Once your mindset changes, everything on the outside will change along with it.
–Steve Maraboli

What is a Mindset?

A mindset is a collection of thoughts and beliefs that shape your thought habits.

In decision theory and general systems theory, a mindset is a set of assumptions, methods, or notations held by one or more people or groups of people. A mindset can also be seen as an incident of a person’s world view or philosophy of life.

The importance of mindset

As you’ve read above and hopefully concluded, your mindset is goddamn important. It quite literally determines how far in life you will go. There are two general mindsets one can have:

1) The growth mindset

2) The Fixed mindset.

The growth mindset

In a growth mindset, people have an underlying belief that their learning and intelligence can grow with time and experience. When people believe they can become smarter, they realize that their effort affects their success, so they put in extra time, leading to higher achievement.

This mindset entails how an individual can adapt to their environments, social situations, stress, and failure. With this mindset, you will genuinely believe in your ability as a human being to develop and advance given enough time and effort.

The fixed mindset

In a fixed mindset, people believe their qualities are fixed traits and therefore cannot change. These people document their intelligence and talents rather than working to develop and improve them. They also believe that talent alone leads to success, and effort is not required.

This mindset is stagnant, unchanging and doesn’t allow personal and professional growth. With this mindset, you will genuinely believe that talent is what makes successful people successful and not effort, smart and hard work.

At this point, you can already tell which mindset is preferable and which isn’t, but if you have a fixed mindset and your reading this you probably think the growth mindset is illogical, which is only natural but I want to ask you this, has the world remained the same throughout the eons? Just ponder that question and correlate it to your mindset. The world changes and so do humans, grow alongside it and you will truly experience life for what it is.

Go about actively believing you can improve, change and do things which will improve you slowly but surely. You will see the change in yourself and how you approach life.

How the most successful people think

Now, implementing a change in mindset isn’t a walk in the park and may take your brain a while to naturally think in that manner, but fear not because during that time you will actually notice the difference between your current mindset and the mindset you’re trying to implement (growth mindset), this will enable you to notice when you lean towards your normal tendencies and it’s called being mindful.

Successful people understand mindfulness and practice it every day, they actively recognize when their brains want to lean towards destructive/unproductive tendencies and they tell themselves the implications of performing that specific task/activity, this leads to them making more informed decisions which impact positively overall.

Successful people value their time the most and view money as a tool, they understand that money is replaceable whilst time isn’t, this is very important because time is money and wasted time equates to wasted money.

They also know that idiosyncrasy is what stands out, playing it safe never amounted to anything worth high value, being unique is always something to consider when creating a new product or service, if you think about it all the most successful people in life where a bit of an odd-ball, they incorporate their uniqueness into their craft and as a result became highly successful.

They know the importance of learning, they value it because they always strive to improve themselves and their abilities, they focus on learning topics that directly impact their field of expertise that’s why successful companies are always at the top because the person/people in charge are always implementing what they’ve learned into their next ideas.

Successful people are open to new opportunities/experiences that may lie outside their comfort zone, they know that new opportunities lead to new horizons.

Conclusion

Everything mentioned here is in line with the growth mindset, but as I’ve mentioned before it won’t be an easy endeavor to achieve. It takes about 66 days to form a habit so go out there and start practicing mindfulness, start accepting the fact you are different from everyone else and start thinking success because mindset is key.

Having said all that I would like to thank you for reaching the end, you must be one determined soul and for that, you have my blessings, make yourself proud and inspire others along the way when you finally achieve your dreams!