The Mindset Shift That Changed My Life

right so a few years ago there was a researcher called carol dweck who wanted to see how children coped with challenges so she gave 10 year olds problems that were slightly too hard for them some of the students tried and failed to solve the problems they felt their intelligence was being tested and they failed and they were absolutely devastated but there were some students in the group who responded differently they also tried and failed to solve the problems but they said shockingly positive things like i love a challenge or i was hoping this would be informative our friend carol tells us that the difference between the two groups was all down to their mindset and this is the book mindset that we're going to be talking about in this episode of book club the series where we distill and discuss lessons from some of my favorite books so if you're new to the channel then consider subscribing lol so the first key takeaway in the book is about the difference between the two mindsets that she calls the growth mindset and the fixed mindset the fixed mindset is the idea that all of the abilities that we have things like our intelligence things like our ability to solve problems these are all fundamentally innate and there's not a lot that we can do to change them whereas the growth mindset is more of a mindset that everything is a skill everything can be learned everything can be improved over time whether that's our ability to solve problems or ability to public speak or ability to do whatever now obviously with all this sort of stuff there is an element of raw talent like there are just some people who are better at singing by default than i am and that's like kind of annoying but to be honest having a growth mindset means that you accept that there is this thing called talent but you also accept there is a huge kind of room for improvement in almost anything that we put our minds to and i remember explaining this like growth fixed mindset stuff to a friend of mine when i first read this book and um this was a friend who was struggling to put her hand up in like anatomy dissection sessions at med school to kind of volunteer and answer or ask a question because she was afraid that she was going to look silly in front of the other people in the group and she was afraid that the anatomy demonstrator or the teacher who was showing stuff to us would think that she was dumb and then i kind of talked her through the growth mindset fixed mindset stuff and then she sort of rolled her eyes be like you know this is all like you know bs mumbo jumbo and everything but then a few days later um she said to me that hey you know i actually thought about what you said about the growth mindset thing and that made me realize that actually if i put my hand up and i get a question wrong it's not the end of the world i can just choose to see it as like a learning opportunity and she tried it a few times in the anatomy class and shocked horror no one cared like there wasn't a single person in the group who thought she was dumb for answering a question wrong or for asking a question in class and in fact she learned a lot more by having more of a growth mindset approach to life keyboard number two that she talks about that i find really helpful is the idea of how much we value effort now in society and especially amongst people with a fixed mindset there's this attitude that you should be able to do something without putting any effort into it and that is the mark of like a true genius or someone who's pro or whatever and so people often feel that if they're having to put effort into something they are doing it wrong and so you see this often a lot in schools and university and stuff where people will feel that oh i can you know when i study for my exam when i'm trying to write an essay when i'm trying to learn this language or learning to code it feels so effortful therefore i must be stupid the fact that i'm working so hard to do this thing means i must not be very good at the thing and therefore i am dumb that's generally the fixed mindset approach to life which is obviously total bs and what carol dweck tells us in mindset and she cites loads of evidence that shows that actually everything in life takes a large amount of effort even the geniuses especially the geniuses they were produ they were putting in so much effort that you just don't hear about or you don't see because it doesn't make for an interesting story you know isaac newton apple fell on his head he discovered gravity whatever like you know that's that's the story that we hear about but there are a zillion other experiments that he tried to do he tried to dabble with astrology he did like so much stuff and most of it is relegated to like the discard pile because it's only the successes that we actually care about and so what she tries to encourage us in the book which i think is very good is to reframe the idea of effort putting an effort is not a bad thing we have to put an effort to get any kind of result especially when it comes to things like learning and studying the more effort we're putting into it the more our brains are having to work the more likely that information is to stick it would be like going to the gym and saying yeah lifting weights should feel effortless well if lifting weights feels effortless then you're not going to get any gains because it's only when you put effort into it and when it starts to get hard that's when you get the stimulus for muscle growth i had a really good illustration of this the other day so i thought i was very growth mindsety and i you know obviously value effort and all that kind of stuff but i was having a chat with the marketing director of this big software company that i really like and he was kind of we were talking about some of the challenges around running a business and managing a team and the thing that really surprised me about what he said is that like i i feel like i really struggled to have difficult conversations with my team members when it comes to things like i don't know salary and expectations and performance and stuff and i thought that the market for a good manager is someone who can have those conversations effortlessly like that was just my default way of thinking then i was speaking to this marketing director guy and i asked him you know what are his tips for having these sorts of difficult conversations and he said oh you know my tip is to spend about two or three hours preparing for each one and taking copious notes and figuring out exactly what you want to say figuring out what they might say figuring out what they want and just like doing loads and loads of preparation and that was really surprising for me because it was like damn you know this guy with with 10 years of experience he's putting an effort to to prepare for