How To Turn Inconvenience Into Adventure
You might’ve heard the difference between having a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. A fixed mindset believes things like intelligence, personality, skills, etc., are fixed. Smart people were just born smart. Musical people were just born musical. Etc. A growth mindset believes your intelligence, personality, skills, etc., can grow or change over time. People can grow more intelligent over time. People can grow more musical over time. Etc.
I want to note something: There’s no such thing as a fixed mindset person or a growth mindset person. Instead, every person has a fixed mindset about some things and a growth mindset about others.
(Ultimately, a fixed mindset is paganism pushed to it’s logical ends and a growth mindset is Christianity pushed to it’s logical ends, so these ideas are older than the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset. But maybe that’s a topic for a future post.)
How do you know when you have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset? You simply pay attention to your reaction to the pain of suffering, failure, mistakes, etc.
The opposing mindsets have nothing to do with feeling or not feeling pain. Everyone feels pain when they suffer, fail, make a mistake. That’s appropriate. Unless you’re a stoic—and you shouldn’t be a stoic.
The difference is in the reaction to the pain. The fixed mindset doesn’t believe the pain has anything good about it. If this is an area where you don’t believe you will ever grow, then your only option is to avoid suffering, failure, mistakes, at all costs. Why would you want pain for no reason? The fixed mindset says things like, “That wasn’t a mistake, I actually already knew that,” or, “I’ve just never been good at this.” Or it stops trying altogether.
But the growth mindset leans into the pain. It believes that growth has growing pains. And the growth of those growing pains is large enough to make the pain worth it.
G.K. Chesterton said, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” The fixed mindset sees only the inconvenience. The growth mindset sees the adventure.
In what areas do you have a growth mindset? In what areas do you have a fixed mindset? How can you change your fixed mindset areas into growth mindset?
What do you think?
Joseph