
There is a shame in not trying hard at all.
People with a fixed mindset tend to resist putting in effort because (a) they believe the need to work harder means they’re not “special” enough, and (b) they’re silently worried that their best effort will turn out to be inadequate. People with a growth mindset are driven by their passion for excellence, and end up winning as a result of their growth.
Talent Doesn’t Exist
This isn’t part of the book. It’s more of my own thesis on life.
The way we see talent is actually wrong.
When we think of talent, we think ‘natural ability’ or being good at something without needing to work as hard.
Or being the best because of gifts you were given at birth.
But the thing is, the people who will call talented actually worked hard for it as well.
Let’s say you’re 8 years old, and your friend who’s also 8 years old is amazing at tennis. You’d think he’s talented!
Of course he is! He’s amazing!
But what if it’s because he practiced since he was 4? While you didn’t?
The point I’m getting at is that talent isn’t about ‘natural ability’
Talent is the ability to display your capabilities.
Natural ability is just the ‘starter pack’ to give you a headstart.
But everyone is able to be good at something.
One example that I love is Nick Vujicic.
He has no arms and legs. But he can:
- surf
- draw
- drive
- swim
- play golf
- play soccer
- play basketball
This man is the living example of “I can do it. Just watch me”.
From now on, if ever I find myself complaining about hard things, I’ll remember this guy. Imagine complaining to him that ‘school is hard’.
This guy literally swam WITHOUT arms and legs.
This goes to show that talent doesn’t exist… or at least is overrated.
Instead focus on what you can control, be patient, and develop a growth mindset.
Your challenges would be more like games, rather than nuisances.
“We cannot change the cards we’re dealt, just how we play the hand”
If you want to apply the growth mindset by showing your failures, you can build a personal brand on Twitter. Learn how to build an authentic personal brand by subscribing to my weekly newsletter: https://the-arlo-letter.beehiiv.com/
