Tag: life long learning

How to Develop a Growth Mindset Effectively, And Grow Baby, Grow!

When I was a little boy, I had a piece of needlepoint art in my bedroom. It depicted a little cowboy, like me, and the words, ‘Please by patient. God isn’t finished with me yet.’ It was my first reminder that who I was as a young boy was not who I was going to be as a full-grown adult. I just didn’t know that I would never outgrow my love for potty humor.

The Growth Mindset

As I grew older, I recognized how much I was changing, learning and growing. First, in elementary, middle and high school. Then, the growth and learning continued at The University of Wisconsin, where I majored in psychology, journalism and cheese curds.

But I liked learning, growing and developing so much that when I graduated from college, I enrolled in Adam Albrecht’s Self-Directed School of Life Long Learning. It’s where I have received all of my advanced degrees. The tuition at AASDSLLL is a great value. But our basketball team couldn’t beat a drum.

Lessons I Have Learned Along The Way.

I have learned that everyone adopts 1 of 2 mindsets.

Those with a fixed mindset believe their knowledge, skills, abilities and limitations are fixed and unchanging.

People with a growth mindset believe that they are continuously growing, evolving and improving. Which sounds way more hopeful. (Pro Tip: It’s also the mindset they are looking for at your parole hearing.)

A growth mindset means you recognize that what you know now is just a tiny percentage of what you could know.

A growth mindset means that you believe that you can feed your brain, your body, and your emotions with better inputs and get better outputs.

It means that if you currently stink at stuff, you are not condemned to a life sentence of stinkage.

It means that you have the superpower to transform yourself into a much better and more powerful version of yourself. Like Ironman.

A growth mindset means that every time you spend time with someone better than you are, their knowledge, skills and mindset rub off on you and make you better.

A growth mindset means that when you read a book, you reach the back cover smarter and more capable than you were when you lifted the front cover.

A growth mindset means you don’t say things like, I can’t or I don’t. And you don’t say Popeye stuff like, ‘I yam what I yam.’ What kind of sweet potato nonsense is that?

A growth mindset means that you see your self-improvement journey as an infinite staircase. The level, step or stair that you are on today is simply where you are today. You have the ability to take another step up in any area of your life, and by any measure you choose, any time you choose.

A growth mindset means having faith in the self-improvement process. Like George Michael. It means that small incremental gains will add up to have a transformational effect. Like compound interest in every area of your life that you invest time and energy into.

Leveling Up

When I entered high school, I was a 6-foot-tall, 150-pound freshman. During my 4 years at Hanover High School in Hanover, New Hampshire, no one spent more time in the weight room than I did. As a result, I graduated as a senior who was 6 feet tall and 215 pounds. (I couldn’t seem to do anything about the height. Maybe I have a fixed heightset.)

In my first track meet as a high school shot putter my freshman year, I finished 28th out of 30 throwers. My senior year I was the state champion.

During my freshman year, my coach didn’t think I was good enough to throw the discus in a meet. But, by the time I was a senior, I was a state champ, New England champ, and held the all-time state record in the discus. All of this happened because I could imagine it happening. So I put in the work to keep climbing that staircase.

How To Develop A Growth Mindset

The first step to developing a growth mindset is to visualize the best version of yourself. Imagine the greatest version of yourself you can conceive of. That is your ideal self. What you are today is your real self. It is the version of you that you have already realized or attained. Now, your job is to simply put in the effort to close the gap between your real self and your ideal self.

The Model And The Path

A growth mindset is simply having an open mind to your ability to improve yourself into someone greater than you are today. One of the best ways to do this is to find a model and a path.

A model is a person whom you aspire to be like. Pick a person you think has the skills, abilities, success, character or mindset that you want to have. (They don’t have to be an actual model, like Heidi Klum, Bella Hadid, or a T Ford.)

Then, examine your model’s path. Learn what work, steps, opportunities and influences helped them develop into the person they are today. (Or, if you choose a historical figure, focus on the path they traveled before they died. And decomposed.) Learn their helpful habits and routines. Learn about their knowledge sources. Which could be books, coaches, teachers, and role models. Learn about their experiences and influences.

