Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential

by Barbara Oakley

What I learned in one career often enabled me to be creatively successful in the next phase of my life. And often, it was seemingly useless information from a previous career that became a powerful foundation for the next.

Whatever you think you are, you are actually bigger than that—you can find a way to go beyond.

“The past is the past. You can’t change that. What you can control is your attitude on the next shot. The only thing in the world that matters right now is the next shot.”

Skill development curves are typically logarithmic, not linear. This means that while developing deep expertise may take a long time, you can often rapidly accelerate to the point of diminishing returns in a fairly short period of time. And this is often good enough to get a toehold in a new area.

“This capacity for change is critical,” Gog notes, “because change is the only constant we will be seeing in the future—from technology to economy to social and political structures. Change is accelerating, and we need to build the capacity for change to continue to be relevant.”

Adam has a wealth of other creative mental tricks to keep him, and his students, on task. For example, he tells his students that motivation is like bathing—it doesn’t last. “You can’t wash once and be clean for the rest of your life,” he says. “Because no matter how much you bathe, you get dirty and smelly and you’ve got to bathe again. Likewise, no matter how motivated you are, the world can be a negative place. Things don’t go your way. You get criticized. You get ‘dirty’ again. So you have to learn how to motivate yourself every day, just like washing.”

A recent neuroimaging meta-analysis analyzed what is termed “cognitive reappraisal of emotion”—that is, reframing.13 The study revealed that finding positive ways to think about a negative occurrence extinguishes negative emotions arising from the fight-or-flight center of the amygdala. For example, an alarming picture of someone bleeding can be cognitively reframed as “that’s just a movie, and they’re using ketchup.” Or negative feelings about an illness can be reframed into something more positive by focusing on how that person will get better.

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All in all, your expectations about what will happen, and the underlying context, can powerfully shape your mind and body’s reaction, both for good and for ill. It was what underpinned Claudia Meadows’ escape from depression. It is what allows for the dramatic success of cognitive behavioral therapy. And it can also underpin your own success in whatever you are trying to learn and become.

a useful way to allow the new neurons to survive, thrive, and make new connections is to do something new and different every day.

Great teachers can bring out the best in someone, even when others might think of that person as a failure. Arnim learned something even more important—that sometimes the best way to succeed in a seemingly impossible task is to slip through a side door.