12 Aug Practice Strategic Mindset to Crush Your Goals
The Mindset You Need to Succeed at Every Goal – David Robson
Boosting your ‘metacognition’ helps you reach your goals more easily. All it takes is developing a strategic mindset – something anyone can do.
Whenever you read about the secrets of success, you’ll no doubt come across that well-known quote from Thomas Edison, that “genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration”.
While inventing the lightbulb, we are told, he tried 3,000 attempts before finally finding a suitable filament that would glow without immediately burning out. The story is meant to be the inspirational reminder that things like natural creativity are often much less important than dogged determination.
There’s no doubt that passion and perseverance are essential to reaching your long-term goals. But it’s important to remember the strategic process that Edison went through to reach his goal. He didn’t just haphazardly move from one failed design after another, after all, but constantly adapted and refined his ideas. “I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable,” he told Harper’s magazine in 1890. “Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved.” At each step of the journey, he was making intelligent decisions that learnt from the failures and built on the small successes.
While others diligently follow the same convoluted path, people with the strategic mindset are constantly looking for a more efficient route forwards
You may not be an inventor tinkering with a new device, but a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academic of Sciences, suggests we might all benefit from a similar way of thinking in the pursuit of our goals.
The construct – called the “strategic mindset” – describes the tendency to question and refine your current approach in the face of setbacks and challenges. While others diligently follow the same convoluted path, people with the strategic mindset are constantly looking for a more efficient route forwards. “It helps them figure out how to direct their efforts more effectively,” says Patricia Chen at the National University of Singapore. And Chen’s new research shows that it may just spell the difference between success or failure.
To see the full article, go to https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200722-the-mindset-you-need-to-succeed-at-every-goal.
David Robson is the author of The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things (WW Norton/Hodder & Stoughton) which examines our most common thinking errors and the ways we can all improve our learning and decision making. He is d_a_robson on Twitter.