The Exponential Mindset

The Exponential Mindset

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Is your mindset having an impact on your life?

For me, everything starts with having a great mindset. This is an amazing concept that everyone should learn about – because it is life-changing. And the great thing about this is that it is such an easy thing for anyone to change.

We have an interesting project going on in my home country that will help to make Guernsey the best place to live on earth by 2020. My friends, Jeremy Frith & Rachel Sykes, (watch their TEDx talk) are running a project to make Guernsey the first growth-minded country in the world. They have set the bold aim to get all 65,000 residents on Guernsey to understand and implement the concept into their daily life. To date, they are well on the way to having trained their first 2000 people. And all of this started as a part-time passion.

I love that this training alone stands to unlock the way we educate children, how we parent, how our schools work,  how our businesses run, and the way we interact with each other as human beings. It truly is one of simplest ways to catalyse societal change from the ground up. In Guernsey, we are already starting to see a shift in behaviour in areas such as sport and education as the training starts to penetrate deep within the people involved in these areas of island life. I can’t wait to see what happens when 10,000 or 20,000 people are trained, so we can determine the tipping point in shifting the mindset of a whole country.

Carol Dweck, a highly acclaimed Stanford University psychologist, has dedicated her life to researching into success and achievement. She has explored the simple but revolutionary idea of mindset, and brought it into popular awareness. She explains that there is a difference between a ‘fixed’ mindset and a ‘growth’ mindset.

If people have a ‘fixed’ mindset, they believe that qualities like talent or intelligence are fixed –  and inborn: you either have them, or you don’t. They don’t bother trying to develop them. They also believe that success comes only from talent or intelligence, without requiring any effort. This is wrong thinking.

People who have a ‘growth’ mindset believe that abilities can be developed through work and dedication. Intelligence or talent can be built upon. Learning and resilience are essential to achievement and success – and these qualities are evident in almost all great people.

And yet, I fundamentally believe that growth mindset can be taken a step further. Having that mindset is one thing, but having the mindset to believe that anything can be possible is another.

Our brains are hardwired to predict what we think is possible, in a linear fashion. Which means that we will predict our ability to grow in linear fashion. This, for me, misses the real, exponential potential of the next generation’s mindset and the potential for humanity through coaching more and more people to think with this mindset.

To understand the true limitlessness of human potential, you need to read two books: Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think and Steven Kotler’s book The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance. Then you will understand that much of what we ‘think’ is possible is well below the mark. You will understand why I think the way I do. You will understand the exponential mindset.

There are people with exponential mindsets already amongst us. People like Elon Musk, who wants to start a colony on mars, and shift transport and energy production to renewable energy; Larry Page, who wants to essentially create the Star Trek computer; Ray Kurzweil who wants to create a human mind and live forever; Peter Diamandis who wants to solve all of humanity’s grand challenges, and people like Felix Baumgartner, who thought it was a clever idea to skydive supersonically from space. They can only conceive and believe in what they are doing because they have learnt to move beyond their linear hard wiring. They look at the world of possibility in completely different ways.

The limits of possibility are purely the limits of our mind. Coaching for the exponential mindset is not that difficult – once we realise that the limits are only our perception. We should operate without fear – since those limits are not actually there. Assume that there is always a way – and not the way that you see in front of you.

As many of you know, my wife and I are working on a project to reimagine the upper limits of education’s possibilities for kids. The very pinnacle of that project is to coach kids and parents to have, and thrive, with an exponential mindset. It will be fascinating to see what they all do in the world with that kind of  belief shift in what is possible.

We live in extraordinary times. The exponential mindset is the key to thriving in a world where anything is possible.

Marc

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  1. Tony Trenker says

    I think we had exponential mindsets when we were kids, but reality came along and we realised that things were very difficult to achieve and, well, we couldn’t all be astronauts now could we. So perhaps we have to remember our old mindset and not be afraid to play with reality.

    I’ve seen people switch up their mindset, all by themselves, and achieve what they desired. Realising what they wanted, and that they had to work to get it, was the key that opened their potential. But then by definition they were unhappy or unfulfilled with what they already had. If most of us are already happy, then we have no need of an exponential mindset – we’ve somehow reached the point we want to be at and perhaps obtained wisdom.

    But then isn’t that a great time to play with reality and expand our thinking?

    • There is a circular element to this I agree. It is possible to travel through life happy and reach a destination. The damage happens when the destination becomes more important than how we travel.

  2. The paragraph, second from the last – ‘the limits of…’ is one of the best in the article. Indeed this was a very effective post giving me new insights as well as my next book to read – The Rise of Superman. Thanks.

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