This is huge; this is key to your success. The difference between someone with a fixed mindset and a growth mindset it fucking huge. Those people with a fixed mindset tend to look at anything new as scary and often shy away from new inputs. These people rarely question what they’re told and do not look to self-improvement in a kind manner. An example of someone with a fixed mindset is very easy to spot, as they are often extremely ignorant with views on the world, perhaps similar views to that of their grandparents generation.
Many people have the same approach to work and life as this, they fail to see things from any other perspective. A fixed mindset person dislikes being wrong, gets offended if you question them and often gets angry if they are found out to be wrong. The simplest way to sum up someone with a fixed mindset is “a rejection of new and improved information”. I often ponder the question; is it ignorant or stupidity if you are presented with new information that changes your understanding of the world and you reject it to hold onto your fixed view? Perhaps neither, maybe it’s just fear or laziness or human nature as we are very resistant to change.
Someone with a growth mindset wants to engage in discussions where they are the least knowledgeable person in the room. They embrace new information. They are happy to change their mind on all manner of topics and subjects.
A growth mindset is someone who seeks information and inputs even if they recognize the new information may mean their current view is wrong. Similar to a scientific approach here, where you do the research with no outcome in mind, or actively try to disprove something to show it’s correct.
This type of person will get information from a news sources, say a television channel BBC 1 for example and then go and research it online via Google, check other news sources in their country, check news sources on the same subject matter from other tv channels in different countries. Check social media and use tools like Twitter and YouTube to research the subject, read books and try to gain as much insight as possible. Seeing one news article from one source is really outdated and is very much a fixed mindset.
A growth mindset is someone who wants to figure out the most effective method, the quickest to a task at hand. The desire to understand the why behind the question. Tim Ferris springs to mind as having a growth mindset.
The details behind why something is a certain way. Children think and engage in the world through a growth mindset, hovering up information and asking all sorts of questions. Life though changes as we get older and as adults many of us stop engaging in this manner as social convention and those around us begin to recede in thought and effectively de-evolve the brain, in plain terms many adults simply become more stupideeeeeer… just like my last sentence! They become fixed in a way of thinking and caught up in a pattern that’s akin to a fixed mindset. This is often through fear and conforming to our surroundings.
An interesting point of note is that many people are not always one or the other. In some areas of life they are extremely growth orientated and willing to expand their view and information sources, yet in another arena they fail to engage the same approach. This is fascinating and I really haven’t figured out why, perhaps it’s the inputs in a certain scenario or perhaps joy or fun and we engage more when we see something as more fun. I’m really not sure why some people can be very growth orientated in one field and very fixed in another, but they are.
Cheers - Tarran