these conversations and i realized that i'd been approaching it with a kind of fixed mindset and in a way i was thinking that i wasn't a good manager because this thing did not come to me effortlessly when in fact the answer is i was not a good manager because i didn't put effort into the thing all right key point number three is all about seeing the opportunity in failure again this is one of those standard things that's become such a a common part of mainstream self-help advice that obviously if you fail at something then you should see it as a learning opportunity rather than seeing its failure i think this is all well and good like when i fail at something if i don't know a girl rejects me or if like a video does badly or if we launch a product and it doesn't do so well that still feels pretty bad even though in my head like logically i have like the symphony of voices telling me to reframe failure as opportunity all that fun stuff but it is always a useful thing to remember that that is a thing and yes i've failed at lots of things over the years i've got a video over there that talks about all the various different ways i failed at various different things but i've always always always been happy that i failed at those things in the long run and so now if i have you know stuff that doesn't do so well i do try my best to convince myself that actually you know this is a learning opportunity what is the lesson i can learn from this and i found that like keeping a journal i'd like to journal in the journaling app in day one it's very good link in the video description if you want to check it out finally keeping your journal of that does actually help because then if i do fail at something i think okay what can i do next time and once i figured out what lessons i'm going to take away from the failure it's become a learning opportunity and then i find that i dwell on the failure a lot less than i would if i don't do the reflection exercise key point number four is the idea that progress beats perfection and i think this is really nice like whenever we're starting anything like especially if you've had any amount of success in the past it's very easy to develop this sort of disease of perfectionism that this next thing that i do has to be good and i see a lot with students of the part-time youtuber academy which is the online course that i'm running we're in the in the in the middle of the third cohort at the moment and it's going pretty well we get a lot of students who have been like really successful running their own businesses or really successful in their corporate jobs or whatever who are then deciding to start youtube channels or to take their youtube channels more seriously and a huge majority of them suffer from this disease of perfectionism that you know i am i am objectively good at this other aspect of my life like my work and my business therefore i want to be objectively good at this youtube thing and it's so hard to make any progress if you've got this attitude of wanting things to actually be good or to actually be actually be perfect and you know given the amount of different skills it takes to make a decent youtube video and to run a successful youtube channel and all that stuff i think it's basically impossible to succeed at it if you have this idea that you want your videos to actually be good at the start and so the thing we always tell our students is that focus on the quantity to begin with focus on making progress focus on putting out one video a week two videos a week and after you've made 50 to 100 videos at that point you can start worrying about making those videos good because quantity leads to quality and progress is more important than perfection by the way if you enjoy getting distillations and summaries and highlights of non-fiction books and not having to read them yourself you should check out short form short form is my favorite way of reading summaries of books uh it's not a replacement for reading the books themselves but usually i will either read a book first and then read the summary afterwards or read the summary first and if i like the summary then i'll read the book it's really good they're not sponsoring the video but there is an affiliate link in the video description if you want to check it out it's like nine dollars a month and it's totally worth it because you can get all of the insights from the book summarized so that you can read those in like a fraction of the time it will take you to read the book and then you can decide you actually want to read the book i would recommend the book the book is pretty solid as well put an amazon link in the video description and finally key point number five that i've taken away from the book is that the whole growth mindset thing is a gradual journey it's not something that will just happen overnight i still think i have a fixed mindset in some areas of my life um you know this this thing about being a manager this thing about being a leader i probably have a little bit more of a fixed mindset in my in my life when it comes to things like relationships and health and stuff like that it's stuff that i'm working on i think i'm pretty good at having a growth mindset in like stuff related to the business or content or coding or the other various things i do music as well um but i do still have a fixed mindset in some some aspects but she talks in the book about how this is all really an ongoing journey it's a gradual journey of discovery and we shouldn't beat ourselves up too much if we can't switch overnight from fixed mindset through to growth mindset in every different area of life if you like the video and you want to embrace the idea of a growth mindset even further you should definitely check out this video over here which is a recent video i've done about how to learn anything faster that is kind of about how we can apply the growth mindset and apply kind of principle to principles tools and hacks from all the scientific research around how to learn faster so that we can learn stuff better and we can growth mindset our way to to infinity and beyond or something like that anyway thank you so much for watching hit the subscribe button if you aren't already and i'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 469,666

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal, how to change your life, self improvement, book recommendations, mindset shifts to change your life, how to change your mindset, change your life, mindset shift, how to change your life for the better, how to change your life motivation, how to change your life completely, how to change your lifestyle for the better, book recommendations self help, book recommendations nonfiction, best books for entrepreneurs, best books 2020, best books 2021

Id: L11WCsRqrIg

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021