Nows and Forevers

An interesting op-ed piece in Sunday’s New York Times took a chunk out of the mindset revolution — whether that’s the growth mindset, the abundance mindset or the gratitude mindset.
Climber Francis Sanzaro’s point is that the trend toward a mindset and self-optimization is cluttering the instrument it seeks to improve: the mind itself.

When I added (determination, grit, self-confidence, desire), I failed. When I took away (the desire for success) my body moved with greater fluidity and naturalness.

He calls it “the power of subtraction.” And it doesn’t have to be an athletic endeavor at all, Sanzaro said. It could mean just about any type of endeavor.
“The key is removing barriers to clarity, not adding them in hopes of reaching our goals,” Sanzaro said.
I can’t proclaim to be an expert on any type of mindset. I first encountered the growth mindset, which was coined by Stanford University Professor Carol Dweck and elaborated in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, several years ago. I was in the early stages of learning another language and had stumbled upon an article advising a growth mindset would help me learn it better.
I later bought Dweck’s book and read it. One of the things that resonated was her explanation of the growth mindset vs. the fixed mindset. A growth mindset focuses on what you can achieve by constant learning, hard work and discipline. That would, in the case of language learning, mean you can improve by those strategies. A fixed mindset, on the other hand, would be someone believing there’s an innate ability to learn a language and not much that can be done to improve on it.
It’s more complicated than that, of course. Dweck herself, in a 2016 Harvard Business Review article, set down some myths about the growth mindset. Dweck said just being open-minded wasn’t enough nor was failing to deal with what she called “fixed-mindset triggers” that lead to derailment.
Look anywhere, from the corporate world to Instagram to podcasts, and you’ll see a lot of talk about the growth mindset. This battle has been something I’ve fought my whole life, whether I was a student or as a journalist. My job, I felt, was to keep an open mind and look at journalism as continuing education. Even then, sometimes, it’s hard to keep an open mind. But I’m always testing myself.
Sanzaro’s advice is strip down to the essentials and nothing more.
“We must take away until there is nothing left to remove, “You are in it, then, in sport or in love, with clarity, intensity and solidity.”
I try to apply this to my writing, both for work and then my personal expression as well. It’s difficult, but it’s important.