JD's Journal
Having roamed this planet for six decades, and after 47 years of full-time employment in a smorgasbord of roles and locations, I'm sharing the gems I've gathered plus the wisdom of other remarkable leaders and innovators who I've encountered along the way. I don't have a clear destination yet, but based on my historical experience, it's certain to be a dynamic and unpredictable adventure. Welcome aboard!
JD's Journal
Embracing a Growth Mindset: The Path to Mastery and Fulfillment
Unlock the transformative power of perseverance and innovation that lies at the heart of every success story. Our latest episode delves into the profound impact a growth mindset can have on personal and professional development, inspired by historical icons and bolstered by psychologist Carol Dweck's groundbreaking insights. Discover how figures like Henry Ford and Colonel Sanders turned their failures into stepping stones for monumental achievements, and learn how you, too, can apply their lessons of resilience to conquer your own challenges.
We've all faced moments when the odds seemed insurmountable, but what if I told you that the secret to overcoming them lies within your perspective? This episode brings to light the stories of George Lucas, Stephen King, and many others who, against all rejections and setbacks, held fast to their beliefs and rewrote their destinies. I open up about my personal journey, including the life-changing experience of climbing Kilimanjaro, to illustrate how shifting to a growth mindset shatters the barriers we often place on ourselves.
Wrap up your listening experience with actionable insights on incorporating a growth mindset into every facet of your life. Tune in as I guide you through embracing feedback, tackling new challenges with a 'not yet' attitude, and believing in the boundless potential of human growth. Whether it's in the office, at home, or within your innermost passions, adopting this outlook can be your game-changer. So join us and start your transformation today; your future self will thank you for it.
Hi folks, and welcome to the JD's Journal podcast where, every couple of weeks, my guests and I share some of our lives, journey, our successes, our failures, the valuable lessons that we've learned on the way and the resources that we've gathered that have allowed us to survive, prosper and thrive. The opinions and perspectives shared on JD's Journal should be taken applied with your own good judges. Episodes of the podcast are largely unscripted and unedited. I'll do my best to keep things on topic, but you can expect some occasional glitches and a little meandering along the way. I hope, if nothing else, you find that entertaining. Now let's get this episode started. Failure is simply an opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. Now you might be thinking that I'm talking about this podcast, but frankly, not yet. At least it's too early to be thinking that this is actually a quote from Henry Ford, the man who was foundational to the establishment of mass-produced motor vehicles back in the early 1900s. Welcome back to JD's Journal. It's great to have you here.
Speaker 1:If you're not familiar with Henry Ford's journey from the family farm to the Ford Motor Company, you might think he had a pretty smooth journey to success. Well, that was simply not the case. The development of a vehicle design that could be mass-produced and would have the performance and reliability to attract the sales he needed to be a viable business definitely had its share of values. The most significant of these was the collapse of his first motor vehicle manufacturing company, the Detroit Automobile Company, which he founded in August of 1899 and closed the doors of in January 1901. This is where a growth mindset kicks in. Ford is tenacious and completely unwilling to give up his vision to bring affordable motor vehicles to the masses, and so, in June 1903, he goes into partnership with Alexander Melcomson, a financier, to establish the Ford Motor Company, and the rest is history. Of course, in the years that followed, though, the evolution from the Model T to where we are today, there's continued to be failures, and every one of them has presented Ford with an opportunity for innovation and improvement. Without a growth mindset, the Model T would never have eventuated and the history of Henry Ford and the very successful business that he established and sustained wouldn't exist.
Speaker 1:But there were definitely some hurdles. He was very stubborn and resistant to change, ignoring the feedback and suggestions from his customers and employees and even his family members. He refused to update or modify the Model T, even when it became outdated and outperformed by other cars in the market, and he was too obsessed with the efficiency and cost, cutting and sacrificing quality and innovation. He alienated his workers and suppliers, imposed harsh conditions and demanded unwavering loyalty, and neglected the social and environmental impacts of his mass production, such as pollution, congestion, urban sprawl. These mistakes led to the decline of Ford's market share, and mutation eventually forced him to abandon the Model T but then introduced the Model A in 1927. The Ford Model A was a very, very successful car that replaced the Model T. It sold over 4.8 million units in four years and was available in various body styles and colors, and it featured more powerful and reliable engine, a three-speed transmission and four-wheel brakes. And the Model A really enabled Ford to regain his market share and reputation and became one of the most popular cars of its time.
