Whether you think you can, or think you can’t – you’re right.*
Henry Ford

I’ve found that the growth mindset and grit go together.*
Angela Duckworth

When it comes to optimism,
Don’t think happy, smily people
denying reality,
Rather think of people who determine to
keep going
until they succeed, arrive,
Or push through to a better possibility.
Angela Duckworth’s definition of an optimist is:

they thought of temporary and specific causes for bad events, and permanent and pervasive cause of good events.*

The reverse is true for the pessimist.

There’s a link between Duckworth’s grit and
Carol Dweck’s growth mindset.
I thought you may like to see how you agree or disagree
with the following four statements:

Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t change much.

You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are.

No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.

You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.*

If you disagree with the first two and agree with the second two
then you have more of a growth mindset
and you are more likely to be optimistic and to keep moving.
Agree with the first two and disagree with the second two
and you have more of a fixed mindset
and are more likely to be pessimistic and to become stuck.

Of course,
The good news is that we don’t have to be held in
a pessimistic/fixed mindset world;
We can learn our way out of it.

A good place to begin is to find some people
who respond to failure and success differently
to those who have influenced you through your life,
Whether this means reading their books,**
Asking to have an hour with them if you buy them a coffee,
Or get involved in dreamwhispering.

*Angela Duckworth’s Grit;
**Check out Carol Dweck’s Mindset as well as Angela Duckworth’s Grit, or, for a comprehensive list of ways and means, Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self Improvement.

When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.**
Robin Wall Kimmerer

Whenever I am around people, my heart and soul radiate with the awareness that I am around greatness. Maybe greatness unfound, or greatness undeveloped, but the potential or existence of greatness nevertheless. You never know who will go onto do good or even great things or become the next great influencer of the world – so treat everyone like they are that person.^
Kat Cole

Yes,
Yes,
Yes,
Each of us is here with a contribution to make,
A gift to bring into the world,
Often made visible and grown
through personal dilemma or difficulty,
And the more beautiful for it.

*Supertramp’s soundtrack for this post, which I forgot to include when posting;
**Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass;
^Angela Duckworth’s Grit.

just about any occupation can be a job, career, or calling*
Angela Duckworth

The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to love, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognito in between lies a life of discovery.**
Rebecca Solnit

We do not have to venture far
To become lost,
We only need to
wander more deeply into the reality of who we are
and the truth of where we are.
As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote,

The human being knows himself only insofar as he knows the world; he perceives the world only in himself, and himself only in the world.  Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us.^

And we also add other explorers to this list because,

The closer we look at what other people believe and do, the more clear it is that our view of the world doesn’t precisely match theirs. It never has but now it’s magnified. No one believes what I believe, not exactly.^^

Becoming lost,
Moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar,
May be all we need to move from
a job
to a career
to a calling
without changing occupation.

*Angela Duckworth’s Grit;
**Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost;
^David Rome’s Your Body Knows the Answer;
^^Seth Godin’s blog: Points of view.

At its core, the idea of purpose is the idea that what we do matters to people other than ourselves. … In my “grit lexicon,” therefore, purpose means the intention to contribute to the well-being of others.*
Angela Duckworth

Before a human being thinks of others, he must have been unapologetically himself; he must have taken the measure of his nature in order to master it and empty it for the benefit of others like himself.**
Rainer Maria Rilke

How do we find purpose?

For me,
It began with an irritating question:
What do I do well and I should focus on?
It turned into the pursuit of helping others.
It wasn’t as clean cut as Rainer Maria Rilke has it,
But I noticed that as I was discovering things about myself,
I wanted to help others to have their own
journeys of discovery.
Over time,
I noticed that this was more important than anything else,
Even more important than the work within which I had uncovered my original
question.
Growing purpose takes time,
Often unnoticed,
And it’s always worth taking a closer look.

*Angela Duckworth’s Grit;
**Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life.

1. Take action creating a work or performing a deed.
2. Experience something or encounter someone that you find captivating and pulls you out of yourself.
3. Have an optimistic attitude toward the inevitable challenges and suffering you will experience in life.*
   Viktor Frankl and Donald Miller

Trust is worth more than attention, and the purpose of the work is to create meaningful change, not to be on a list.**
Seth Godin

A meaningful life is its own truth.
We build upon the truth we receive from others,
The best of which will set us up
for what we might add,
For what we must add
no matter what.

*Donald Miller’s Hero On a Mission;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Superfamous.

“Once there was, and once there was not …” This paradoxical phrase is meant to alert the should of the listener that this story takes place in the world between worlds where nothing is as it seems.*
Clarissa Pinkola Estés

In a word: one ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure for one’s life, for our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry.**
Rainer Maria Rilke

We’re all invited to join in,
To make our joyful noise,
To bring our song,
Our words, to
combine our voice with others
Meld our sound with sounds.

In the bringing
lies the honing
of our gift.

Always have the courage
To change, welcoming those voices
That call you beyond your self.^

*Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves;
**Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life;
^John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: At the Threshold of Manhood.

If there were no problems, it wouldn’t be much fun.**
Alan Lightman

It is, therefore, this fluidity that presents us with an unavoidable challenge: how to contain the serious within the truly playful; that is to keep all our finite games in infinite play.^
James Carse

Playfulness enables us to meet problems
with flexibility
rather than
rigidity.
“There is only one way to do this,”
Is a very serious approach;
Without distance and its accompanying perspective
We are unable to see many more ways.

A good place to begin towards playfulness is
to follow our awe:

Awe diminishes the press of self-interest and reorients the mind to interconnection and design.^^

What awes you?
When you follow it,
There will be found opportunities to play.

*From Rebecca Elson’s A Responsibility to Awe;
**Alan Lightman’s A Sense of the Mysterious;
^James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
^^Dacher Keltner’s Born to Be Good.

Old men [and women] ought to be explorers.*
T. S. Eliot

Make interesting amazing, glorious mistakes. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.**
Neil Gaiman

Here are some “explorer clothes,”
Timeless classics^
as supplied by Anna Katharina Schaffner:^^
Self-knowledge for mastery and realism;
Choose your thoughts, rather than the other way around;
Let go of the False Self;
Do good and put others first;
Be humble to learn and grow;
Simplify to be able to focus on what’s important;
Free your imagination to wander freely;
Keep going;
Put yourself in other’s lives;
Always practise being present.

Plenty to keep us going.

*Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward;
**Neil Gaiman’s Art Matters;
^These practices have been utilised through hundreds, if not thousands, of years;
^^Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self Improvement.

Grit has two components: passion and perseverance. … Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.*
Angela Duckworth

How will you go about finding that thing the nature o which is totally unknown to you.**
Meno

Angela Duckworth is helping me to see how my passion is not about
intensity
as much as it is about
consistency.
Almost thirty years on from the emergence of a
niggling personal question about competency,
I am still navigating continents of possibility.
It turns out that passion is my compass.

*Angela Duckworth’s Grit.
**Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

Going through a ritual every day keeps you on the line.*
Joseph Campbell

We distract ourselves with pleasure when we can’t find a sense of meaning.**
Donald Miller

I am guessing that you don’t want to be
off the line:
Waiting, disconnected, non-contributing.

Your ritual is the thing you have devised
to keep bringing you back to what you want your life to be about,
So you don’t allow it to become stale,
You keep developing it
each day.

You know that without it,
It would be too easy to be
distracted,
And life is too short to be distracted.

*Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth;
**Donald Miller’s Hero On a Mission.