This year, I had two exam periods that couldn’t have been more different.
During the first one, I was highly committed. I had to confront five exams in four days — which included studying the most difficult philosophical text I’d ever read, the entire history of Romance languages, and the perfidious grammar of the Portuguese conjuntivo. But hey, I decided to make it work. Use it as an opportunity. To grow. Learn from my mistakes. Work hard.
It didn’t work.
I felt constantly stressed, anxious, and tense. Worse, I determined my success on external factors. When I received grades below my expectations, I spiraled into doubt. Felt disappointed. The thing that people call the “growth mindset” had become my greatest enemy.
Then, for the second exam period, I tried the opposite: I ditched growth.
I dropped one of my courses, dumped the topics that didn’t fascinate me, and stopped caring about grades. Sure, some of the edginess was still there. But it had different qualities — ease, effortlessness, spontaneity. Paradoxically, I experienced growth despite not putting my mind to it.
Ever since I kept coming back to the same phenomenon: When I tried to grow, I didn’t. When I stopped trying, I flourished.
This dichotomy shows that the growth mindset deserves deeper examination. Here’s what the growth mindset actually means, why it can be problematic, and what a more reasonable approach to growth might look like.
What the Growth Mindset Actually Means
First, let’s get on the same page about the growth mindset. Here’s how Carol Dweck, the leading researcher on this topic, puts it:
“Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset. They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts). This is because they worry less about looking smart and put more energy into learning.”
In a nutshell:
- Fixed mindset — Skills are predetermined, and many goals are unachievable, even if you were willing to work for them. Typical thought pattern: “Oh, I’m just not good at this.”
- Growth mindset — Skills are learnable, and any goal is achievable if you’re willing to work for it. Typical thought pattern: “I’m just not good at this yet.” It’s the Yet that makes all the difference.
Now, it’s important to note that we don’t crawl out of the womb with one of these mindsets. Rather, they’re like seeds that we can choose to cultivate. Whenever we say something like, “I’ll never be good at this,” we water the fixed mindset. Conversely, when we say, “I could get good at this if I put in the time and effort,” we nourish the growth mindset.
It’s not surprising that people with a growth mindset generally make greater progress toward their goals. It helps them move on from failure, discover new opportunities, and focus on doing the work. Progress replaces paralyzation.
However.
We should also acknowledge that the growth mindset isn’t always fruitful. For me, it came with a hefty suitcase of problems that unfolded into a wide array of misery.
Three Problems with the Growth Mindset
The first problem with the growth mindset is that it puts growth on a pedestal. It sneakily suggests we should grow like bamboo on fertilizer: work harder, strategize more, get more feedback — then, rinse and repeat. If we’re not growing, this mindset implies, we’re fixed. Stuck in place. And that’s bad because we’re not making progress toward our goals.
No progress: no growth.
No growth: no good.
But this thinking transforms growth into a fetish. A cover-up strategy to stroke an ego with unmet needs. After all, isn’t it that we find fulfillment in small, ordinary moments rather than in the hunt for the next best milestone? When can we stop growing and just… be?
The second problem with the growth mindset is that it doesn’t allow for mediocrity. It can easily invoke pressure to grow in EVERY aspect of life. As in: it’s not enough to grow as a friend, partner, or parent. You should also get better at your job, your guitar skills, your knitting project. It’s a never-ending list of demands.
But this is an illusion.
Life’s finitude demands sacrifices. Our limited lifetime forces us to make tough choices, so believing that we must grow in everything is more likely to lead to growth in nothing. A more fruitful approach might be to adopt a growth mindset in the few, curated areas that matter most. For the rest, a fixed mindset is more than enough.
The third and final problem with the growth mindset is that it leaves little room for sorrow, disappointment, and other uncomfortable emotions. If the growth mindset were a person, its emotional support would look like this: “Oh, that’s too bad you failed the exam. But hey, I’m sure you’ll learn a lot from this!” Or: “Cheer up! It’s just a depressive episode. Someday, you’ll look back on this and marvel at how much you’ve grown!”
Yeah… no.
More often than not, we just need assurance that failure, rejection, and adversity suck. That we’re not alone in these feelings. That it’s okay to be stuck. That we don’t need to jump back on the growth treadmill and optimize ourselves. And that instead, we’re allowed to feel shitty for a while and let all the uncomfortable emotions pass through our system.
Sometimes, we must take a few steps back to start walking in the right direction.
The Counterintuitive Way to Real Growth
One operating mode that shows a more sustainable path to growth is what author Oliver Burkeman calls strategic underachievement. That is, as Oliver writes in Four Thousand Weeks, “nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself.”
Since our time and energy are limited, we’re bound to fail in some areas of life. And so, we might as well decide in which areas we fail. The great benefit that emerges is that growth stops feeling like scatter-blasted light speckles and more like bundled laser beams.
During my first exam period, I was trying to do everything: ace six exams, write on the side, improve my mental health, yada yada. The second time around, I simply did the bare minimum for my exams to focus on writing articles and maintaining my exercise schedule. The surprising thing was that I actually performed better when I took off the pressure — even though I objectively worked less.
To grow means, in one way or another, to take steps toward the person you want to become in life. The lengths of these steps are your expectations. Now, when you take giant leaps or run faster than you can — that is, you ask too much of yourself — you trip and fall. Worse, you might be tempted to quickly get back on your feet, without reflecting on where you’re going or how you’re feeling.
In this sense, the growth mindset shouldn’t just spur us to think like a sprinter or marathon athlete. Instead, it might also have the qualities of a meditative stroll through gravel and puddles on a Sunday afternoon. There’s a rough direction without a specific goal. The tempo is slack and mediocre. Park benches pledge pauses.
Growth isn’t as much about speed and progress as reflection and intention.
All this led me back to a question that already brought me clarity in many other situations:
What might we be trying to achieve by doing this?
In this case: What might we be trying to achieve by adopting a growth mindset?
Do you want to grow because it genuinely leads to the person you strive to become? Or is growth just a tool to please others, suppress uncomfortable emotions, and serve the gods of the growth mindset?
If the growth mindset is a seed we can cultivate, then we mustn’t forget that seeds take time to evolve, blossom, and grow. Even the most resistant plant will wither if you drown it in water, sunlight, and fertilizer.
Imposing too much growth on myself — like during that first exam period — chained me on a self-optimization treadmill that depleted me and thus inhibited my growth. I was so eager to brush up on “wrongdoings” that I never paused to see what I was doing right. Conversely, when I watered my growth mindset in tiny, consistent doses, I didn’t just feel better but also saw my work blossom.
It was this simple shift that made my second exam period feel effortless: from overcommitment to commitment. From constantly watering to occasionally watering.
Real growth demands us — occasionally — to abandon the idea of growth.