Author: Phantom Brother
Have you ever experienced:
From an early age, you have a subject that you are very good at, it may be Chinese, it may be mathematics, or it may be your hands-on ability.
You've always prided yourself on mastering it well without much effort, and your parents often complimented it on to their friends and family.
But as you get older, you suddenly find that your "talent" seems to be gone: there are so many people who are as good at the subject as you are, and they are even better than you.
You start to panic, think you've become a loser, and you don't know where to go.
You may have had the experience of:
Since you were a child, you had a subject that you were very bad at, maybe mathematics, maybe running, and you tried hard but didn't see obvious results.
People around you tell you that you weren't born to do this. "It's not this piece of material!" They said.
Listen to it a lot, and you start to believe it. You thought, instead of wasting time on subjects that I don't have a talent for, I should go and study something else.
So you start to resist it, and naturally you never get good results again, and you can't reconcile with it for the rest of your life.
If you've had both experiences and have struggled with them, listen to this solution:
First of all, don't believe the saying that "talent is everything". When you encounter a subject that you are not good at, tell yourself: it may be because I am not trying hard enough.
Secondly, we must remain humble and continue to climb the subjects we are good at, and we must not be afraid of setbacks and persist in working hard for the subjects we are not good at.
Over time, you will be surprised to find that you have not only maintained your strengths, but also made progress in the subjects you are not good at.
This solution is called a "growth mindset."
1
Confucius pursued "my Tao is consistent", Lao Tzu said, Tao gives birth to one, life to two, two to three, and three to all things.
Why is everyone so willing to pursue "one"?
What is "one"?
In my opinion, "one" is called "virtue behind virtue."
Which virtue gives birth to all the good deeds in all the world? Peter Drucker famously said, "To steward is to maximize the goodwill of others."
However, the word good faith seems too general.
What kind of kindness do we need to motivate? Eventually, I found an answer in a book that came close to the answer.
The book is called "Lifelong Growth."
She boils down all of our most important elements of success, our behavior, our relationships with others, our families, and our careers to our two mindsets. One is called a fixed mindset and the other is called a growth mindset, which is very convincing.
Consider two questions:
"Which do you think is more important, intelligence or hard work?"
"Can the ability be changed through hard work?"
Don't underestimate these two simple questions, they embody the two basic mindsets of people when it comes to success and failure, achievements and challenges, and it is this mindset that determines whether you will be satisfied with the existing achievements or actively explore new knowledge.
Fixed-minded people believe that human talents are immutable. So they always take a negative attitude towards life, especially afraid of facing failure.
Whereas, growth minders believe that human abilities can be cultivated through hard work. Therefore, they will actively face the problem of failure, summarize experience from failure, and gain growth.
What is a fixed mindset?
It's everywhere.
"The driving skills are so poor, it must be a female driver!"
"Do things so slowly, what can you do well when you grow up!"
"Virgo is clean!"
"Girls can't learn mathematics, physics and chemistry well"
......
Are these commonplace statements in life the truth? No, these are just some of our accidental feelings, not facts.
And if we don't think about it, or if we follow the crowd, we will take them as established facts, and then go deep into our subconscious, hindering our personal development and not daring to try.
Always give yourself a "I'm stupid, I shouldn't be able to do it, and I can't do it".
But if you look at the people around you who do something, they are usually not too bad at doing anything, but do they really have some talent in some aspects, otherwise? One of the big differences is the way of thinking and attitude in the face of setbacks and difficulties.
That is, we have two different modes of thinking.
People with a fixed mindset believe that their talents are immutable, and it is precisely because of this that they want to prove their abilities over and over again, and are accustomed to using what happens as a direct yardstick to measure their ability and value.
Habitually concerned about other people's opinions and evaluations, and prone to self-denial, labeling themselves in various types and expressing judgmental remarks.
Once there are too many setbacks and difficulties in life, it is easy to produce a strong state of stress, easy to get angry, and even in the face of real problems, you can choose to escape from your true heart and avoid responsibility, and use lies, blaming others, or silent evasion to face and solve problems.
Or simply choose not to try, because if you don't say or do, you won't make a mistake, so as to avoid judgment and denial by others.
