How this Dutch mindset CHANGED MY LIFE | USA vs The Netherlands cultural differences

unlike in America the grading system here in the Netherlands runs from a 1 to a 10 one being the lowest you could score and 10 being the highest in theory in practice a t is basically nowhere to be seen watch until the end of the video to find out why that is if you're new here hi my name is aan I'm an American living in the Netherlands and today I wanted to talk about the Dutch mindset now I cannot believe I haven't spoken about this in any of my videos up to this point because I feel like this is one of the most important differences between the US and the Netherlands super important I would not be exaggerating if I said that this difference actually has changed my life so let's get into it starting with the US okay so I guess there's really no other way to say this but America just really loves Geniuses and not just any Geniuses but those innately born Geniuses and where do you see those Geniuses well take any Tech billionaire for instance like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk Steve Jobs right these people well what do they have in common like maybe they dropped out of college and because they're so smart they didn't even need college and yet yet they achieved this enormous level of success also this other thing that these people have in common is they dress down they really walk around in just a hoodie or well if you're Steve Jobs a black polo neck and jeans and what is all of this signaling all of this signals that you know fashion is beneath them they don't think about things mere mortals think about they are above that because they are innate Geniuses they don't need college they don't need anything this my friends is America now I'm sure it's not just America but this rhetoric in America is really really prevalent you could see that for instance in the story of Elizabeth Holmes the founder of Theos when she was 19 she went around telling everybody that she had this machine that with a tiny prick of blood could detect medical conditions such as high cholesterol and cancer and at some point her company at its peak was valued at about 10 billion now all this was a lie her machine couldn't do anything and she was 19 she didn't know what she was doing but what she did know was that people would believe in her story she dropped out of college and not just any college but Stanford University she also dressed the part she wore black polo necks and kind of wore the same outfit every day ate the same food every day to indicate that you know she was too busy being a genius to think about mere mortal things like food and fashion so there we have it this is the context that I grew up in that I lived in and that was honestly I'm going to be very very brutally honest here it was really not good for me so sharing my own story and experiences a little bit when I graduated college I was 19 years old in the US you typically are 22 or 23 when you graduate college so I was quite a bit younger and when I got my masters and my PhD I was also still quite young compared to the average person who gets those degrees now why is that important well it's because a lot of the time people would go oh my God Ava you're so young you must be a genius and that sounds really flattering right except it did nothing but destroy my mental health and honestly my ability to develop and grow as a person here's why during my PhD for instance I was too afraid to shatter any illusion that I might be a genius or gifted because that was valued so much that I never said anything I'm a talkative person I usually speak up during meetings because I enjoy conversation and learning through conversation but that whole time at some point I noticed that I just shut down I was too afraid of making a mistake too afraid of asking a question that might come off as too simple if I were to ask a question it had to be the best question ever asked and maybe that sounds like I'm exaggerating to you but let me assure you that I am not and what that resulted in was that I couldn't get as much out of my PhD as I would have liked or as I could have if I didn't understand something right away and I mean right away just one time I would just move on to something else and focus on that so that it always seemed as if things naturally came to me when you also looked at the culture of the universities that I went to so for in instance at ivy league universities where I was at for my PhD uh we had to be really careful of the students as well because the undergraduate students who were there they were all known to exhibit the duck syndrome which is where they appear cool common collected on the surface but underneath the water they are kicking and struggling because it was all about seeming effortless like you are you are a genius Geniuses don't need to work hard that's the impression that you have in America so as you can probably tell from this small glimpse into my life back then I was not thriving under this system and then I moved to the Netherlands and moving to the Netherlands has been a little bit of a healing process for me now I've lived here for a few years so I hope that the healing process has been mostly completed of course I'm still learning because this video is all about growth and I am still growing and developing as a person but when I first moved here one thing that stood out to me almost immediately was the kind of conversations I was having with people here and specifically Dutch people I was surprised the Dutch people were very open to talk about the mistakes they had made or the failures that they had experienced and not into a LinkedIn post kind of way right like in America people write these LinkedIn posts like oh I failed one year and then I failed another year and the third year I succeeded enormously where you actually have your failures disguised as successes no here in the Netherlands people would actually talk about things that went wrong for them sort of sharing their experiences because it was a part of their lives and who they were so they would say hey this thing didn't work out for me here was my experience I worked really hard at it and uh it didn't work out but you know I did learn a lot in the process and I think I'm a better person for it mindblowing it was so special for me to see that you could actually just talk about your life experiences that way because guess what we've all had challenges in our lives so why try to hide them why try to hide that you are actually working hard at something why does it need to come effortlessly to you this this is something that I cannot comprehend now but I know that that was the reality I lived in before now here are a couple of fun stories of my own learning experiences since I moved to the Netherlands now as some of you might know if you watched my previous videos that I did not know how to ride a bike until I moved to the Netherlands and you might know that the Netherlands is the biking capital of the world so me not knowing how to bike was kind of a problem people here didn't understand what that even entailed like how did you not learn how to bike right but besides this initial shock I was actually given the opportunity to learn how to bike so I seized that chance however I was really really embarrassed about the fact that I didn't know how to bike so much so that when I was learning there was this beginning period where I could sort of ride a bike but I struggled quite a bit I'm still struggling I'm I'm not a great Biker let me just put it out there you know but