Speaker 1:In this episode, the topic I'll be focusing on is mindset and specifically having a growth mindset. In my less than humble opinion, a growth mindset is one of the most critical attributes that will positively influence your confidence, motivation and, ultimately, your sense of professional and personal accomplishment. So it's pretty important To be transparent. It was my intention just to find one quote to kick off this episode, which is what I did when I chose the quote from Henry Ford above. It was my favorite, but I've got to say I was pretty fond of these ones as well.
Speaker 1:Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. That was from Trim and Capote, an American novelist, screenwriter and actor. Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. That was the British Prime Minister, winston Churchill, during World War II. Fail, fail again, fail better. Sangal Beckett, irish novelist, dramatist and poet. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure because you won't. It's whether you'll let it harden or shame you into inaction or whether you learn from it, whether you choose to persevere. That was Barack Obama, the US president. Some great quotes there, and for me I think every one of those has a personal meaning in my life and hopefully resonates with you as well.
Speaker 1:My first real exposure to the notion and importance of mindset came from reading a fabulous book appropriately entitled Mindset by author and psychologist Carol Dweck. I won't say that the concepts that Carol presented in the book were mind-blowingly new or unexpected, but the way that she developed her findings and the way that they were presented brought a fresh and powerful understanding to the topic, particularly applied to education and corporate environments. So Carol's a psychologist and a professor at Stanford University who researched the idea of mindset in general In her 2006 book Mindset and the subsequent 2014 TED Talk, which I highly recommend, called the Power of Believing that you Can Improve or the Power of Not. Yet Carol observed that we are differentiated, or that the students that she studied were differentiated on the pathway to their success by the mindset that they adopted. Some of them would embrace failure, being genuinely motivated by the challenges that they couldn't solve, while others would act defeated or would actively avoid the possibility of failure. This is what she defined as having either a growth or a fixed mindset. She also tracked that children with a fixed mindset continued to slide in their academic performance. They fell behind their peers further with each passing year, while children with a growth mindset demonstrated academic development and success that accelerated over time.
Speaker 1:As with a growth mindset, the notion of not competent yet created this mindset of appreciating failure as just a part of the path to ultimate success. So I'd like you to reflect for a moment when you're faced with a crossword puzzle, a Sudoku puzzle, that horrible New York Times connections word game that my family has introduced me to, and you find a puzzle that you can't crack. Do you get excited or do you get frustrated? Do you go back to it with determination to solve it, or do you throw it away and move on to something else? Does the thought of having to fail repeatedly before you achieve a significant goal fill you with determination to succeed, or does it sap your energy away? If you feel uncomfortable with the mere thought of failure, you may have a fixed mindset and it might be holding you back from achieving your full potential. My own experience is that mindset is contextual as well. For example, failing over and over again to complete a mission on an Xbox or a PC game just makes me more determined to have another go, trying different approaches to the challenge. But I have to say that trying to learn the violin particularly perhaps at my age, and listening to every tune that I try to play sounding like I'm strangling a cat, or let's just say that my violin rarely comes out of its case these days. So back to Carol, the expert on mindset. The eight ideas that Carol presents in her book are these Our mindset shapes whether we believe we can learn and change and grow or not, and individuals' abilities are set in stone.
Speaker 1:In a fixed mindset, the mindset is I can't do that. Growth and development are possible. In the growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset seek approval, while those with a growth mindset seek development. The fixed mindset sees values as disasters. The growth mindset sees them as opportunities. People with a fixed mindset avoid difficulties. Those with a growth mindset seek out and relish them. Our mindset is often strongly influenced by the role models that we had as children. And finally, anyone can adopt a growth mindset and make the impossible possible. Think about those for a moment.
Speaker 1:While I talk about the pitfalls of having a fixed mindset, I see these all around me. First of all, these feelings of insecurity, this sense that I'm going to be seen. I'm going to be seen by others as not being capable or successful, and so forth. It may even get to the point where there's a temptation to cheat for the sake of saving face, or to hide to save face. The avoidance of taking risks, which really crushes your ability to break through, crushes your ability to innovate, crushes your ability to experience new things.
Speaker 1:A laser focus on perfection, a perfection you'll hear about perfection so often during this podcast as a killer of progress. That need for everything to be perfect before I take the next step Results in procrastination and analysis. Paralysis, all you're going to call it, but it essentially forces you to be stuck because it's never quite right. And, by the way, perfection is unachievable. So if you have a perfectionist mindset, you'll never take that next step because you'll never be satisfied that you're ready. And then, finally, with all of the things I talked about, they're feeling a stagnation, feeling like you're not developing, you're not growing, you're not taking new steps. And so these things, you know they're so limiting.
