Crystal's Essay
The aspects of the Growth and Fixed mindset that I can identify in my personal history would be surrounding my relationships. When I was younger, I figured that the man of my dreams could/would whisk me away to a fairytale land and we would ride off into the sunset. Our relationship would be perfect and easy, only arguing over who loves the other more. He would worship the ground that I walked on and be a Thomas Crowne-like mind-reader. As maturity set in, I realized that that wasn’t at all what it was about. I was transitioning from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset here. When I met my (now) husband, we set out to sharpen each other and to help the other grow. We choose to love each other where we’re at, and not where we want to be or where we want the other person to be. We are present with each other and remind ourselves that it’s about the journey, not the destination. We argue.. or (ahem) “discuss”.. whether brand is better than generic and who deserves the 2-for-1 margaritas more at happy hour after a long week. You know, the important things! And still we manage to grow in our love for each other. This is where I see the most Growth.
The area that I feel Fixed in is my present customer service track. Over the past 14 years, I have excelled in each position I’ve gotten into and most of it was my need to feel superior to others. That may be the brattiest thing I’ve typed since my AOLchat days. In most environments, I am the least competitive person in the room. I do not feel the need to prove myself as stronger or faster than everyone else. Contact sports have always made me sad, as I don’t WANT to hurl a dodgeball at you or hurl myself over a net to spike a volleyball in your direction. However, when it comes to work ethic and getting tasks done, I have an urge to make myself indispensable to whomever I’m working for. I will be the cream of the crop so that you can’t afford to let me go. I believe that’s driven by my need for security and stability in both work and home environments. Thus, I play the sport of Intelligence and attempt to win championships.
This brings us into what I believe will be my biggest hurdle to overcome in class. I have a tendency to look left and right at the people in class to see where they’re at with things and think that I should be where they’re at (if not further ahead). In my past college experiences, this has lead me to not ask questions (thinking it’ll expose my weakness) but also to retreat and think that I can’t do it anyway, so why even try? I do think I’ve grown beyond that, as I now ask 75% of those questions (nobody’s perfect, right?) and fervently remind myself that if you’re not growing, you’re dying. During class, I plan on putting on mental-blinders when we are working solo so that I can focus on my work only and not look around jealously at other’s ‘AHA!’ moments. However, making the absolute most of our teamwork time to pick other student’s brains about something they are really strong in that I may not be as strong in, or vise versa. For me, mental clarity and direction comes from a place of calmness, so I plan on doing morning and afternoon meditations and setting a mantra for myself to repeat if I start to feel overwhelmed in class.
What surprised me in ‘What is Code?’ is that it was actually fairly easy to read! No offense, but with a title like that I was expecting a dry, technical, non anecdotal article that I may or may not need a glass of wine to get through. But alas, this was a fun read! I think the perspective of Ford was on point for relating to coders as well as people on the outside. I appreciated that TMitTB was trying his darnedest to make sure that what they were doing was worthwhile and not willing to just slap a band-aid on it to make the CTO and other executive staff happy. I can relate to that! Oftentimes, the quickest way isn’t the right way. One thing that I thought I understood (prior to reading) was that programming is changing every day and it’s something that you have to keep on top of to stay relevant to your employer. This really opened my eyes to how MUCH and how OFTEN it changes. It really is a constant learning curve! The culture described is a relative to what I thought it’d be and something I’m really looking forward to. I enjoy dissecting a project piece-by-piece and working on my portion of it, just to bring it all together and let it run!