I am proud of the progress I've made over the years and I'm a clumsy person which is why biking doesn't come naturally to me but as you can can see I am owning this about myself here to the world it wasn't always like that in the beginning I went through a phase where I could ride the bike but getting on and getting off was sloppier than it is now so there was a period when I would ask our Dutch friends to look in a different direction when I would get on the bike so that they didn't have to watch me struggle because I was so embarrassed by it but if you tell me now or if this was the case now I think I would be more open to people watching me learn you know I'm really proud of all of the progress that I've made I learned how to bike as an adult that is not an easy thing to do it's pretty scary let me tell you now another thing that I've learned as an adult languages in high school I learned Spanish I only took Spanish for two years before I went on to college but in those two years I loved the language the culture that came with it from the different countries and I just soaked it up like a sponge and by the end of those two years I was actually sort of conversational so I wanted to study it in college and I did but something happened in college where because I think I was perceived as this young student that was really good at things and people would always say oh my God Ava you have this knack for languages I uh sort of I think took that to heart and at some point I realized I made the switch from just being Carefree to being very conscious about my language skills and then I totally stopped practicing speaking just completely zero I don't know how that happened why that happened but it it's kind of a shame because I could have just improved on my Spanish over those years but I didn't and after I graduated I stopped speaking Spanish I just did not want to there were very few occasions over the last few years where I actually dared to do it and that is really sad I this is something that I love but I was just too afraid now since then I learned other languages that I was a bit more okay practicing I don't know why I had this block with Spanish and then of course I learned Dutch and I saw the same thing happening with Dutch where in the beginning people would give give me like lots of praise for picking up pretty quickly on phrases remembering new vocabulary and then I got really nervous because now I had to keep going now I had to maintain this illusion that I was good at it because otherwise people would think I wasn't good at it so then I noticed that again I was not speaking Dutch as much as I should I went through a period where I would tell people yeah my Dutch is pretty good I understand it but I would never speak it and then something changed I had lived here for some time now in the Netherlands and my mindset started to change I started going from an innate genius mindset or being innately good at something mindset to a growth mindset at some point I just thought you know what am I doing never mind I live here I love the language I I can speak it enough to have conversations with people and so I just let loose I thought I'm just going to speak it I don't care if the Barista in Amsterdam switches to English in the next sentence because I have an accent or make a mistake I really consciously decided that I wasn't going to care and guess what my Dutch improved tremendously in the months following and this is just a lesson for everyone watching this that if you for instance are learning a new language or new skill and you feel like that's holding you back learn the Dutch mindset of growth where you can improve on yourself and get better in the Netherlands you really also see this growth mindset as part of the work culture and the education system so at work same thing holds if you don't understand something people are happy to explain it to you feedback here in the Netherlands is really very important Dutch directness is no joke so let's say you're you know organizing a workshop or an event or you do something right a task and then people give you feedback on it maybe it didn't go so well right people give you feedback and then you just take the feedback work on it and the next time it'll be better the feedback is not directed at you and your overall abilities it's just directed at that one piece and that is also something I had to get used to because again that Dutch directness to me the beginning was like oh my God no I got feedback on something I didn't do something well that means I am terrible I'm a bad employee I need to quit and find another profession and a career oh my God no so instead of going down that rabbit hole I just said in my one case that I'm thinking of right now okay that sounds fine let me just work on it and the next time it was great and I got really good at it and even if you don't get really good at it that's fine but at least you tried and you got better at it so it's the growth to me that I realize is very important and now I wanted to talk about the Dutch education system that is so different from the US here in the Netherlands you have a couple of streams uh in high school so at the age of like 12 or something ridiculous the Netherlands how are you supposed to know what you want to do at the age of 12 but anyway at the age of 12 here you sort of like end up in one of the different types of high schools here there are a few streams now if you let's say started out in one stream but wanted to move to another stream all you had to do is take a you all you have to do I know the kids in high school or people who've gone through this are like all you have to do but no compar to what you have to do in the US here in the Netherlands you would have to just take a few classes and you could move into a different stream yes it takes time but that's you could do it and people actually really respect you for doing that because it's more effort you've worked hard and then you achieve your goals and you've learned more You' grown like what's not to love about that like the qualities that it takes to grow yourself are just as important if not more important than the innate Brilliance so going back to the point that I made at the beginning of this video why is it that in the Dutch school system while you could in theory score a 10 the highest score you'll never really see that in practice and that is because there is always room for growth you are never going to be perfect it's never going to be 100% And instead of viewing that as a bad thing where in America you get A+ like what is that even what is what is an A+ you can even get a 4.3 G GPA out of a four but here in the Netherlands the N9 out of 10 sort of the highest you can get really is indicative of the fact that you always have room to grow and it encourages people to grow it says you have done really well now you can do better because we are all learning and developing together so anyway I hope you enjoyed and learned something from my experiences from the American mindset to the Dutch growth mindset if you have any personal experiences you would like to share feel free to leave them in the comments down below

Channel: Dutch Americano

Views: 61,825

Keywords: Dutch culture, cultural differences, growth mindset, mindset change, living in the netherlands vlog, culture shock, American in the Netherlands, American culture, American abroad, USA vs the Netherlands, life in America, life in the Netherlands, Dutch society, The Netherlands

Id: xJ06_vYjW5c

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2024