Speaker 1:On the inverse, the benefits of having a growth mindset you know the lifelong love of learning, being authentically excited about the need to gain new knowledge, new skills, new experiences. That translates to improved career success. That translates the ability to move into new domain spaces, new areas, take on new challenges, new projects or new disciplines and places where you have limited or maybe no experience whatsoever. That ability to have the confidence to take a leap and do something will give you a new perspective, a new experience and new skills in your tool belt. And the personal evolution outside of the classroom or outside of the workplace. You know, in your personal life again, the ability for you to be adventurous, to try new things, try new cultures, try new foods, try new hobbies, take on something in your later life that you'd never considered was possible to take on. For me, that's this podcast, for instance. A perfect example of that ability to say I don't know nothing about podcasts, I'm going to clue what I'm doing here, but what the hell? I'm going to grow, I'm going to experience this and learn something new.
Speaker 1:So Carol goes on to explain that people with a growth mindset believe that their abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. They see every failure, as I said before, as an opportunity to learn and to grow rather than as a reflection on their personal intelligence or their talent. Fail fast, fail small is a phrase that I hear more and more in the business world and the technology world, particularly in the entrepreneurial spaces, and what it really means is that when you're trying to do something new, you should find the failure quickly and, to the best of your ability, design what you're doing to fail small, to have the ability to fail, but with minimal impact. What I think about? I think one of the best metaphors for this is agile project management. I came from an era where programs were waterfall programs and they had long timelines that went off into months and sometimes years, with dependencies and so forth, and you kick a program off and it would be running and running, but often you would get towards that program before you realize that guess what you're miles behind schedule and destined to fail. And so we saw the eventuation of agile models and sprints, where we set goals that had short timelines, a week or two of timeline. We completed that milestone and then we course correct, we fine-tuned, we had hands and so forth, and we learn, like with every sprint, every milestone it was achieved. That moment to do a retrospective, to step back and go what worked well, what didn't go well, and we acknowledge what didn't go well and we embrace what didn't go well and we translated that into learning that we would then apply to the next sprint so that with each of those project sprints we'd learn in terms of process or technology approach or programming approach to drive better. And we got afraid of the failure. We see the failure as that opportunity to get this feedback, this constant feedback loop that allows the project to evolve in terms of its culture and its process and its approach and so forth.
Speaker 1:The quote I've not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work is one that's famously attributed to Thomas Edison, who's known for inventing the light bulb. Imagine, if you will, if Edison had a fixed mindset and gave up after his first few attempts, deciding it's all too hard. It's all too hard, I'm frustrated, I'm failing, and let's me go and work on something else. Now let's face it, the light bulb was always going to be invented when we're. Another Tesla was making significant contributions into the invention process, and if it wasn't Tesla or Edison, it would have been somebody else who saw the commercial value in this. But I still think it's relevant to look at the approach here. I'm okay with failing 10,000 times, I'm okay with the fact that this didn't work, but I learned something. I learned something that I can translate back into what I'm doing. That's going to make the next attempt and the next attempt even better and get me closer to the conclusion I want to get to.
Speaker 1:So at Amazon, where I'm currently employed, we absolutely embrace failure as a fundamental cultural normality to the way that this organization has grown and the way that it's succeeded. We have what we call a day one culture, which I've got to say in an organization of the scale and now maturity that we are as a global enterprise feels like when I joined the organization. This notion of a day one culture, which is really the whole context behind a day one culture, is we act like a startup. We act like a new entrepreneurial company who is just beginning and is scrappy and navigating its way through the early learning process of establishing itself as an organization. Backing that up is a notion of high velocity decision making, and the notion there is that we won't have all the information that we need to make important decisions. We don't expect to have 90% of the information available to us to be able to make decisions, and so we've developed a culture that assumes that somewhere around 70% of the information that we have is enough for us to be able to make a decision, to move forward, but to move forward intelligently and again willing to fail, willing to experience an unsuccessful outcome of what we tried, but always to turn that into learning.
Speaker 1:In fact, of the leadership principles which I'll be talking about in another podcast coming up soon in the 16 leadership principles that we have, supporting this notion are two very key leadership principles. One of them are right a lot and are right a lot is very deliberately not are right all the time. The whole context behind are right. A lot is that we use our knowledge. We use the data that's available to us in terms of tangible information, that 70% that I talked about before, the data that backs that decision, but the rest is really intuition and intelligence and experience. So if we combine those things, we set ourselves up to be able to make a good intuitive decision, a good intelligent decision that has intelligent risk of tie to it but moves us forward quickly and that supports the other key leadership principle I see relating to this, which is bias for action.
