You can do anything

Growth mindsets

Years ago, while working as a software engineer at Rio Tinto, senior management circulated a new team building initiative around the company, centred on the concept of growth mindsets and fixed mindsets. At the time, I thought it was an interesting piece — not just the usual corporate diatribe of "team work" and "company values" — but something with real weight behind it, a genuine offer of self-improvement. I read the poster, agreed with its principles, concluded that I already had a "growth mindset" and summarily patted myself on the back for it. Then I went back to whatever JIRA ticket I happened to be working on before my day was interrupted.

In some respects, I was right — when it came to my profession, I've always backed my ability to do pretty much anything I set my mind to. I think I can trace that self-belief back to my early childhood; I started tinkering with code at age 11, and back then, I truly did believe I could do anything. I thought I could single-handedly build an entire MMORPG in C++, or invent a new algorithm for machine translation that would put Google Translate to shame. When each of these endeavours inevitably failed, it never felt like failure or as if I'd hit some innate brick wall — I just carried on and tried the next thing.

I used to reflect on that audacity and laugh at how preposterous those ambitions were, perhaps even a little embarrassed by my naïvety. Yet, without those experiences I almost certainly wouldn't have the skills and self-confidence with respect to programming I adorn today. What I had back then — I now realise — was perhaps the most unadulterated embodiment of a growth mindset I've ever known. I look back on those years with great fondness — they made me who I am today.

What I failed to consider that day at Central Park, glossing over phrases like "view challenges as opportunities" or "skills can be improved through time and effort", was how those principles may apply to other areas of my life. It didn't occur to me that I may have been applying a fixed mindset outside of work, that I could be holding myself back without even realising it. So the momentum of my life carried on, unperturbed.

Growing up

As we grow out of childhood and into adulthood, we wake up to the world around us and how it really operates. We realise Santa isn't real, and fairies aren't stealing our teeth. We construct a model of the world and a model of ourselves and our own limitations, accruing narratives we can retell ourselves to explain the things we experience, to navigate life with practicality rather than idealism, to take off the space helmet and study accounting instead.

Whereas children can afford to have boundless curiosity and self-confidence because they have guardians to protect them, adults have to protect themselves, and so lean on those narratives to guide their decisions and make sense of the world. The child may believe they can cuddle the overgrown cats in the reeds, but the adult must know that lions can bite.

Introspection

Recent life events have pushed me to a level of self-examination I'm not sure I've ever been to before; I felt trapped in a crucible and the heat was peaking. Through the lens of that metaphor it only seems natural that I experienced what could only be described as a phase transition — not a mere epiphany but a palpable shift in my whole outlook on life.

I finally saw the false narratives that had been holding me back for so long, in so many facets of my life. I heard the invisible voice in my head telling me what I couldn't do, what wasn't possible, who I couldn't be. I saw the doors it protested were locked, the paths it bemoaned were too treacherous to scout. I cannot silence that voice, but I realised I could simply discard its pernicious untruths, and hence rob it of its power.

It's powerful to consider than your own self-doubts, your own inhibitions, the ingrained narratives you retell yourself incessantly, aren't rooted in objective truth. That's not to say people can literally do anything — I'm certainly not claiming we can all be astronauts if we just believed hard enough — but until we recognise that even our most innately felt limitations could stem from falsehoods we adopted in our past, we have no way to tease apart the real from the imagined.

When I came to realise I had so much more agency in my life than I'd ever previously imagined, it was as if I'd stumbled into a room and seen a million dollars cash — unbridled possibility lay before me.

Housework

I had always considered myself to be someone who struggles with housework, who would always find cleaning, cooking, and the like to be intrinsically boring chores. I thought I could only maintain a household consistently if some external force, like a nagging partner, kept me to account — otherwise I was doomed to fall back into old habits as if by natural force — the epitome of a fixed mindset.

I didn't assert that growth was impossible, merely slow and uncontrollable. There were even times I managed to shake my self-doubts and believe I could form better habits, but I never trusted it to last — I never dispelled those core beliefs holding me back.

I have now cleaned my entire apartment from top to bottom, and I enjoyed every minute of it. As my mum would say, my home is now "Monica clean". I relinquished the belief that chores were fundamentally boring and tedious, and they ceased to be so. Whereas I used to feel dejected when my living space was unclean or untidy, I instead found motivation. I finally believed in my capacity to grow into the responsible adult I deserve to be.

I'm not hoping I can keep on top of housework anymore. I'm just going to do it.

Work-life balance

My drive for professional success and achievement has been a deeply held pillar of my identity and self-worth for as long as I remember, and I've come to realise that this too has bred false narratives in my subconscious — narratives that ended up inflicting a great deal of pain and discontentment upon my life.

I have no shame in identifying as someone who strives for success, who is willing to work hard and conquer fear in pursuit of realising their potential — but I let these motivations suck the oxygen from other areas of my life. That pernicious voice told me that I was exempt from needing work-life balance, because I loved my work, because the more I slaved over it, the more likely I was to achieve the outcomes that would validate my identity. The voice told me I couldn't afford to relax, to invest in my own happiness, lest my career suffer. "After all," it whispered, "professional success will bring you true, lasting happiness."

I was a textbook workaholic, and I wore it as a badge of honour.

While the impact these thoughts had on my life ebbed and flowed with time, they began wreaking their worst havoc when I become a startup founder around six months ago. This has only been exacerbated by the effect of all the narratives I'd consumed about running a startup — that it demands all your time and mental energy, requires inordinate effort to succeed, and strains personal relationships without mercy. I mistook these words for fundamental truths, and so they came to shape my thinking, and consequently become my reality.

Indeed, the crucible was of my own unwitting creation. Only when my partner of nearly five years walked out the door — possibly forever — did the porcelain finally rupture.

Since then, I haven't thought about achievement in the same narrow terms. I opened myself up to a new definition of success — one centred around personal growth rather than external validation. What followed was possibly the happiest, most fulfilling day I'd experienced in years — the burden of work felt entirely lifted away, and I revelled in the sense of achievement I gained from simply doing the things I'd been putting off longer for than I can recall. I hauled a pedestal fan and some fake house plants out of Big W, felt the cool Melbourne air on my face as I ran towards the tram, and lived entirely in the moment — I had not a care in the world.

Believing it

It's one thing to hear about something but another to experience it. We can saturate our brains with platitudes like "anything is possible if you just try hard enough" or "practice makes perfect", but the only way to truly believe them is to live them. On the surface it may seem like a chicken and egg scenario — you can only grow when you believe in self-growth, yet it's difficult to really believe in self-growth until you've experienced it first-hand.

I think the key is to start small and build momentum. Challenge one preconceived notion you have about yourself or the world you suspect might be wrong, yet still feels innately true. Do one thing that contradicts the narratives you keep telling yourself. Experience the empowerment that comes from hearing those voices of fear and doubt, and carrying on in spite of them. Prove them wrong.

I now face life with a sense of immense possibility, and — subject to constraints like physics, time, my own values, other people, and plain old luck — I truly believe I can do anything I set my mind to. That's not to say it'll be easy or I don't still have an enormous amount to learn, but I'm proving to myself everyday that I can do things I once thought were out of reach. I put off starting a blog for years because it just felt too difficult, too hard to achieve perfection, not worth the effort — but today I just chose to do it anyway, and hit publish on my first post.

I know I can do anything.

You can do anything, too.