Dealings with My Growth Mindset

I imagine a ratchet. Turn the handle. Click, click, click. The spring gives. Then turn the other way and the nut tightens.

This visual comes to my mind when I think of Growth Mindset. If the tightening nut is a metaphor for Growth, then counter turning handle click, click, click is the Mindset.

Growth Mindset is the search to improve constantly. I feel alive when I improve. But it can lead to burnout.

I’ll lean on the tightening nut metaphor some more: after ratcheting, the nut reaches a point where it is tight enough. It has reached the torque-spec of that bolt. At that point the tightening must stop. The nut has now started doing its job of keeping the bolt fastened to the frame. It may need re-tightening later but today it is fastened.

This last image of the nut at rest is missing from my relentless pursuit of growth. It is easy for me to keep tightening and reach the point of over-tightening or burnout.

I have given myself a few lofty goals for 2022. Nothing wrong with aiming high as long as I remember that I many cases, finger-tighten is good enough.

Negative Reinforcement

I thought Negative Reinforcement was the same as punishment and I was wrong.

Get low grades and lose video game privileges. This is punishment.

Negative Reinforcement is removing something unpleasant to promote good behavior. Get good grades and you don’t have to do dishes for a week. Just like positive reinforcement is adding something to promote good behavior. Get good grades and we buy you a new board game.

I learned this three months ago and promptly forgot. I had to look it up to write this article. As irony would have it, I read about this because the author, Scott Young was making a point that remembering something new is hard when we have a wrong idea about it!

So true!

The Problem Is...

Imagine a big pothole on the road. A farmhand is driving a truck full of eggs from the farm to the market. The truck falls in and out of the pothole. Eggs break.

The farmhand says The Problem is the truck can’t fly over the pothole. So the farmer and the engineer start building wings and jetpacks for the truck.

What if the farmhand said The Problem is there is a big pothole on the way to the market, the truck falls in the pothole which makes the eggs break. Now the farmer can do several things: call the county to repair the pothole, repair the pothole themselves, try a different route, give the farmhand a taller seat, or glasses or both so the farmhand can see the pothole coming and swerve, put better shocks and springs on the truck, put the eggs in a padded basket, and on and on.

The way we state a problem drives how we fix it.

Jet packs or simple pothole repairs? Which is easier?

Newsletter No. 6

I flew to California on Monday for work. I started my day at 5 AM in Florida, flew seven hours, then spent five more hours walking through a warehouse. I had been going for fifteen hours straight which left me sapped out of energy by the early California evening. So I excused myself from group dinner invitations, checked into the hotel and went to bed.

I awoke Tuesday morning at 2:30 AM California time which is 5:30 AM in Florida, my usual waking up time. Sleeping-in has a paradoxical effect on me — it makes me groggy for the rest of the day. On days when I sleep-in, I spend nursing a low-grade headache. With the clock showing 2:30 AM I knew sleeping-in would be a disaster for the busy day ahead of me. So I decided to commit. I got out of bed, fiddled with the little coffee machine, and sat down with my book.

The book was Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. I read around 80 pages between 3 AM and 6 AM. In Caste, the author makes a strong case to identify the role that long standing caste systems play in American and Indian societies, and the role it played in Nazi Germany. I was naturally hooked to the topic as I had grown up in India under the Caste system. It was a heavy book and I was grateful that the quietness of the early hour opened the space for the chaotic humanity the book exposed.

I was in bed early that evening and I woke up early on Wednesday again. I repeated this early morning reading schedule for the entire duration of my visit. Those three quiet hours of reading every day were too precious to give up! I never left the Florida time-zone.

Thursday, somewhere 30,000 feet over Tallahassee, Florida in a Boeing 757, I finished the 400 page book.

I am not a speed reader by any measure. I am prone to day-dream while reading. So I was surprised to complete a large book with a heavy topic in half a week! I had picked up several hours of reading during the long flights, and additionally 3 hours of daily reading during this visit. This reminded me of Casey Neistat who said air travel is the closest thing to time travel.

James L. Gibson says in his book Ecological Approach to Visual Perception that an environment provides us good and bad options for movement. These he called Affordances.

Business travel three timezones away provided the affordances to read uninterrupted (I have deputized reading to be a form of intellectual movement). My Florida home does not provide three uninterrupted hours to read on weekdays. I read in the morning for ninety minutes before life pulls me away. Feed the cats, make coffee, make the bed, get dressed, pour cereal, turn on the computer and start the workday.

There is nothing I want more than the routine of a harmonious life at home in Florida. Reading in the morning, albeit shorter, is not the same without one of our cats sleeping on my lap. There are obvious drawbacks to traveling all the time. I will tolerate with staying in hotel rooms, eating hotel food and drinking hotel coffee in short and temporary bursts. What I notice is the disdain of business travel has shifted for the better. The affordances of transit — cramped airplanes, noisy airports and hurried schedules — used to be a bother but have now morphed into gateways to a temporary world where uninterrupted reading can happen.

Business travel is starting to look like a portal to uninterrupted reading time. On a trip I don’t have to make the bed, do dishes, feed the cats and take out the trash. I go to work during the day, and when I am not working, I can read!

— — —

I write this newsletter once a week but I post short articles daily on my blog. Here is what I posted last week:

• Variety in My Reading Diet
• Slow Hunch
• Ego Depletion
• Choice Blindness
• Intellectual Humility

Intellectual Humility

We often think we are above average than our peers:

• We think our personality is better than most people we know — that we are kinder, intelligent, loving and more giving than others
• We think we have better attitude
• We have more self esteem

This is called Self-Serving Bias.

Majority of us cannot be above average… this is not how average works! But this trait can help us be resilient. People with depression have less self-serving bias — they tend to have a more accurate view of themselves in relation to their peers.