Speaker 1:As an organization, we have very deliberately decided that we are fast, we work at high velocity, as I said before, and to support that we have this bias for action. You're better to do something than to do nothing. You better to take action even if it's ultimately not the right action. Hopefully it's close to the right action, but if it's not the right action, at least it's progress. And if the progress reveals nothing but learning because of an ultimate failure, that's still progress because it's given us more knowledge than we had before. To support that, the company has established for a very long time now a correction of errors mechanism and the entirety of Amazon. Whether you're in the retail space, whether you're in Amazon Prime, whether you're delivering media services or in the infrastructure spaces, I am across the entire organization.
Speaker 1:We have one singular framework and one singular mechanism and culture around correction of errors and, quite deliberately, it focuses on the what, not the who, and so the correction of errors looks at what was the failure, what went wrong, what was the chronology that led to that, what are the steps and the inputs that got us to a point where something didn't work well, what were the observations of that event? So what did we learn through the failure and how did we learn it? How did we detect it? Is there a way that we could detect that failure more quickly, which I think is an important part of any correction of errors or continuous improvement program? Is that not only detect the issue, but how could we detect it even quicker next time so that we fail even faster and learn from that? And then, finally, the most important parts of the COE in my opinion, the correction of errors, in my opinion is what are the corrective actions? What are the steps we're going to take now, quickly, to make sure that we can have another go or restore that process or continue to do business without that issue occurring again.
Speaker 1:The whole notion behind this correction of errors framework is that again we make new mistakes. We don't make the same mistakes, we don't have the same errors occurring. Once that error occurs, or once that issue occurs, we analyze it, we peel the onion, we work out whatever we have to learn from it. We make the process or system or operational changes that need to be made so we don't have that issue again but we relish the next one that's going to help us continue to drive that improvement. And we have this notion of raising the bar, constantly raising the bar in the process, and the COE mechanism that we use is inherent within that.
Speaker 1:I love it because of the way that works. I love the framework. I think it's very mature and, again, one of the things I do love about it is it never talks about the who we don't focus on. Fred did the wrong thing, or it was Mary that screwed up, or whatever. You go to a COE review and I'll promise you some of these reviews are hugely uncomfortable because if we've impacted customers, of course the company is cussed or obsessed. If we've harmed customers, it gets a lot of scrutiny. It's sometimes very senior scrutiny, so these discussions are not necessarily so comfortable, but it's never about that person. It's about what were the factors that got us to that point and what can we learn from it and how can we make sure it never happens again. So, again, not to go on, but I do love it.
Speaker 1:So back to Thomas Edison. He worked on developing the light bulb for several years before he was able to create a working prototype and he quite literally tried thousands of different materials and designs before he came up with a filament that was going to be successful. I don't know the exact amount of time and I can't find the exact amount of hours that he invested in the development, but it certainly was several years and I think it could only be through a growth mindset that he would have the resilience and the tenacity and the commitment to continue that, because he could see something happening there. There are so many. As I looked into this topic, there are so many examples of folks who we probably think had pretty easy roads to achieving greatness, and some of you want to take a deeper dive in this and some that I would recommend that you take a look at Colonel Sanders with KFC. I love KFC.
Speaker 1:Histories are really interesting one in terms of what it took to get to the point where we have what we have as KFC today, whereas Lucas was Star Wars, he tried multiple times to have studios pick up Star Wars and just couldn't get there. And look at this amazing series that we have today and all of the other contents come out of this. It's incredible. It's hard to imagine, knowing what we know today, that the studios weren't falling over themselves to pick this thing up. But the reality was that Lucas was rejected over and over, again and again at growth mindset, at play, where he was absolutely willing to learn from each of those rejections and change his approach to be successful.
Speaker 1:Stephen King, one of my favourite authors as well, took him a long time to get published the way that he's getting published today, and was very tenacious. He had a mission, he had a passion, but what he does he still does, thankfully, a great story there. Hady Perry was an interesting story to read about. That's a good one to look up as well if you want to read an interesting story. She had some struggles along the way, and there are so many more, but I think about.
