Unltd. Thinking
- awalker187
- Oct 9
- 6 min read
We hired a talented young account manager.
They had valuable sector experience and needed to learn the account manager role.
They were smart, capable and quickly picked up the basic skills, building the trust of their manager.
But a year in, things fell apart.
One of their largest clients cancelled out of the blue.
Right up until the end the account manager had been confidently reporting that a new contract was on the way.
But in the post mortem it became clear that the account had been in trouble for a long time and they had known it.
A fear of failure had overwhelmed them.
They shied away addressing the real problem, they didn’t ask for help, and they stopped communicating with the client.
Instead they just tried to save face and hope that the inevitable would magically become evitable.
It was hugely concerning behaviour.
And it wasn't a one-off.
Their manager soon discovered other accounts in trouble too.
It looked like a sad end to what could have been a promising career.
Except there was one last throw of the dice.
It was the moment to have a very serious discussion about mindset.
Fixed Mindset
The account manager had a Fixed Mindset.
They believed that their intelligence, talent, and abilities were innate and static.
They feared any sort of failure.
If you believe that you cannot change, then if something goes wrong the logical explanation is that you are a failure.
And they found this terrifying.
So people with a Fixed Mindset avoid challenges to protect their sense of competence.
They focus on looking good.
If there is a danger of looking bad they try to hide it, ignore it, or run from it.
They believe that success should come naturally and quickly and if it doesn’t, it’s a sign that it’s not meant to be.
And they see effort as a bad thing, because you shouldn't need to work hard if you are sufficiently smart or talented.
It's limited thinking.
This is how the account manager was behaving and why when things got tough they bottomed out.
Getting Into a Fix
A lot of people come out of education and launch into the job market with a Fixed Mindset.
From early on we’re streamed based on our ‘innate abilities’.
Everyone gets taught the same things in a fixed way, and there’s no reward for self-initiated learning.
And education asks questions with definitive answers.
Get the answer right you succeed, get it wrong you fail.
For the first twenty years of our lives we’re exposed to the perfect conditions to develop a rigid way of thinking.
“I’ve often thought that parents and schools overemphasize the value of having the right answers all the time. It seems to me that the best students in school tend to be the worst at learning from their mistakes, because they have been conditioned to associate mistakes with failure instead of opportunity. This is a major impediment to their progress.” - Ray Dalio
What’s your IQ?
The IQ test is the ultimate example of a Fixed Mindset tool.
Your IQ defines your potential and your limits.
Except that wasn't what the inventor of the test, Alfred Binet, intended:
“Some recent philosophers seem to have given their moral approval to these deplorable verdicts that affirm that the intelligence of an individual is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be augmented. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism.”
Your potential and your abilities are not fixed.
Outside of the controlled education environment, real life is open ended.
Now there are no clear answers, just more questions.
And now you have to question the questions themselves.
You can’t wait to be told, you have to seek to learn.
And you have to be aware that the game and the rules are fundamentally different.
Growth Mindset
Carol Dweck is a psychologist and expert in human motivation.
She has focused her career on studying why people succeed, or don’t, popularising the idea of Fixed Mindset and also its opposite - Growth Mindset.
“Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset.” - Carol Dweck
People with a Growth Mindset believe that intelligence, talent, and abilities can be developed through effort, learning, and persistence.
They are fascinated by mistakes and the learning opportunity they provide.
They view failure failure as feedback, not a verdict.
They are invigorated by challenges and embrace the chance to grow.
And when things get tough they increase their efforts.
They understand that continued application of learning effort is what makes you smart and talented.
“This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others. Although people may differ in every which way - in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments - everyone can change and grow through application and experience.” - Carol Dweck
Having a Growth Mindset is what allows you to thrive in the complex and volatile world.
It's unlimited thinking.
Fixed Mindset | Growth Mindset |
You have it or you don’t | You can have if it you work at it |
Stick to what you know | Stretch into what you don’t know yet. |
Look good | Be good |
Fear failure | Fear unfulfilled potential |
Feedback is negative | Feedback is coaching |
Threatened by other’ success | Inspired by others’ success |
When the going gets tough, give up | When the going gets tough, get going |
Be reactive | Be proactive |
Success is proving yourself | Success is improving yourself |
“In one world - the world of fixed traits - success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other - the world of changing qualities - it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.” - Carol Dweck
Brain Training
London back cab drivers have incredible memories.
To earn their license, trainee London taxi drivers have to complete “The Knowledge".
They spend three to four years, driving across the city, memorising over 25,000 streets and thousands of places of interest.
It’s an incredible feat.
Were they born to do it, or was it a skill that they developed?
The neuroscientists Elenor Maguire and Katherine Woollett measured the brains of the drivers at the start and end of those four years of training.
They also measured the brains of a group that started but dropped out of the training, and a control group of people that didn’t attempt the training.
All three groups started with the same levels of gray matter.
But all that work to learn and retain a huge volume of information measurably changed the brains of the successful trainee drivers:
Like a muscle, our brains can physically grow and develop with training.
You can chose to become a taxi driver and develop an incredible memory for the roads of London.
Likewise you can actively chose to switch from having a Fixed Mindset to having a Growth Mindset.
“With practice, training and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgement and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.” - Carol Dweck
What Happened?
So the account manager was in a terrible position.
They’d just failed very publicly and received a very straight intervention from their managers.
If they held on to their Fixed Mindset the obvious solution would be to quickly find another job where the failure would not follow.
They could have quite happily continued to have an apparently successful career, jumping jobs whenever things got tough.
But they didn’t.
They too a hard look at themselves and decided to change.
They embraced the challenge.
They actively sought help and used the resources of the rest of the team to turn around the other problem clients. They proactively focused their efforts on learning and improving.
A year later they had become the product expert of the account management team.
They had gone from failure to being the person that others now sought out to help them.
And with a Growth Mindset they have a very different career opportunity ahead of them.
The Unltd.
Switching to a Growth Mindset is not easy.
It’s so tempting to say, “It’s just the way I am” and leave it at that.
It’s incredibly difficult to admit you need to change, and it takes a lot of effort to continue to learn.
But to be successful in your career it’s an essential lesson to learn.
I embraced this lesson the time I was fired from my first job.
And it's an important part of leadership to be able to convey this learning to others.
Are you an unlimited thinker?
“You have a choice. Mindsets are just beliefs. They’re powerful beliefs, but they’re just something in your mind, and you can change your mind.” - Carol Dweck