It sounds like Self-Serving bias is a good thing: more resilience, less depression — what’s not to like about it? It can make us less humble.

Enter Intellectual Humility.

This is everyday humility plus reflection. This is reflecting accurately about our own emotions and intentions, about our personality and attitude.

By first being humble, and then reflecting on our limitations and gaps, can we start being curious about getting better.

Here is an intellectually humble question and I don’t know the answer to it: does this mean people predisposed with depression will have trouble finding curiosity? Would exploring unknowns make them feel less capable than their peers? Does their depression turn into a slippery slope, from “I don’t know how this works” to “I must be incompetent”? How does someone struggling with depression find curiosity?

Thoughts?

Choice Blindness

When you ordered the hamburger instead of the salad, were you intentional?

After you have already ordered, you may say it was intentional.

“I’ve been going for daily walks”

“I ate a salad earlier this week”

“I’m going to the gym tomorrow”

“One burger isn’t going to hurt my health”

It is our nature to stand behind our choices, even if it is the wrong choice. I am not saying an occasional burger is a wrong choice, that is for you to decide.

We do this with work all the time.

“I thrive in meetings all day”

“It’s normal to get so many emails over a weekend”

“Everyone works on Sunday evenings to catch up”

“60 hour weeks are normal in my career”

Brad Stulburg calls this Motivated Reasoning in his book Practice of Groundedness

The first step to better is to recognize this blindspot. We can not effectively fix the blindspot and bridge the gap if we don’t know what the gap is.

Footnote: I first head of the idea of Choice Blindness from the book, Making Habits Break Habits. This book is a gold-mine of ideas! Read more about understanding Choice Blindness to break bad habits in this book. There is more via study by Johansson, P., L. Hall, S. Sikstrom, and A. Olsson 2005 "Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task"

Ego Depletion

This is one of those ideas that provides missing pieces to so many puzzles.

Willpower is limited. It is like a muscle. When you have friction and stress, you need willpower to keep going. The more you use willpower, the less you have left to use, until you can replenish it. This is ego-depletion in a nutshell.

What sucks my willpower?

• Doing anything that it outside natural routine
• Incessantly checking email to not miss anything
• Last minute meetings
• Fires to put out
• Narcissistic people
• Ever-expanding to-do list
• Impossible deadlines

How to replenish it? We are still learning how to replenish willpower, though here are ways that have worked for me.

• Rest, rest, rest — when my day starts getting tough, I start simplifying the evening
• Turn rumination into questions: when my willpower depletes, I start ruminating about hypothetical ways problems will arise. I have started to turn those ruminating thoughts into questions via this TED talk. Having a question to answer energizes me to think of a viable solution instead of losing willpower to suffering in the problem
• Reflect on Core Values: Having a simple list of the values that are important can give you a temporary boost
• Reflect On Good Outcome of Goals: Not fantasizing but imagining what a good outcome looks like can also help with a temporary boos to willpower

What sucks your willpower? How do you replenish it?

For more information on this topic, see paper "Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource?", 2000 by Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven and Tice

Slow Hunch

Good ideas generally don't come from a bolt of inspiration. They first form as a slow hunch.

Here is the hard part: we have to be open and receptive to slow hunches so they grow in our brain.

The bolt of inspiration lands when a slow hunch crystalizes into an idea. Newton must have been thinking about Gravity before the apple fell. Archimedes must have been immersed in thinking about mass and weight before he had the "Eureka" moment in the bathtub. They all had slow hunches or intuitions.

Here are some of my slow hunches:

• Re-read books from the last five years that left me sad because I had finished reading them
• When I don’t feel like following my schedule, it is a sign that I need rest
• Pick up woodworking again, even if I have not done it in five years
• Take a pause on my hobby of Grassroots car racing
• Double down on Attention, hone it, craft it, deepen the roots

Further reading on this topic is “Where Good Ideas Come From” by Steven Johnson, 2011. It’s on my reading list.

Variety in My Reading Diet

A sure-shot way for me to lose interest in reading is when it gets monotonous. Reading gets monotonous if I read book after book without extracting new ideas from it, when book after book feels stale. Pursuit of unknown-unknowns is key, and this comes from reading a variety of books.

Plus, I love making connections between two ideas taken from two very different contexts. Here are two examples: Management and Team Building principles from Italy Talgam’s Ignorant Maestro (which is about Symphony conducting) and Suzanne Clothiers Bones Would Rain From The Sky (which is on dog training)!

I get majority of reading recommendations from the books that I am already reading. When an idea I am reading stands out, I look at the footnotes to see what paper or book the author is referencing. If the idea looks rich, I add the source book to my reading list.

Getting to the source material an important activity — A book is an author’s interpretation of the source idea. Interpretations are selected by authors to forward their own thesis. It reflects the author’s worldview and their biases — and these are valuable. It is the photograph of a slice of cake from a specific angle.

But also of value to me is the original idea in the source material — I don’t know what that might spark in my own thoughts. This is like getting to the whole cake so you get to decide what it tastes like.

Now, source material has its limits. It keeps me within the same echo chamber of the idea. It is important for me to get out of the echo chamber.

This is why I have challenged myself to get reading recommendations from novel sources this year. Here are how I plan to do them:

• Ask friends what they are reading — I have three new recommendations from friends and acquaintances so far
• Stroll around a library and pick up books that sound good
• Stroll around a used book store — this will require some traveling since good used book stores are on the decline. I discovered Phillip Pullman’s excellent “His Dark Materials” trilogy browsing down cluttered aisles of a used book store
• Join a book club — this is harder than it seems. I crave face-to-face discussions. This is nearly impossible given the small town I live in and the unstoppable pandemic. I’ll settle for Zoom.