Speaker 1:Another great example that for me, is quite relatable is the landing on the moon. The Apollo program had so many setbacks and even tragedies the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts during the testing on the launch pad. Nasa, again to their credit, learned through every failure. Their level of correction of errors, their level of analysis and investigation into every single failure that allowed them to land on the moon is quite incredible. Of course, every space agency in the world who's gone through this experience has had a similar experience in terms of trial and error and failure and so forth. And we've seen it more recently with organizations like SpaceX, et cetera, who've all gone through their learning processes. The shuttle series again, some tremendous accomplishments but some horrific failures, in one in particular with the Columbia, a huge tragedy for us. But this ability to take those failures, knock it up and have this mindset of you know, what did we learn? What went wrong? How did we change? What were the failures of never giving up on that.
Speaker 1:I can tell you quite personally that establishing this podcast, as I mentioned earlier, at this late stage of my life, has been something that I've been thinking about for quite some time, something that I've procrastinated on and really festered on in terms of is this a worthwhile thing to do and can I do this? Can I learn how to do this? Now, as I've started to play and rehearse and learned the technology or at least try to learn the technology, there have definitely been moments where that horrible fixed mindset has come into play and I've had to catch myself in terms of you know, I can't do this. It's like I can't learn how to do this. What do I know about mixing discs? What do I know about adding sound and mixing music and clearing out those horrible gaps and blips in the sound? And can I talk for an hour without putting people to sleep? We'll see whether I can do that or not, but those, all those thoughts come through. You know the imposter syndrome which is going to come up.
Speaker 1:I think quite a lot in this podcast is constantly there tapping me on the shoulder and so forth. But I believe this is a worthwhile project. I think this is a worthwhile mission. Hopefully it's going to bring some entertainment and some information and education and inspiration and hopefully a few laughs for the audience. So I think it's worthwhile and so I think it's worthy of applying a growth mindset. So we've talked a lot about the benefits of having a growth mindset.
Speaker 1:I think the real question is if you tend to be on the side of having a fixed mindset. And again I want to be really clear I think everybody has a growth and a fixed mindset. I don't think anybody is, you know, absolutely a fixed mindset or absolutely a growth mindset. I think it is contextual for all of us. There are some areas where we have passion, where we will push through and we'll be excited about not getting it right and learning. There are other areas where that's not the case. But if you tend to be on the side of a fixed mindset and you want to move towards a growth mindset, I think it can be a gradual process. I think you can learn to learn. I think you can learn to take risks by maybe taking minor risks and then building confidence and then becoming courageous to take more significant risks and kind of build on that.
Speaker 1:And so I guess the guidance I would give anybody to think about developing a mindset, based on my own experience and also the research that I've done, is that it's first of all to focus on the learning instead of focusing on the outcome. Go into your activities, the new activities when you're working outside of your comfort zone or outside of your experience zone, go into it for the purpose of learning and the experience, as opposed to going into it for the outcome. I think one way to think about it is I think the phrase you'll hear from people is that it's the journey, not the destination. I think this is very true, that if you can embrace the idea that the value is in the journey, the experience and all of the things that happen in that experience, then I think you'll be more comfortable to focus on the learning along the way.
Speaker 1:Celebrate progress, recognize that any progress, any learning, any new accomplishments is a win, and you should recognize that for yourself, that you did it a little bit better, a little bit faster, or you were a little bit more accurate than you were last time or a little bit more competent than you were last time. Give yourself that reward, welcome that little bit of dopamine that comes through the system and gives you that happy feeling because of the little accomplishment, and also do it with others. There's an incredible power that comes when you celebrate with others. It's actually been proven to be both physiological and cognitively healthy for you to give others feedback, give others joy and recognition and so forth. So look for those opportunities to not only recognize yourself for your little wins, but recognize others and their little wins.
Speaker 1:The next one is to embrace failure. You, like see joy in failure. It's a natural part of the learning process and so, instead of being discouraged when things don't work out, like, be curious and like be authentically interested and willing to dive into wow, that was fascinating. What happened there? It didn't go up. It didn't work the way I expected it to work. Why was that? What can I learn from that? What can I take away from that and really use that as the opportunity to learn, improve. Take the curiosity, pull it apart, learn what you can learn, capture it and apply it to next time and see what happens. And hopefully it's going to make it better. If it makes it worse, you know that what you did wasn't the right thing and you do a different course. Correctly. You try something else.
