Growth Mindset

I first saw Carol Dweck's "Growth Mindset" TED Talk in high school. At the time, I thought listening to this lecture was like unlocking some extra part of the brain, like the fabled "other 90%" of the brain that modern culture claims the average person doesn't use. Yet, it also surprised me that there are people who, according to this lecture, face a problem, become frustrated, and give up.

My family moved very often because of my father's job in the military. This forced me to attend five different schools in six years around middle school. I'm sure that being in the "gifted" program provided me additional attention from teachers that helped to ensure that I fit in and was not "slipping through the cracks" as I changed schools. That constant turnover- make friends, learn to fit in at school, learn to do well in school, say good bye to friends, rinse, and repeat- throughout middle school seemingly helped me develop some form of this growth mindset mentality. I had two options- learn to adapt or give up. I learned to adapt and persevere. Thus, in both my personal and educational lives, I feel that I've had some sort of a growth mindset even before I knew what this mindset was.

That mindset has really helped me during my time at OU. Engineering has thrown all kinds of difficult courses and topics at me. I have plenty of peers who changed their majors, or even left college, due to the course difficulty or their inability to improve their study habits. Every semester it feels like there is at least one student who is especially vocal about their struggles in a class, as though they're Indiana Jones running from that giant boulder after he steals the golden idol. Studying and learning would allow them to outrun the boulder, but they fail to determine how to succeed in these courses, and end up getting smashed. I feel that I've learned from the mistakes of others and determined what methods of learning work for myself as a student.

The great Indiana Jones... who in my unique metaphor represents the growth mindset.

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I'm interested in seeing how the growth mindset will work when I become an adult in the workforce. When I am no longer at a point in my life where everything is stepping stone to the next large phase in my life- middle school to high school to college to the workforce- will I still see myself with an ability to constantly better myself? Will the fact that I reach the final "phase" in my life put me in a state of passivity and acceptance of the status quo? I expect that in doing the same sort of work for twenty or thirty years I'll reach a point where improvement and learning will be harder to visualize. As a kid, this mind set has seemed fairly obvious to me, so I wonder if the true test will be applying it as a full-fledged adult.