You always have two choices with change: learn from it or find reasons to ignore it.
Can you guess which makes you better and less fragile?
I believe there are two kinds of people: growth-minded and fixed-minded.
Every generation of human history has the rebels, iconoclasts, and crazy ones willing to think differently.
To think differently than society requires optimism and seeing possibility. It requires a growth mindset.
The thing is, the growth-minded humans are those that move society forward.
The fixed-minded defend the status quo.
It reminds me of this quote by George Bernard Shaw:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
New technologies, ideas, ways of doing things are a gift that propels society forward. And the masses always resist because the masses don’t like change.
Consider your life
Do you cling to your current ideas, habits, routines?
How often are you trying new things?
How often are you saying, “I changed my mind,” or “I was wrong.”
Do you always find the reasons why something won’t work, or do you focus on the possibilities
This isn’t easy for any of us.
Change is hard and wrought with creative destruction.
It makes us reevaluate our values and habits, and comfort.
Struggling through the muddiness of a growth-focused life has forced me to realize how important it is to stick with the basics, with first principles.
The more you spend time on things you can know for sure, the less energy you waste on maybes and what-ifs and woulda/coulda/shoulda.
It is a sickness of the human mind to justify why things are, why they won’t change, and why change itself is bad/scary/to be avoided.
This primal psychology kept our ancestors safe in the cruel wild.
But all progress in the modern world requires opposite thinking. It requires an unwavering obsession with what could be at the expense of what is.
All progress depends on the growth mindset.