When you face failure, what is the first thought that comes to your mind? Does your confidence immediately diminish or do you learn from that defeat? Do you look at every challenge from the perspective that it is just an opportunity to prove how intelligent and talented you are? Or do you see it as something that helps you grow?
Every person is very different from each other and their experiences are also very different from each other. If any different person is asked to do the same work or come out of the same dilemma, then also that person will find its solution in his own different ways, for example many students give competitive exams but not everyone is able to give good results.
So why is it that some people start growing after overcoming a challenge, while some people kneel before it and are never able to move forward from there?
What is success?
The first step to living a productive, busy and prosperous life is to understand what success means to you. According to Maya Angelou, success means liking yourself, liking what we are doing and liking the way we are doing it. Before achieving your goal, it is important to know what you want to achieve. Find answers to these questions –
- What is most important to you?
- What is a successful life according to you?
- Is there any person whom you follow? What is there in their life that you would like to include in your life?
- How much willpower do you have to achieve your goal?
- How will you know that you have achieved success?
After knowing the answers to these questions, we can understand what success means to us.
Secrets of Success
Richard John has given 8 guiding principles that successful people use –
- Guided by passion – If you have a strong desire or passion for any work, then choose that path.
- Hard work and playfulness – Work hard but in a way that you enjoy the work rather than getting bored.
- Expertise – Keep learning, practice and improve your skills until you start giving good results in that task.
- Focus – Give your work as much time as required.
- Be determined – Rejection, criticism and victory and defeat are a part of this game, our confidence in ourselves should not be weakened due to these.
- Be curious – One should be curious, observant and interested in new ideas.
- Help others – Don’t get too involved in doing good for yourself, help other people too.
- Confidence – Have faith in yourself despite many difficulties. Give yourself new challenges.
Two mindsets of mind-sets
- Fixed mindset – a fixed ability that needs to be proven.
- Developing mindset – a changeable ability that can be developed through learning.
In one world, effort is a bad thing. It’s like failure, which means you’re not smart or talented. In another world, effort is worth nothing. Kids don’t care about making mistakes or embarrassing themselves. They walk, they fall, they get back up. They just keep going. What stops this learning process? The answer is a fixed mindset.
The child with a growth mindset asks: Why would anyone keep solving the same puzzle? Most children don’t lift their hand in the event that they don’t know of the answer. But a student with a growing mindset does: If I’m wrong, the mistake will be corrected. “I don’t understand this. Can you help me?” I’m improving my intelligence just by doing this.
Kids with fixed mindset let go of opportunities because they thought that they would fail and they couldn’t become a good learner.
People with a growing mindset grab opportunities thinking that success is in the learning. After answering difficult questions, people with a fixed mindset just wanted to know if their answer was right or wrong. They were not interested in whether the information could help them learn. Only people with a growth mindset cared about it because they valued learning. Effort makes you smart or talented. You have a choice of mindset. Mindsets are just powerful beliefs, but they are in your mind, and you can change your thinking.
I don’t divide the world into weak and strong or successful and unsuccessful… I divide the world into learners and non-learners.
Everyone is born with a natural urge to learn. Babies improve their skills every day. Not only simple skills, but also the most difficult tasks of life, like learning to walk and talk. They never decide it’s too hard.
Mindset changes the meaning of effort
As children, we were told a story about a brilliant but indecisive rabbit and a slow but steady tortoise. The lesson was “Slow and steady wins the race”. But really, did any of us want to be a tortoise? The problem was that these stories made it a choice – either this, or that.
As a society, we value easy success more than success that comes with effort. People with a growth mindset believe that even talented people have to work hard for their achievements.
- More effort: bigger risk
For a person with a fixed mindset, the idea of trying and still failing is the biggest fear.
- Less effort: bigger risk
You can look back and say, “I could have…” or say, “I gave my best to the things that mattered to me.”
Also Read: Mental Health: A Constant Journey of Experiences, Struggles and Growth
The Journey to the Developing Mindset
Step 1: Embrace your fixed mindset.
Step 2: Notice what triggers your fixed mindset.
Step 3: Give your fixed mindset a name.
Step 4: Educate it. Take it on a journey with you.
