Demonstrating “Growth Mindset” in recent challenges — The only way forward.
In an article Dweck wrote on Harvard Business Review, he said “Individuals who believe their talents can be developed have a growth mindset. They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts).”
What is actually growth mindset or having a growth mindset, in a short sentence, Growth mindset to me means “having the belief that you can do something, you can achieve a goal, you can acquire the skills needed to accomplished a given task, no matter how challenging it is, you go out of your comfort zone to get the desired result.”
Someone with a growth mindset perceives every blocker they encounter as an opportunity to grow, they are resilient, ambitious, persistent, determined to succeed.
Recently, I demonstrated the “Growth mindset” to an app development that requires the Full stack skills, being a complete beginner to Software development with no coding experience, it looks like “impossible” to accomplished initially but I told myself “You can do it, everything needed is out there, you can convert the raw ore to a finished product, this is not an obstacle, this is an opportunity for you to learn new things and to reach new heights of achievement”, With a growth mindset, I developed the “willingness to learn” attitude to carry out some researches on how to make things happen, things needed, consulted some resources.
The task given to me requires me to build a light-weight core banking application that powers banking operations like account creation, customer deposit and withdrawals.
To accomplish the challenge, from my many kinds of research I learnt HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the languages that run the web. I was curious about how related they are and what tasks each are designed to handle and how they interact with each other, I spent sleepless nights learning how to code in HTML to add meaning to raw content by marking it up, styling with CSS to format the marked-up content and adding javascript to the work to make that content and formatting interactive, after some few days input, I was able to run my codes with my browser and I was so happy with the result, and I’m like “Yes, you have something up and running”. Aside learning how to code, I need to use a project management tool(Pivotal Tracker) to manage my progress while working on tasks (app developing), I need to use GIT to manage and track changes in my project and push to GitHub (a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration which lets you and others work together on projects from anywhere) and there’s a need to integrate my project management tool(Pivotal Tracker) with the code hosting platform, these are new things to me and seems like a big stuff to wrap my head around, but with my Growth Mindset attitude, I see it as an opportunity to learn new things, new workflow, and an opportunity to move myself towards becoming a badass software developer.
After few days of learning, writing codes, refactoring my codes, and following the required workflow and feedback gotten from colleagues and facilitators, I can feel it that I’m much better than I was before given the app development challenge, I can give myself a pat on the back for having a growth mindset
