Growth Mindset, Be A Round Character

Talk About Mindset
The Golems Journey Begins
Frédéric Bennett (Benef) 
FanArt Commons 

I am going to let you folks in on a little secret to add a little street cred to my blogpost. I am 40+ years old. I will say that when I was a young man, I spent much of my time assuming that when I got older I would just know things. I would just understand how to talk to people better, be able to write and communicate better. You know, be smarter. I can honestly say that while life has a way of teaching a person things that will definitely make it harder to con an old man verses a young man, there is not a time latter when you think that you have made it. If anything, the older man begins to see that there is so much to learn that, even had I started trying to learn at 19 years of age, I would never have made it to the place where I would be satisfied with where I am today. So my growth mindset post is more general to all you young men and women out there. I hope you will gain the spirit of learning and keep trying to find out the things in which you are interested. If you are anything like me, you will find out that you are interested in so many things that you would never have thought you were before. If someone would have told me at 19 that I would some day choose to take a class about Indian Epics, I would have laughed in their face. If they would have told me I would find it fascinating I would have mocked them. Don’t be afraid to try things out that may seem uninteresting.
If you ever wonder what older construction workers talk about in their spare time. You might be surprised to know that it is about what interesting thing they learned or a documentary they saw on the history channel. At some point along the way discovered an unknown passion to better understand the world around me. I would only wish that on a person that is young and feeling bored with an unfulfilled life. This blogpost is not shaping up the way I had hoped but I guess the message I wish to convey onto you is that a passion for applying the mindset we refer to as a growth mindset will make you feel good. I feel a high level of satisfaction when I learn things I did not know.

I had a friend that got it early. He said that just like the stories in a book, they generally have characters in the story that are both flat and round. A flat character is a person that has the same way of thinking at the beginning of the book as he does at the end. Though not a simple description because the example is a complicated character that appeared to be changing, in the end, the golem was in the same place as he started and it cost him everything. A round character will relate to the flat character at the beginning of the book but when faced with new information, she grows a little and it shifts her entire mindset. After a shift like that occurs, one can no longer even relate the flat character, they seem antiquated and foolish in their way of thinking.

So to bring it around full circle, in this class about stories. I will ask the reader a question. Are you a round character in your story, or are you a flat character trapped in the past?


Comments