When the fixed mindset appears, thank it for its feedback, but tell it what you want to do and why. When there is a failure, tell it that you are learning from it. What opportunities are there to learn and grow today? For me? For the people around me? When, where, and how will I begin my plan?
Turning Knowledge into Action
Mindsets can be changed. Only by becoming aware of these two mindsets can you begin to think and react differently. A person can have both mindsets. He may show a fixed mindset in some areas, and a developing mindset in other areas. Also, a person does not necessarily always live in either a fixed or a developing mindset. People have different resources and opportunities. Wealthy people have a safety net.
They can take more risks and keep trying until they succeed. Effort works better for the wealthy, educated, and connected. A growth mindset allows people to love their work and keep doing it despite difficulties. Many growth mindset people don’t plan to reach great heights; they just do what they love, and as a result they reach great heights. A growth mindset allows people to value their work regardless of the outcome.
Both mindsets may also love a Nobel Prize or a lot of money and will do whatever it takes to get there, but the former do it for approval and the latter do it for love. Understanding your mindset helps you realize the drawbacks of a fixed mindset. A growth mindset is the belief that abilities can improve, but it doesn’t say how much change is possible or how long it will take.
It also doesn’t mean that everything, like preferences or values, can be changed. Once you win a junior tournament, it becomes easier to win it multiple times. By participating in senior tournaments, you are preparing for the future. You don’t need to be confident always if you have a growth mindset. Even when you’re not good at something, you can still jump right in and play it and learn. In fact, sometimes you jump into it because you’re not good at it. In this way, cognitive therapy helps people make more realistic and optimistic evaluations.
But it doesn’t remove them from the fixed mindset’s way of thinking and judging. Moving to junior high can be a major challenge for many students in terms of mindset and school achievement. Work becomes much harder, grading policies become stricter, and the approach to studying is less personal. All of this happens while students are trying to understand their new adolescent bodies and roles. Grades drop, but not all students’ grades fall equally.
Staying mindset students show a drop, while developing mindset students’ grades improve. When stable mindset students fail, they blame many things: their own ability, poor teachers. Feeling the threat of failure, developing mindset students also feel helpless, but they mobilize resources to learn. George Dantzig, a graduate student at Berkeley, arrived late to a math class and quickly copied questions off the blackboard. He found the questions very difficult and took days to solve.
They were not homework questions, but two famous math problems that had never been solved. Adolescents often tend to work less hard as they realize the freedom of their adulthood. But students with a positive mindset see this as an opportunity. For them, it is time to learn new subjects, to figure out what they like and what they want to become in the future.
The transition to college is another change, another crisis. This is where the brightest people get put together. Many fixed mindsets student’s study like this: They read the textbook and their class notes. If they find it too difficult, they read it again. Or they try to memorize everything. Students with a growth mindset take full control of their studies and motivation. Instead of mindlessly memorizing course material, they look for themes and fundamentals in the lectures.
They repeat their mistakes until they fully understand them. They were studying to learn, not just to score well in exams. They did not lose motivation even when the course became boring or difficult. They said: “I kept my interest.” “I stayed positive about taking chemistry.” “I kept myself motivated to study.” They did not lose motivation even if they found the textbook boring or the teacher strict.
Learn from failure
According to a study done in the US, businessmen changed their industry if they failed and most of the time they failed in the new industry too. This does not mean that they did not have knowledge, they felt that the work they did before and failed in that will make them fail again. Successful are those who do not fall into this trap. We should learn from our mistakes and move forward and find new ways to face challenges. If we can be happy in success, then we should also know how to handle failure.
Failure should be accepted. If we get some disease, we take medicine for it and when we get cured, we stop taking medicine but this does not mean that the disease cannot occur again. Similarly, success also remains the same, once we become successful, we should not reduce our efforts. Even after becoming successful, we will remain insecure about when we will fail. Success is a process for which continuous efforts are required. The meaning of success can be different for every person, what success is and how to continue it, all this is in our hands.
Our thinking can make us successful or unsuccessful. Ultimately, success does not depend only on talent or luck, but depends on how we mold our thinking and keep learning and trying continuously by believing in ourselves. By adopting this approach, we can not only achieve our goals but can also live an inspiring life.
