Are you Cursed with Talent?
What a ridiculous thing to say, how can talent be a curse? Isn’t that a blessing? It comes down to your basic beliefs about talent. Are we born with a fixed amount of talent or can we develop it? Do we have a natural aptitude for certain things and not for others despite our best efforts? Are some people just naturally good at math or sports and others aren’t? Do we have accurate beliefs about reality or do our beliefs shape our reality? Reading the book ‘Mindset’ by Carol S. Dweck really helped me to understand the role that my mindset has played in my life. I highly recommend it. Believing you can improve is the key to growth.
Gifted or hard working?
Growing up I knew I was smart and naturally athletic. I believed I was gifted and my belief about my natural abilities held me back. It sounds counterintuitive, but this is the nature of a fixed mindset. A gift is something that is given, not something that you work for. Being talented and believing that I was talented held me back because I also believed that these talents were just innate abilities, not things that I could develop and therefore they had predetermined limits.
I remember being afraid of pushing myself to my limits. I was afraid of finding out what those limits might be because maybe they were less than I hoped they would be and there was nothing I could do about it. That fear stopped me from doing things that might be difficult for me. Things that could help me grow, but that I would struggle with. That is how a fixed mindset limits your growth. You don’t believe that you can grow so why try? Believing you can improve is the key to personal growth.
They are just lucky, it’s easy for them
I also believed that people who were better than me at something, were just lucky. They just had greater natural ability than I did. I didn’t realize how important struggle is in the learning process. Struggling meant that you weren’t good at something. I didn’t know how hard other people worked to develop their talent and just assumed, they must be gifted. I didn’t realize how important it is it to try and fail, so that you can learn and grow. Failure is really a critical part of the growth process. It’s the feedback you need to help determine a new approach to get the result you want.
Fixed vs. Growth Mindset
People with fixed mindsets can become paralyzed by fear of failure while those with growth mindsets embrace failure and use it to learn and grow. For a fixed mindset, failure means you aren’t as good as you thought you were and there is nothing you can do about it, it can be devastating. You are afraid of doing things that can help you to grow, so you miss out on a lot of opportunities to grow. The problem is that people with this mindset see everything as a test of their inherent traits so they tend to shy away from anything that might lead to failure and thus an identity crisis. By avoiding failure, they also avoid growth opportunities. Believing you can improve is the key to being open to doing things that help you grow.
Failure is how we learn
Those that see difficult challenges as opportunities to learn embrace failure as a learning opportunity and tend to be more successful over time. They don’t define themselves by success or failure. I remember being afraid of finding out what my limits were. My fear of failure kept me from trying anything that I might fail at. High school was really easy for me. I did well without trying. College was a real struggle for me because I hadn’t developed good study habits and didn’t really know how to learn complex concepts or feel comfortable asking for help. I didn’t know that struggling was part of the learning process, I thought it meant that I wasn’t as smart as my classmates. My fear of failure persisted into adulthood and left me feeling stuck for many years.
Watch Your Language
It’s important to recognize these mindsets and be mindful of how we teach others to favor one mindset over the other. By telling someone especially a child, ‘you did a great job, you are so smart’, you tend to reinforce a fixed mindset. The message is relayed that they did well because they are smart, not because they worked hard. You might say, ‘you did well, you must have studied hard and paid attention in class’. It’s important to use language that reinforces to ability to grow and that success is linked to hard work, not innate abilities.
Embrace the struggle
There’s an old joke, one person asks another, ‘do you know how to play the violin?’. The other person responds, ‘I don’t know, I never tried’. It’s ridiculous to think that you could play the violin without going through the struggle of learning. Why do we think that we can master other areas of life without going through the struggle of learning? The best thing you can do is to adopt a growth mindset or the belief that you can improve in any area through focused and consistent effort. Then pick some areas to improve maybe even master. You might consider joining a Mastermind group. Surround yourself with people who have a growth mindset. I recently joined a group founded by Jeff Lerner. They focus on learning and growth and have inspired me to work on improving the core areas of my life.
