Fixed vs Growth Mindset: What’s the Difference?

We all want to find success. While you might think that success is only for the few lucky ones, you’d be mistaken. What if I told you that success is attainable by something as simple as changing your mindset. In this blog post, I’m going to detail the difference between a fixed vs. growth mindset.

We live in a “make it happen” society that doesn’t have the patience to see the fruits of our labor. But with side hustles and business, it takes patience to see success.

So, how do you become more patient?

You need to change your mindset from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

The problem with a fixed mindset

If you have a fixed mindset, you’ll always find it difficult to see any growth, even when there is growth. So you see, you can’t always see growth in your new online business or side hustle.

Sometimes, growth is just failure. But failure is knowledge of how not to approach a subject. So it is growth, and you have to see that.

Here are the main problems of a fixed mindset:

1. Hold you back from attempting to make progress and reach your goals.
2. Make you give up when success has not happened overnight.
3. Lower your confidence when you believe that you are continuously failing.
4. Make you convince yourself that you cannot succeed and put yourself off from even attempting something new.
5. Take criticism in the wrong way; you will only let it make you feel like failing.
6. Look to blame other people for certain reasons when you have not achieved what you are looking to do.
7. Make you fail to understand that other people who excel in certain areas have the growth mindset and are putting in the behind-the-scenes effort to obtain the high returns and results they’re getting.
8. Keep you in the same structured way of learning, never looking outside the box.
9. Stop you being accountable for your own lack of effort.
10. Make you hide your flaws and possibly even lie about test results to make yourself look good.

You need to change your mindset to incorporate a new way of learning. How can you do this?

What is a growth mindset?

Think about this logically, did you build your entire life in one night? No, it has taken time—several years in most cases.

As a good working marriage, a successful career, or a blossoming business, all good things take time to achieve. Why would you expect anything else that you are attempting later in your life to happen overnight when it has taken a set of several years to achieve everything that you have learned up to this point? It won’t.

Slow and steady wins the race.

Those overnight success stories you read about? What you do not see is the hard work that has gone on behind the scenes, probably over several years, to hone skills and have a greater understanding. That number one selling book did not just get magically written and hit the number 1 spot on Amazon. The same applies to the actor starring in the latest blockbuster or a band with the hit new album.

It takes a long time to hone your skills, so you need to practice and improve them.

Remember that practice does not make perfect. Instead, it makes you better at what you are practicing.

The growth mindset allows you to accept that. You should always be looking to expand your learning skills, your personality, etc. This will really benefit your life and allow you to achieve success and reach your long-term goals over a long-term period.

When it comes to the fixed vs. growth mindset, there is no debate.

Benefits of a growth mindset

The growth mindset will allow you to really expand on areas in your life that you wish to improve on. Just because you did not do something right the first time doesn’t mean you should simply give up. It simply means that you need to gain more insight on how to do it better next time.

1. Be more patient – nothing happens overnight.
2. Approach learning with new angles so you will have a greater chance of understanding something better.
3. Accept criticism and learn to use it in a positive way to improve on what you are practicing.
4. Gain confidence by learning new topics.
5. Have a thirst for knowledge. The more you learn about a topic, the better you will understand it.
6. Learn to practice something over a long period of time to get better at it.
7. Understand that people are not born with instant knowledge. Instead, they get good at what they do by spending a long time practicing it.
8. Create good habits and learn to make them stick over the long term to achieve success.
9. Believe that you can always expand your learning capabilities.
10. You will learn to look at the word “Failure” in a new way. Are you actually failing at something, or are you learning to do something different and better at it the next time you attempt it?

Fixed vs. growth mindset difference

If you apply this way of thinking to different areas of your life and make the habit stick, then there is no reason you will not be able to improve on those areas over the long term, giving your life a greater depth.

I strongly believe that anybody can do this no matter what their circumstances are. Of course, you may not believe that you are the smartest or most intelligent person. Still, if you continue to study something over a long period of time, your hard work will pay off, so can you reach your goals.

So, be patient, continue to move forward by learning, and then reap the results over the long term.

Changing your frame of mind from the fixed mindset to the growth mindset will result in only positive things happening to your life.

And that is a life worth living.