Growth Mindset

    I have definitely heard of the growth mindset before. I can't exactly remember when I first heard of it, maybe it was in my high school psychology class, but it's been brought up a few times throughout my academic career. Typically, it was always a comparison between the growth mindset and fixed mindset with a push for the students to have a growth mindset. 

Grow your People by Xavier Vergés (June 2011). Source: Flickr

    I struggled with having a growth mindset, if I'm understanding it right, in an academic sense because I never really cared about schooling and procrastinated a lot, still do. Growing up, my parents always pushed me to do well in school and luckily for me, things tended to click so I did do well. However, I was never really interested in the subjects that were taught so I never really challenged myself to do better. My policy tended to be "strive for an A, settle for a B". Though strive really just meant "don't procrastinate too much". I always had the mindset of "do what I have to do to get good grades so I can go to college". That then turned into, "do what I have to do to get a decent job", but I never went above and beyond to really challenge my understanding of a certain subject or anything like that. I managed to skip a grade in math and finish high school with something like 54 hours of college credit already done. I just did the work required and never felt the need to putting in the effort to challenge myself because it felt like it didn't really matter and wasn't going to help as I seemed to already be performing well. To me, most classes seem to be just filler because they are mandatory to meet some standard, so challenging myself in them just seems like unnecessary work for little to no reward. Anyway, I feel like I'm getting off track, so I'll move on.

    A couple times where I believe growth mindset kicked in for me were when I was on the speech and debate team in high school and when I play video games. I was a public forum debater, there are a few different kinds of debates one could participate in, in high school. I felt it was the most challenging and fun as tournaments would be a whole day of constantly trying to convince the judges why your argument was more correct. It would get heated and loud sometimes, but it was always a good time when you went against a good debate team because it would bring out a good amount of aggressiveness and creativity into the arguments with every point that was made being challenged. In terms of video games, it essentially boils down to the fact that if it's too easy, then it gets boring, so I tend to do challenges, harder difficulties, or ranked play to push myself to do better and I tend to have more fun, enjoy games more, and learn the game better. This in turn allows for better strategies in the future and a more engaging experience.