Speaker 1:Seek feedback and have the courage to seek feedback from others. You know where you believe that you need to improve. Maybe you're not sure how to do that. Maybe you know whatever it is that you're trying to get better at. Maybe it's public speaking or playing guitar or whatever. And if you're feeling like I don't know what step to take here, then look for folks around you who might have experience or might have knowledge or strength in a particular area and get their feedback, get their ideas, ask them about their journey, ask them how they got so good at it, what did they have to do, and be open to the constructive criticism. Don't take it on as a personal attack, but take it on as a gift. You know, feedback is one of the greatest gifts that you can give and I frankly think you know for a lot of people, giving constructive and honest feedback is tough. You know, I feel for people who have discomfort in sharing critical feedback, but I welcome it because I do think it's enriching you to have that perspective from somebody who's outside your skin. We see each other through our own paradigm. We see ourselves through our own eyes and it's inherently built within us to be protective of ourselves and to be defensive. It's just a natural thing that you actually can't stop, no question about it. But consciously, you can make the choice to say that's a gift, that's something that you're going out of your way to share with me for my benefit. So I encourage you to seek that feedback and welcome that feedback and not take it personally.
Speaker 1:The next one is really challenge yourself, like, do deliberately step out of your comfort zone and take on new challenges. You know, you recognize that I think we tell ourselves I can't do that. I know when my kids, my younger kids, were going through their learning process at school and so forth, and occasionally you would get that message from the kids where you know, this is too hard, I can't do this, I can't do this. And having read Carol's book, you know I got in this notion of not yet, not yet, you can't do that yet. But you're not saying you can't do that ever. You're saying you can't do that yet. Fantastic, right, there is the opportunity. Not yet has an end date on it, right, there will come a time when you can do it and that becomes the next boundary for you. And so every little movement you take outside of your comfort zone expands your comfort zone. It's actually getting bigger every time you do that. And so you know, think about that. I want to step out of my comfort zone, but maybe not too far out of my comfort zone, but I want to expand my comfort zone. So it's getting bigger and bigger and through that, you know the opportunity to develop your skills and your confidence as a person to take on the next big challenge, the next small challenge and just continue to grow.
Speaker 1:And finally, the most important thing of all is to believe in yourself. Believe, honestly, believe, that you have the ability to learn and grow. Humans are incredibly unimaginably able to grow and learn. Our brains have so much capacity and our bodies have so much ability to grow and learn new muscle capabilities and so forth. You just have to believe that you can and have the ability, and that mental model of I can do this is really so powerful. You know the mental model that I can't is defeating, it's limiting and it will restrict you always, and so challenge that whenever you hear that little voice telling you you can't do this, this is beyond you. Look it off, tell it it's a liar, tell it's an idiot, whatever you have to do, and remind yourself that, yes, you have the capability to do that. You absolutely can.
Speaker 1:If I can share another personal example of myself, back in back in 2013, in a moment of complete insanity, for whatever reason, I heard about some colleagues of mine who had got a climb Kilimanjaro in Africa, a 5,958 meter climb and I said I'd like to join them. I don't know why I did that and I could see it after I did it. I'm like you're nuts, but. But I did. And for the months and months and months that led up to that climb in 2013, I changed my regiment. I was fat and out of condition and so I walked 16 kilometers every work day. I changed my diet, I started climbing up and down a hill in Berlin to practice, because Berlin's pretty flat. So we went to Teufelsberg and climbed the hill in Teufelsberg with backpacks and so forth and ultimately, long story short, I made it to the summit of Kilimanjaro and it completely changed my mindset in terms of what I was able to do, my capabilities as an older guy.
Speaker 1:And not long after that, I had the absolute joyous pleasure of walking the Dolomites with my niece, tracy, and again, it was a tough walk. She's very fit, she knows that mountain like the back of her hands, and I was in the middle of the mountain climbing moments where I thought this is beyond me. But what an incredible experience to walk the Dolomites in Italy and the gorgeous views and so forth. So for me, you know those. Those were things that were way outside of my comfort zone in terms of my ability. I did them. Maybe I did them because I was too stupid to know that I couldn't, but I did both cases. I did those experiences and I would never give them up. I never would have gone on either of those two adventures. They just would never have happened in those life changing experiences would never have happened.
Speaker 1:Anyway, this is my episode on growth mindset. I hope you found it interesting and informative. I do encourage you to check out Carol's Wets' Ted Talk and I'll put it in the show notes. The books bring it as well. I'll put some other resources there around growth mindset. But think about it. Think about your own life, think about your own work, think about the way that you're approaching things. And growth mindset I could give a change in life if you want to go just today. Looking forward to seeing you again in the next episode of JD's Journal. Thank you for watching.