Next, reproduce or approximate the helpful forces that pushed them to grow into the model you admire. This provides both a great recipe for improvement, and prevents you from having to reinvent the wheel. Or become a psycho stalker.

A Few Final Thoughts

A growth mindset is about experimenting. It is about adjusting variables to get better results.

A growth mindset means you give yourself permission to be an amateur. You can’t beat yourself up over all the things you don’t yet know or can’t do yet. By giving yourself permission to be an amateur, you allow yourself to start and put a premium on all the growth you experience along the way.

A growth mindset is about developing great habits. You are a product of your habits. Growth-focused habits have the power to help you improve every day. These include reading, practicing the skills you want to develop, time management, exercise, sleep, and gratitude.

Key Takeaway

To become the greatest version of yourself, you have to adopt a growth mindset. Imagine a version of yourself far greater and more capable than you are today. Then continuously work to close the gap. Allow yourself to be an amateur. Develop great habits that help you learn and grow. Experiment. Stay curious. Find someone who you want to be more like and discover their path. It will help you discover your own path to an even greater you.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.

How you can get really smart by acting dumb.

In his book, My Father’s Business, Cal Turner Jr., the long-time CEO of Dollar General and the son of the company’s Founder talks about how his grandfather was one of the smartest people he ever knew. What makes this particularly interesting is that his grandfather dropped out of elementary school to help run the family farm after his dad died in a freak wrestling accident. (I’m assuming it wasn’t cauliflower ear.)

Turner goes on to say that his grandfather’s lack of formal education offered a significant advantage.

It says a great deal about Luther Turner that he was able to turn
his third-grade education into a plus. He was convinced that everyone he met was smarter than he, and that he needed to learn some thing from each of them. He became a first-rate observer, a great listener, and a dedicated student of life. What he practiced was more than empathy. It involved valuing the other person and his or her information, insight, and perspective.

– Cal Turner Jr
I was surprised to learn that Dollar General was never actually in the military.

To be clear, I’m not encouraging you to drop out of school after 3rd grade. (Very few of my readers are in the 3rd grade and under demographic.) But it’s important to recognize the danger of assuming you are the smartest person in the room. We all have blind spots which limit us. But if you remain open to the ideas of others you have the potential to become as smart as everyone you have encountered combined.

Key Takeaway

Everyone you interact with has amassed their own unique combination of knowledge and experience. Which means they have insights and perspectives you don’t have. Listen to them. Learn from them. Add their lessons to your own. The only limit to how much you can learn in life is your own curiosity and receptivity.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my new book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.

Get a little smarter every day.

Since Labor Day my 3 kids have been in school full time. By this I mean they are in a real brick-and-mortar-and-spitball schools, where they see their classmates sitting near-ish them, not in squares on a computer screen.

Every morning as they leave for Homestead High School, Steffen Middle School and Wilson Elementary I send them off with the same instruction: Come Back Smarter.

The very purpose of attending school is to increase your intelligence. (And to get a return on all the tax dollars your parents pay.) Day by day, and week by week, if you take advantage of the opportunity, you get smarter and smarter. The way a snowball becomes larger and larger as you roll it. #WinterIsComing

This means that when you send your child off to school (or into their virtual schooling pod), they come back (or out) as a better, more intelligent, more capable version of themself. How much better, and how much smarter is largely up to them and how much they are willing to soak up. And how much they are willing to reconfigure their thought processes as a result.

But the opportunity for daily self-improvement doesn’t end at graduation. You have abundant opportunities for daily growth your entire life. It should be your daily imperative that you end the day smarter than you began.

You don’t need to be enrolled in school to increase your intelligence daily. Simply do these 7.5 things as a matter of habit:

  • Read
  • Ask
  • Listen
  • Investigate
  • Try
  • Discuss
  • Watch
  • (And maybe Google)

Keep your mind open. You will be amazed by how much enters in. 

Key Takeaway

When you get out of bed each morning commit to hitting the pillow that night with a smarter, not harder head. Keep your mind open and keep improving it. By upgrading your personal operating system daily you will maximize your personal potential, your earning potential, and lifetime impact on the world.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them. And maybe tell them that you didn’t send it to them because you thought they were dumb.