Growth Mindset
Upgrade Your Skills with Deliberate Practice
It is important to continually challenge oneself to practice coding in a deliberate manner. The key ideas of practicing deliberately are as follows:
- It should push you out of your comfort zone
- It should be repeated often
- You should try to get consistent feedback on it
- You need good goals to achieve it
Ultimately, deliberate practice should be challenging at all times. Through repetitive challenges to your understanding of coding, you become better at problem solving in general, and a better coder as a result.
The Power of Yet
Growth mindset is an exercise in telling oneself yet. If you don’t understand a concept, or can’t work through a problem, the trick is to tell yourself that you just don’t understand or are able to solve the problem yet.
Grit
Grit is passion and perseverance for very long term goals. Grit is a somewhat unknown variable in terms of how to cultivate it within a person. The best working theory is that growth mindset might have an influence on the level of grit within an individual.
Redefining Success
As we exist in society now, the landscape of what it means to be successful is rife with envy and mislabelling on the part of people defining it. In his TED talk, Alain argues to focus in on what it is we actually think it means to be successful. Currently, the dominating philosophy is to measure oneself against others. This, paired with the idea that anyone can achieve anything that they set their mind to, has dangerous implications. What with the world being full of random occurrences, occurrences that might keep one away from achieving what they wish, the fact that they then did not achieve what they hoped to falls squarely on their own shoulders. Ultimately, I think the push of the talk is to not focus too much on the envy that we can sometimes cultivate from other’s successes, as well as recognize that there is only so much one human can achieve under even ideal circumstances, and to temper their ideas of success as a result.