Seeds of Success: Growth Mindset
What is a growth mindset?
In short, it is the absence of the fear of failure. Or, more accurately, it is the bravery of facing failure as an option. Knowing that you might fail, and knowing that you will learn and grow from that failure.
Too many of us are raised with a fixed mindset about success:
Success = Good; Failure = Bad.
End of story.
So we avoid failure, even when it means cheating, cutting corners, or taking the easiest path ahead.
A fixed mindset defines success as a measure. Whether it is a letter grade, a salary or a title, once you've got it you've achieved success.
What does that really do for us?
It teaches us as children that the important thing, is that you got a A. So we strive to get that A, no matter how we get it. It's easy in early education, a simple matter of wrote memorization really. Research has shown that a fixed mindset is developed early in life, when their parents start praising the outcomes of their achievements, rather than the work that got them to those achievements. The result is that rather than striving to learn, understand and grow, we strive to reach an outcome.
For example, when I was young I got paid for my grades. It was something like $5 for a A, $3 for a B and maybe $1 for a C. So I tried very hard to get those grades. In math, half of the answers were in the back of the book, so I copied all of those answers and used them to try to judge the rest of the questions. I was in trouble when it cam time to show my work because I hadn't actually learned much. I am still really bad at math. I tend to avoid it because I learned that I am not good at it, and I learned that failure is bad.
Here is another scenario of a fixed mindset: Have you ever had a physician who consistently treats symptoms and not the root cause of those symptoms? You're back hurts and they prescribe a muscle relaxer. Maybe you have a string of ear infections and they continually prescribe the same medication. Symptoms are easy to treat, and this physician has just taken the easy path of treating the most obvious and most easily corrected issues that you have. Maybe your back pain is caused by a rotation of your hip bone, that might require a surgery, which might not be 100% proven to fix the issue. Maybe your earaches are indicative of some deeper, more risky issue. This individual doesn't even want to find out because it may lead to a failure.
A growth mindset, on the other hand, thinks that failure is an opportunity to learn and grow. Every time you fail, you will be more likely to succeed in the future. In fact, failure is the key to growth.
Failure is essential to long term, true success.
Children who were taught using a growth mindset out performed students who were taught only study skills in both classroom success and standardized testing. This was shown in multiple studies.
Learning and failure go hand in hand. If you wish to succeed, you must be prepared to fail (probably a few times). If you get up and keep failing --oops, I mean learning-- you are sure to succeed in the end.
So get out there and get your fail on!
Resources:
http://mindsetscholarsnetwork....
http://news.stanford.edu/news/...
Recent Comments
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A successful person is someone who learns from their failures. I do must best to not worry about failing, because what I concentrate on is what will happen to me.
Wow, really enjoyed that!!!