Fixed thinking habitually attributes outward, and it is easy to attribute the reasons why oneself cannot solve or encounter setbacks to fate, others, opportunities, and abilities, but only ignores one's own subjectivity.
On the other hand, the mindset of inward attribution tells us an important truth: you always have a choice!
Wooden, the famous basketball coach, once said, "You are not a loser until you start blaming others", you can always choose to change yourself, to face the problem of the moment, to take responsibility, to start again and choose your own life.
What is a growth mindset?
As the old saying goes: "If you don't enter the tiger's den, you will get the tiger." ”
A growth mindset focuses on capacity development and self-learning, and the courage to break through. It is this courage to face reality, attribution, and self-responsibility that enables people with this mindset to have the passion to improve themselves and persevere, even when things are not going well.
When they encounter major challenges in their lives, they can still achieve greater growth and breakthroughs through continuous self-sharpening and learning and change.
When it comes to a thing, what they pursue is not just a result, but also the true feeling and growth in the process.
A fixed mindset may hold the answer, while a growth mindset holds the way things are done.
Sociologist Benjamin Barber said, "I don't divide the world into strong and weak, or successful and unsuccessful...... I would divide the world into good scholars and bad scholars. ”
People with a growth mindset don't necessarily follow the established path, but have the courage to challenge and face reality.
A fixed mindset makes you more concerned about how others perceive you, while a growth mindset makes you more concerned about improving yourself.
In the Talmud, the Jewish Bible, it is recorded that every Jewish child, as he grows up, is asked a question:
"If one day, your house burns down, what will you take with you to escape?"
If the child is going to take something valuable, the mother will tell them: "Child, what you are going to take away is not money, not diamonds, but your knowledge, your way of thinking." ”
Schopenhauer said, "The largest prison in the world is the consciousness of the human mind." ”
The human brain will be affected by past habits and experiences, and will make subconscious judgments about certain issues.
Trapped in habitual thinking, even simple questions can become tricky.
In many cases, what really limits our development is often our original thinking.
In this life, people are paying for the limitations of their thinking. If the thinking pattern is wrong, no matter how hard you work, it will be in vain.
Fixed mindsets always come easily.
2
How do we foster a growth mindset?
In the book, the author proposes four steps to developing a growth mindset: receive, observe, name, educate.
1. Acceptance;
Accept that each of us has a fixed mindset. See it and accept it. This is a normal thing, neither shameful nor scary.
Because everyone has two mindsets.
2. Observation;
When you fail, observe if there are voices in your head: "You will never be a good person", "Maybe you don't have that much ability".
These negative voices are the emergence of your fixed-minded personality, and you need to pay attention to when it appears and find what motivates it.
III. naming;
You can give a person a name to a person with a fixed mindset. You can call him Xiaoqiang, Xiaopang or Mingming. Whenever you have self-doubt, they often come up.
So once you find them showing up, remind yourself not to let them control you.
4. Education;
As a final step, you need to embark on a journey of growth with your fixed mindset personality. When he shows up, you have to say to him, "yes, I'm not very good at this right now, but I think I know exactly what I'm going to do next." Let's give it a try."
When we are able to actively face the fixed mindset personality and invite him to join us in our growth, we can better solve the difficulties in life.
Change is hard, but it's worth it.
I once read an article about a colleague who has a very smart and lovely son.
Every time she visited her home, she would enthusiastically show off her children's drawings and report cards.
Whenever a child gets a good grade, she compliments: "You're so smart!" "You're really great!"
But later, after the child was promoted to the senior grade, her grades suddenly plummeted, and she was often distressed: "Why don't you want to use it on your studies when your son is very smart?" ”
The daily life shared with us every day has also changed from "mother's love and filial piety" to "chickens flying and dogs jumping".
Is Encouragement Education a Failure?
It's not, it's just a fixed mindset.
It makes children obsessed with the praised outcome itself, but ignores the process.
The disadvantages of parents associating "smart" with their children's "grades" are:
First, once school becomes difficult, it means that it is likely that he will not be able to achieve the good grades he used to have, and the child will suspect that he has become stupid.
