The Great William Shakespeare:
Master author of ground-breaking poems and plays that are still read and revered to this day, but how can we relate Shakespeare to our daily lives almost 400 years after his death? That is the question.
I want to examine a specific quote written by Mr. Shakespeare, "There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so." This line from the infamous play, Hamlet, came from a conversation between the Prince of Denmark himself, and one of his courtiers, Rosencrantz. Hamlet is describing his disdain for the land of Denmark calling it a prison, but Rosencrantz disagrees. The two men's differing opinions lead Hamlet to respond with the previously mentioned quote. What the prince meant by his response was that nothing is definitely good or bad in itself. Everything is relative to what the individual thinks about it. What one person viewed as horrible and prison-like was a perfectly fine place to call home by someone else's standards.
This is an idea that every person who has ever lived can appreciate. As humans, none of us have minds that think the exact same way. When faced with a challenge, we choose to approach it with a certain mindset. If you are the type of person who believes that intelligence is a predisposed trait you are born with and cannot be augmented, you have a fixed mindset. If you believe in the love of learning and enjoy challenges that will help you develop your intelligence, you have a growth mindset. Which mindset do you have?
Let's make up a realistic scenario that I am sure most people have gone through: You are sitting in math class as the teacher is explaining a foreign idea. You are then asked to do a certain number of questions from your textbook, but as you attempt the first problem you realize that you are unsure of how to execute it. What do you do?
Person A who has a fixed mindset would become frustrated and discouraged at the fact that they are not innately smart enough to solve this problem on his or her first try. The fear of being deemed as "stupid" would hold them back from attempting the challenge and lead them to give up.
On the other hand, person B who has a growth mindset would welcome the challenge with open arms. They know that just because they do not understand how to solve the equation right away does not mean that they cannot figure it out eventually.
If you are most like person A, it is not too late to change your negative thinking. You can fix your fixed mindset. You can recapture the elementary state of mind when you valued learning and challenges. It is not until around middle school age that we begin to surrender to difficult tasks and lose our love of education. You can learn to cope with disappointing performances on tests, in sports, or in any area of your life by planning new strategies and putting in more effort next time. You have to put yourself in charge of your own learning because no one can change your mindset except for you.
The factor that goes hand in hand with mindset is motivation. This is the driving force behind the accomplishment of the challenging tasks we face every day. As described in "Motivation, the Elusive Drive", written by Kevin Washburn, "Motivation is elusive. In part because motivation is idiosyncratic. We all assign different levels of significance and meaning to different things." Whether we are extrinsically motivated by some type of reward, or intrinsically motivated by our own will-power, motivation is the key to accomplish all of our goals whether they are short-term or more far off and evasive.
I have a difficult math class pretty soon, so I am going to put my growth mindset thinking cap on, get in tune with my intrinsic motivation and try my best. If I don't do well, it's alright because there is always next time, and as Shakespeare would say, "All's well that ends well."
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