Growth mindset
The growth mindset is the idea that abilities can be developed.
It's all about taking on your challenges and pushing yourself and breaking yourself down so that you can come back stronger. It's about resilience, about not waning in the face of difficulties. It's definitely a paradigm shift from what you had before.
You should remember that every time you push out of your comfort zone to learn something new and difficult, the neurons in your brain can form new, stronger connections, and over time, you get smarter.
If you get this growth mindset you show a sharp rebound in your grades or whatever.
The power of «yet»
You should understand that you are not able to manage every task from the first time you face it. Its ok if task takes you some time to make it done. Don't give up if you can't solve the problem on the first try. Do not blame yourself and do not scold, on the contrary tell yourself that I cannot solve this problem, but this is only «for now» or «yet». By giving yourself room to grow, you increase your chances of success.
When you get the grade «Yet», you understand that you're on a learning curve. It gives you a path into the future. Unlike the unhealthy self-flagellation of failure, the ability to accept failure plays into your hands.
Do not focus on fast results
Praising the process that you engage in, your effort, your strategies, your focus, your perseverance, your improvement. You should be self rewarded for effort, strategy and progress.Because the most valuable thing you can gain is experience, not the ultimate goal.
If laziness is the only reason to say «no» — say «yes»
If the reason for refusing to perform a task is laziness, then it is worth it through the effort to complete it. Because your brain is always trying to «save» energy for you. However, learning to notice these moments when you are for example at home, instead of going to workout solely out of laziness, can train your willpower and increase productivity. Say «yes» to any action you would say «no» only because you are too lazy. It will undoubtedly get you to best results.
Learn as much as perform
You'd better go through life deliberately alternating between two zones:
- 1. The learning zone.The learning zone is when our goal is to improve. Then we do activities designed for improvement, concentrating on what we haven't mastered yet, which means we have to expect to make mistakes, knowing that we will learn from them.
- 2. The performance zone. That is very different from what we do when we're in our performance zone, which is when our goal is to do something as best as we can, to execute. Then we concentrate on what we have already mastered and we try to minimize mistakes.
The performance zone maximizes our immediate performance, while the learning zone maximizes our growth and our future performance. The reason many of us don't improve much despite our hard work is that we tend to spend almost all of our time in the performance zone.
So the way to high performance is to alternate between the learning zone and the performance zone, purposefully building our skills in the learning zone, then applying those skills in the performance zone.
So how can we spend more time in the learning zone?
We must want to improve at that particular skill. There has to be a purpose we care about, because it takes time and effort.
We must have an idea about how to improve, what we can do to improve, and do deliberate practice.
We must be in a low—stakes situation, because if mistakes are to be expected, then the consequence of making them must not be catastrophic, or even very significant.
For example: a tightrope walker doesn't practice new tricks without a net underneath, and an athlete wouldn't set out to first try a new move during a championship match.
From an early age children feel that if they make a mistake, others will think less of them, and parents will punish. No wonder they're always stressed out and not taking the risks necessary for learning.
We should, instead of spending our lives doing, performing, spend more time exploring, asking, listening, experimenting, making mistakes, reflecting, striving and becoming.
Do not compare others talent and intelligence with yours
It seems we have been measured almost all of our lives, when we are infants, with our height and our weight, and as we grew it became our speed and our strength. Scores at school, salaries and job performance are still measurements.
It seems as if those personal averages are almost always used to measure where we are in comparison to our peers.
Success of other people can stimulate you, but not affect. Because every person has different conditions and opportunities for growing up. And it's just irrazionali to measure you by others.
So the quicker you understand it and move on to what's next, the quicker you can start achieving things. Do not give yourself time to doubt. And by moving on to the next task as fast as possible, you shrink the time you spend on those destructive comparative thoughts. And, as a result, the good outweighs the bad, your average increases and that's just how the math works.
Do not envy others' success and don't let yourself be cracked by your first try failures, its ok not to manage smth for the first time you try. You think that some people have the talent or the genetics to do this thing and, specifically, you don't. You should know that at the heart of success is not talent; it's effort. Mostly, talented people are spending much time on developing their talent.
It's effort, over time, that produces accomplishment; it's effort that creates opportunities.
Everybody has something that they're fighting for, and it may be visible, it may not be, but please, take some time and focus on you instead of others, and I bet you can win those challenges and really start accomplishing so many great things.