Second, in order to avoid everyone thinking that he is no longer smart, he will choose to avoid and have a strong resistance to learning.
In fact, this is also the main reason for the emergence of modern "hurt Zhongyong".
Carroll mentions in the book:
We should avoid the kind of praise that evaluates a child's intelligence, or makes them feel that we are not proud of their intelligence and talents, rather than for their efforts.
This is not to say that encouraging education is incorrect.
As a parent, you should use a growth mindset to encourage your child to focus on the process, enjoy the challenge, and learn from the failure.
For example, instead of praising a child for being smart, it is better to praise him for being diligent and hardworking;
Instead of praising the child for doing well in the exam, it is better to praise him for making progress in which subject this time.
If your child is not doing well, then analyze the pros and cons with him, continue to improve next time, and continue to work hard.
With a growth mindset to grow with your child, your child will understand that the process of hard work is more important than the result.
When you are able to face your mindset and involve him in your own growth path, you will be able to face those difficult problems with a more positive attitude.
And people with a true growth mindset will ponder, think, and after doing a wrong question, summarize and think, which is their learning method. Therefore, in terms of learning methods, these two kinds of people are different.
People with fixed thinking can try not to work hard if they don't work hard, and in all the examination process, in the learning process, as long as they can meet the standards, as long as they can rank in the top few.
Wang Wei, founder of SF Express, said:
A person's success may be accidental, but if he can succeed for a long time, he must have his own uniqueness, and may be different from others in terms of thinking and behavior.
Thinking is a person's superstructure, which determines the angle from which we look at problems and the way we behave.
The mind is the commander of life, and the mind is the vanguard of action.
Schrödinger once said: Human life is a process of constantly fighting against the law of entropy increase, and life lives on negative entropy. And if you want to increase entropy, you have to keep growing upward.
Everything in the world is like a river that flows forward, everything is rushing from order to disorder, and all living and non-living things struggle and swim against the current in this river. Obviously, only by being proactive and diligent can we make the world and everything more orderly and become the most powerful weapon against entropy.
This brings us to the theme we're talking about today: a growth mindset. Only a growth mindset can make people fight against the increasing problems in life.
3
Today's article, written to the end, leave a few questions for you:
The first question: I hope you will think, why do you believe that human abilities can be developed? This is crucial.
The second question: we need to come up with an area where we used to be very poor, but now we are doing very well. If you have time, you can also write about how you did it.
Question 3: Write a letter to your employees who are struggling with their work and tell them that their abilities can be developed.
Question 4: Think back to a time when you thought someone couldn't do something, but that person eventually learned.
You need to reflect on how this shift happened in this case. For example, you have met an employee who was not good at something, but then slowly became good.
How did this come about?
The mindset changes the meaning of effort, and eventually turns the gears of fate in a different direction.
Life is short, be active and brave, take the initiative to break down the walls in those thinking, put aside the self-limiting and self-denial voices, and continue to explore inward and break through outward with a growth mindset.
Growing up is a lifelong affair for everyone.
It has nothing to do with age. Stagnation is the most terrible thing about aging.
"Lifelong Growth" clearly tells us to maintain a growth mindset, not to live too hard, not to find.
Maugham once said, "A man can observe fallen leaves, flowers, and see everything from a subtle point of view, and life cannot do anything to him." ”
The harder you pursue, the more you will not have a good life. In uncertain times, anything can happen. Unsustainable relationships, unbearable pressure, unfulfilled dreams, and things that can't be achieved even with all your best efforts gradually evolve into a self-anxiety.
Don't be in a hurry, don't be forced, walk slowly and relaxedly, and you will always reach the end.
As someone said: Life is just a one-stop scenery, and the worst result is just a late bloomer.
For the rest of our lives, may we not be slow and achieve a better version of ourselves in the waves.
As the book gives examples, when we are in the world, we can say to ourselves: I have fully tapped my potential in this life, instead of always doing some simple things, and there are traces of my courage to face in the years!
Grow up for life, with faith, pick up the sword of thinking, and overcome obstacles and be invincible in the turbulent life.
Since it is the desire of the heart, why not be afraid of the road and grow!
Phantom Brother was recorded at Ming Fu College on May 8, 2024