Let Your Mindset Grow

It's so good to be back after a fairly long break and I thank you for giving me that leeway to take a vacation and get recharged. My daughter Krista, who just graduated with a business degree, has been after me for the past year or so, to read a book called 'Mindset: The New Psychology of Success' written by Carol Dweck, a professor at Stanford University. I bought the book but had been putting off reading it, but finally used this vacation to read it. It is such a powerful book; I would strongly recommend it to every one of you.

In this book, she talks about two mindsets that we can have – the 'fixed' mindset or the 'growth' mindset. The fixed mindset is one that we have, which defines us permanently. We think – "This is it; we cannot change." The growth mindset, on the other hand, is a mindset that says that we can always develop; that we can continue to learn from the things that happen to us. As I went through this book, I thought that this is so important for us. Sometimes we determine failure and success through the grids or the mindsets that we have. She quotes a New York Times article that says, "Failure has been transformed from an action 'I failed' to an identity 'I am a failure'. This is especially true of a fixed mindset. Instead of looking at an action that has happened as 'I failed – it's a one-off thing; it happened', we tend to let it mold our identity saying, 'I am a failure' which is detrimental to progress.

Dream On

This past week, a short little video I had made a couple of years ago resurfaced on Facebook. I had posted it 2 years ago and a cousin brought it back up. In this video, my wife Sheila and I, along with our children, had gone to see an aunt of hers. In the course of the evening, this aunt began to sing some of the older songs from her generation, on the verge of being forgotten by ours. It was wonderful to hear her singing all these songs and that was when I took this video. At the end of the evening, I hooked my iPhone to the computer, worked with it a little bit on iMovie and then put it up on Facebook. I also looked into burning a CD through iDVD and giving it to some of the other relatives who might enjoy it.

Looking at this video and the number of people who have been blessed by it, I was reminded of what Steve Jobs once said about iMovie. He said, "Using iMovie makes your camcorder ten times more valuable (p. 381)." Basically saying that we often take pictures or movies but then don't know what to do with them. I'm not talking about now, but about 3-4 years ago. He said that what iMovie did was "allowed people to be creative, to express themselves, to make something emotional." So true! It allowed me to be creative, to express myself and to hang on to something that had great emotional content.

The Present, God's Gift

A Happy New Year to each one of you. I wonder how you are all doing, whether these 6 days have been enjoyable or you are looking wistfully back at 2014 and wishing you were still there. Or are you looking ahead and hoping things will change. I'd like to talk to you about living in the present – living in the now.

I remember reading a little anecdote about a person who was transferred to a place that was entirely new to him – a new environment, a new culture, a new language. He was having a real difficult time trying to live in the present. One day he met a lady who gave him good advice. She said, "Always bloom where you are planted." In other words, don't just live for the future, live for the present. Look at what is happening around you and make it count. Sometimes we ship out of the present when things are not going too well. It could be that it's a bad day; maybe you are thinking that it's not going as it should and you are just waiting for the day to finish. Or maybe yesterday was a bad day and you're thinking that this week needs to get over. Or maybe it's a part of your life in which you are having difficulty and you say, "Well, this too shall pass and I'll just wait for something fresh to come my way."

BE POSITIVE

by Dr. Cecil Clements (13th March 2012)

I was reading an article by Jay Schliefer, writing for ‘Society for Human Resource Management’ entitled ‘Workplace Negativity: Ways to Beat it’. The author started off by talking about Thomas Edison saying, “As Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he went through hundreds of designs that didn’t work. At one point, a reporter asked him, ‘Mr. Edison, aren’t you tired of failing?’ Edison wrote back, ‘Failing? Why! I’ve succeeded. I’ve discovered hundreds of ways how not to make a light bulb.’”