When failure hits hard, Brian Johnson says grieve it, then get to work. Michael Jordan missed his varsity cut at 15. Carol Dweck's research shows the difference between blaming yourself and treating low moods as a signal to learn and practice harder.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. In our last plus one we talked about Michael Jordan and Carol Dweck and growth mindsets. I mentioned the fact that when I imagined Jordan crying after missing the cut for his varsity basketball team, I thought of Carol Dweck for two reasons. Yesterday we talked about the first reason. Today I'd like to Talk about the second first again, imagine Michael Jordan, 15 years old, missing the cut for his varsity team. Feel his heart sink as he looked at the sheet on the wall and saw that his name was missing. Of course, that shouldn't be hard to imagine and feel as we've all experienced exactly that sense of despair when we failed at something super important to us. Enter common humanity. Then let's follow Jordan back to his house where he locked himself in his room and cried and cried and cried, totally devastated. Now that shouldn't be too hard to imagine either as we've all experienced our own version of that as well. Right? And by the way, as Emerson and I were reading the Odyssey, I was struck by just how often Odysseus and his men wept in responses to the losses they experienced and the challenges they faced. Yeah, heroes cry a lot. It's not supposed to be easy. So our young hero is devastated. Then what? Well then we come back to Carol Dweck and the point of today's plus one. Here's how she puts it in mindset. She says, quote, how do you act when you feel depressed? Do you work harder at things in your life or do you let them go? Next time you feel low, put yourself in a growth mindset. Think about learning, challenging, confronting obstacles. Think about effort as a positive constructive force, not as a big drag. Try it out. She says, well, how do you act when you feel depressed? We need to really get the fact that we all get depressed and this is a very big and we need to know that there are two very different ways to respond to that depression. And we need to know that our responses are shaped by our mindsets. When fixed mindset people get depressed, they tend to think that something's inherently wrong with them and that they're the only ones who experience failure and its associated pain. Then they tend to stop doing the very things that could help them rebound and anti voila, downward spiral. By the way, my old self was an expert at this type of thinking. I had no sense of perspective and, or self compassion and or emotional stamina and, or any fundamentals and, or any of this wisdom and I thought something was fundamentally wrong with me. That I a failed and B felt horrible about it. Oh again. To have been taught this stuff decades ago. Now, on the other hand, when we approach the exact same devastating failure with a growth mindset, we respond in a very different way. We know we can get better, so we work harder. We get to work on learning from our mistakes and optimizing again. Know this, if you don't think you can get better, then every little mistake is torture. It's proof that we are, in fact, idiots. Now, it's much better to take Matthew Syed's approach and use every single failure, no matter how big or small, as another opportunity to get better. Newsflash, that's the epitome of the growth mindset. So today's +1. Has life kicked you where it hurts lately? Cry. Cry some more, then cry a little more, then get up and get better. Be more committed to your protocol than you've ever been in your life. Remembering that the worse we feel, the more committed we are to doing the right thing. Life deliver a minus one. Minus one. Minus one. Minis one, minus one. Fine. We respond with plus one plus one, plus one, plus one for a very, very long seque sequence of plus ones, plus one and another plus one.
