If you protect yourself from the possibility of failure, you protect yourself from success. This is why the growth mindset — backed by neuroscientific research — is the number one determinant of success. Accepting that a learning curve and failure is part of the journey towards mastery and success, not innate ability, is what makes people achieve. A fixed mindset leaves people stuck miserably believing their abilities are fixed so they flee from their goals. Success is a combination of hard work, resilience, and seeking opportunities.
Some people will withdraw in the face of failure, shy away from challenges, while others no more talented than them embrace challenges and thrive in the face of failure. This dichotomy on outcomes stemming from people’s attitudes towards failure, was studied over 30 years ago by Dr. Carol Dwec. Dr Dweck and her colleagues studied thousands of students and noticed some students rebounded while others gave up by the smallest of setbacks. She coined the terms “fixed mindset” and “growth mindset” to describe the ideas people have about intelligence and learning. When students believe they can become more intelligent and ability is not fixed, they understand effort leads to higher results, and persevere.
Fixed mindsets believe their abilities are fixed, growth mindsets believe they can be developed through hard work. Fixed mindsets make you fear challenges that reveal your deficiencies and make you withdraw. But others think, their abilities can be developed, that everyone can grow and abilities aren’t inherent. Every self-made successful person rose to the top not because of innate talent alone, but because they put in extraordinary amounts of hard work and resilience.
This is what separates the achievers, from those full of wasted potential because they gave up while on the learning curve. Some people are born with predispositions for passions and talents but others that are born with them too never achieve anything because they don’t put in the hard work and resilience.
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
Calvin Coolidge
In Dweck’s studies, students’ underlying beliefs about effort and abilities created self-fulfilling prophecies. Those who persevere after failures, understanding that effort made them stronger, put in extra time and work and achieved higher results. Neuroscience research on brain plasticity lends credence to these observations. With practice, connectivity between neurons strengthens and grows new connections, and “builds insulation that speeds transmission of impulses.” Humans increase their neural growth through actions we take such as practice, good nutrition and sleep habits.
Thus, while fixed mindsets ran from errors and challenges and underachieved despite having the same mental capacity for growth, growth mindset subjects formed stronger neural connections by preserving through practice.
Adopting the Growth Mindset
‘Imagining something can be almost as good as having it.” Big dreamers with big goals typically think they’d have achieved more than they actually have and end up disappointed wondering where all their potential went.
Instead of dreaming away of all the great things you’re not actually working for, imagine what your life will be like if you don’t make it. The years pass faster with each coming year as they become a smaller percentage of your life. One day you’ll wake up 20 years later feeling completely dissatisfied and entrapped by the life you passively created. Not financially free, stuck in the same place, always hoping for something better to magically land in your lap, wishing you had put in more effort in your younger days, wishing you’d pursued your passion. Imagine what life will be like if you don’t accomplish your goals and dreams in fear of challenges.
After this dreadful exercise gives you a spark of ephemeral motivation, comes the hard part — combatting the habit of procrastination. How? By learning delayed gratification. A seemingly insurmountable feat in the social media age of instant gratification — a habit that soon leaves you regretful and as empty as before you started doom scrolling. Instant gratification doesn’t build towards your goals, it’s only focused on the present minute’s comfort and pleasure, which leaves you in the same place. Make it a goal to choose long-term satisfaction over instant gratification.
Halting Procrastination
Procrastinators only tend to act until the last minute when the pressure of deadlines overcomes their perfectionism and finally forces them to act. While it may sometimes work for those of us who somehow write last minute A+ college papers, it fails to accomplish those extra goals that no one is setting deadlines for you. You won’t write a book, read a book for the first time in years, workout, make that career change. You’ll get stuck in a hamster wheel of life just barely outrunning the next necessary deadline.
Perfectionism often goes hand in hand with procrastination. It makes us fear the outcome before even starting, so we don’t start at all. We fear we have to be in a perfect state to get started, that we need better skills. The truth is there will never be a perfect time to start, nor will we ever be fully ready. The first step to halting our procrastination is to realize that perfection is a false idol. Perfectionism is not necessary for success. We forget about the learning curve every successful person went through to become an expert in their craft and the many challenges they overcame. Learning to be okay with being average before being good is the first step to achieving one’s goals.
Exceptionalism is another false idol. Discipline and resilience can go further than natural talent and intelligence which result in unfulfilled potential without discipline. Start now, start where you are. There is never a perfect time, and you don’t have to be perfect. Perfect is the paralyzing enemy of progress. You can only succeed by not being afraid to be bad initially. Perfectionism leaves you paralyzed, waiting for the perfect conditions. But you may be waiting for the rest of your life. The perfect time doesn’t exist and success does not require starting with perfection. Accepting the learning curve is the beginning of achievement. No self-made person starts off as an expert, but as a learner with a love for the process. It is only then that one can shed the fear of failure — the fixed mindset — that stops us from starting at all.
1.Imagine what life will be like if you don’t accomplish your goals and dreams in fear of challenges.
2. Fight procrastination by detaching yourself from the outcome and just promising yourself to put in your best effort. Your worth isn’t in your achievements or external validation and successful people are the ones who persisted through a learning curve. Just start.
3.Choose long-term satisfaction over instant-gratification to take steps towards your goals. Your future self will thank you.
4.Make a to-do list of all your tasks and highlight the ones you actually need done for the day. Tackle the biggest task in the morning first.
5.Time yourself to create an artificial deadline — keeping a timer in 30 minute increments helps prevent you from wasting time
6.Reward yourself with all the extra free time you have from not wasting it on anxiously procrastinating without ever really relaxing because you were too busy thinking about your looming tasks.
7.Remember that action precedes motivation — don’t overschedule tasks, just do one thing for 10 minutes and your motivation will grow from there until you’ve suddenly finished.
Remember
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right,” Henry Ford once said. Doubt really is often the only dream killer. The achievers in life aren’t extraordinary human beings with insurmountable talent. Innate talent and perfectionism is a false idol. Only the hunger of average, of dissatisfaction, of inadequacy leads to achievement. People can do hard things. Most of them are ordinary people that simply had the unordinary tendency to believe in their abilities and simply start and persevere. When we let emotions like doubt control and anxiety control our reality, we stop ourselves from doing everything we could have succeeded at in life. Put your goals, not negative emotions in the driver’s seat.
Excellence is just cultivated hard work. If you want to change your situation you must create a sense of urgency from your dissatisfaction from your misery, to change things. Pushing out of your comfort zone to learn new things forms stronger neural connections since the brain is far more malleable than we thought, and ability is not fixed. Remember, persistence and determination win over talent & genius. If you protect yourself from the possibility of failure, you protect yourself from the possibility of happiness and success.
What do you value in life? To break out of the human tendency to let actions be led by our ephemeral emotions (that leave us with a reality that doesn’t match our dreams) we must be led by our goals, not our fears. Learning curves exist in every goal that’s worth it and every successful person has had to go through them. Ability isn’t innate and failure is truly a guiding, instructive, part of the unpaved road to success. The mind is malleable and research shows that achievement comes from believing in the growth mindset and practice.
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