I hate high school graduations.
They remind me of how bad I felt after I got rejected from every college I applied to.
Just listen to the graduation speech I wrote:
As those much sought after college acceptance letters began to come in, I waited.
I looked around as all of my friends were being accepted.
The only reward for my patience were seven slim envelopes.
Those applications that I poured my heart and soul into, the physical representation
of all that I am, were rejected.
My high school’s graduation committee didn’t select my speech.
They said it had wrong tone...
What I remember most about that time is feeling ashamed and hopeless, that the universe is
telling me I am not the kind of person who should go to college, and I should give up
on that dream.
It’s what psychologist Carol Dweck calls a fixed mindset, believing that you are who
you are and your strengths and weaknesses can’t change.
My brother took me aside and told me that “getting rejected from college doesn’t
mean that you’re not cut out for college, it just means you’re not ready for it right
now.”
This perspective helped me think of my failure differently.
It’s what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset, believing that through hard work, the right
strategies, and a supportive environment you can change, that you can develop talents.
Her research suggests people with a growth mindset tend to do better, especially when
they see failure as an opportunity to learn instead of a permanent setback.
But just thinking about failure differently isn’t enough to succeed.
I needed to get help from people who could teach me how to become a better student, help
me find my academic passions, and mentor me through the college application process.
Community college gave me that opportunity.
I had fantastic teachers who taught me how to be a good student and helped me get accepted
to UCLA.
This time when I graduated, it was my speech that was selected for the ceremony.
But the skills that helped me succeed in college didn’t help me succeed in grad school.
At the end of the first class I taught in grad school, a student of mine wrote a teaching
evaluation that said, “This man should never be allowed to teach psychology ever again.”
A year later I got a scathing evaluation from a supervisor who said I was “failing to
meet the obligations of the training program.”
And then the dissertation I spent a year and half working on, this giant independent research
project that every PhD student has to complete before graduating, it wasn’t going anywhere.
I had to dump the project and start from scratch.
I remember crying in my mentor’s office the day that happened.
I felt like I was in high school all over again – ashamed, hopeless, like I let down
the people who were counting on me and wasn’t as good as all the other grad students around
me.
That’s when my mentor said, “We’re going to learn from what happened and build a better
dissertation.”
She helped me understand that I was struggling to manage large independent projects.
I hired a dissertation coach who helped me learn how to stay on track and then two years
later I defended my dissertation with distinction.
Now I know that a growth mindset isn’t something you achieve and are done with.
Even though I developed a growth mindset about being a good student it took me longer to
develop a growth mindset about managing large projects.
I also discovered that when I feel shame, it paralyzes me, triggers a fixed mindset,
makes me feel like I can’t change.
That’s when it becomes critical for me to get help from someone who can show me what
I’m doing wrong and teach me the best way to move forward.
A growth mindset it’s not about praising someone for trying and encouraging them to
work harder.
It’s about helping people understand that their abilities can change, showing them what
went wrong, and teaching them the step by step skills they need to improve.
This is how we learn from our failures.
What makes you feel like your abilities are stuck and how have you grown from your failures?
Let me know in the comments below!