Entering a New World: Why Mindset is The Realest Thing There Is

Mindset.

For a long, long time, whenever I would hear or read this word, I would think of a typical fake guru saying how all the problems in your life can be fixed and all your dreams achieved simply by learning one secret mindset hack. It's not about real-world actions or the circumstances of your life. It's all in your mind. And it just so happens that he or she can teach you this mindset trick to change your life for just $999.

Mindset, like many other ideas and concepts, has been hijacked and somewhat destroyed by people who don't really care about its actual meaning but just make it fit into a story that would help them sell their ideas and products.

Or maybe I'm just too sensitive to the modern guru phenomenon.

This has resulted in me viewing mindset as something too vague to be relevant. For me, mindset was just a buzzword that didn't hold too much weight in real life. Mindset isn't real; that's what I thought.

I can't give up in the face of life's difficulties. I must work hard for anything that I want to achieve in life. Those two attitudes were ingrained in the core of who I am, and I could accept them as something related to mindset. But everything else was mumbo-jumbo talk for those who want to waste time trying to "hack" their mind instead of putting in the work.

How glad I am to admit that I was wrong and narrow-minded.

A series of failures and self-sabotaging events forced me to question my way of thinking. Not giving up and working hard clearly weren't enough for me to move forward in life. Not on a professional nor a personal level.

I asked myself as many challenging questions as I could think of. Two of them stood out and shook the foundations of what I thought I knew about myself.

What do you believe you are capable of?

What level of success do you believe is possible in your life?

Do you believe you are truly able to learn and even master the skills you need to achieve your goals and dreams?

I always had ambitious goals. I dreamed big. But when I asked myself these questions and demanded that I answer honestly, it was a sobering experience.

A person like me, with my background, cannot achieve the things I want to achieve. No matter how much effort I put in, I can't become proficient enough in the skills I need to attain my goals. Those were my true beliefs, no matter how much I loved dreaming big and aiming high.

"Is this mindset?" I asked myself.

"When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world." -Carol Dweck

Mindset is real, I realized as I was sitting with this new-found awareness of my beliefs, stuck in a situation where simply putting my head down and working harder wasn't going to help.

What is a mindset? After making an effort to understand it and change the mindset that was holding me back, I attempted to define it. Mindset is a collection of attitudes, beliefs, and stories we tell ourselves that shape our approach to life. It is the mental lens through which we view the world around us, ourselves, our capacities, and our life trajectory. This mental lens strongly influences, and sometimes even dictates, how we interpret different experiences and react to our life circumstances.

Probably a more precise definition was given by Dr. Alia Crum, a psychologist recognized for her research on mindset.

"We define mindsets as core beliefs or assumptions that we have about a domain or a category of things, that orient us toward particular sets of explanations, expectations, and goals."

Mindset is real. One of the realest things there is. I viewed it as something too vague to be relevant in real life. All the while, it was shaping my life, or preventing me from shaping it.

I intended this more as a "Why" than a "How" essay, so I will have to disappoint you if you expected a comprehensive, step-by-step overview of how I changed my mindset, although I am willing to write about my experience in one of the future essays. You won't be surprised to learn that this process involves asking yourself difficult questions, challenging your beliefs, and taking daily, real-world actions to back up your new mindset. However, I should mention that this is still a work in progress for me.

To illustrate how powerful the story you tell yourself can be, I would like to share one of my own stories.

I was recently sitting in a cafe at an undisclosed location in Asia when I overheard a young woman sitting at the table next to me. She was on a Zoom call. I was curious—perhaps too curious—and I realized she was just finishing up a job interview. She just hired someone for her online business.

I was amazed. This girl was clearly European. She was thousands of miles away from home, running her own business from a laptop. She is even able to hire people. Wow. The things some people are able to do nowadays... It seemed impossible to me, reserved only for the special.

I somehow forgot the fact that I was thousands of miles away from home as well. I came to that cafe with my laptop to write for tens of thousands of people who read what I have to say daily and to work on my online business. I was recently able to hire, at least part-time, the most disciplined person I know to help me run my private community. I accomplished that without having a single person in my life who has taken a similar life path and has done any of these things. All of these facts about my life slipped from my mind when the old story of what is possible came back to visit me.

The concept of all these things being possible to achieve for someone like me is so far removed from what I've been taught and conditioned to believe that I find it hard to believe at the very moment of living it.

A person from Montenegro cannot move to another country unless they are rich, they have family abroad, or they immigrate illegally. No one can really make a living working from their laptop. That's just a fake trend made up by people who already have money. Those beliefs were so strongly ingrained in me that they still occasionally revisit me, even after I've created real-world evidence that they were wrong.

Fortunately, I challenged those beliefs and managed to change my mindset, which is one of the main reasons I accomplished the things I did. So now, when those old beliefs manage to break through, I am pretty quickly able to recognize what is going on and just laugh at the imaginary constraints I had accepted from others and was putting on myself. But it also says a lot that there are still moments, no matter how short, where I am confronted with those same beliefs. As I said, it's a work in progress.

Maybe, for you, the things I gave as an example never seemed impossible, and you don't see why I would make such a big deal around them. Especially if you come from a developed country or a more entrepreneurially minded family and group of friends. And that's great. This is not about me or my accomplishments. Those are just examples. It's about mindset and the story you've been telling yourself.

Maybe you've convinced yourself that a healthy, long-lasting relationship is impossible to have in our day and age.

Maybe you keep telling yourself that you cannot learn that new language.

Maybe you've accepted the story that an introvert like you cannot become a good public speaker.

I'm not here to tell you that changing your mindset will magically make things happen for you in life just as you want them to. But I know this much: Those core beliefs that make up your mindset will dictate where you aim, how you structure your plan of action, what you are willing to do, and what you think is worth doing in the first place.

Mindset might not change your reality on its own. But it influences the way you go about changing your reality and if you even attempt to change it in the first place.

That's why mindset is one of the realest things there is.

I will leave you with these 3 questions:

What do you believe you are capable of?

What level of success do you believe is possible in your life?

Do you believe you are truly able to learn and even master the skills you need to achieve your goals and dreams?

And I challenge you to come up with questions that are more relevant and specific to your life.

Sit with them as long as you need to and answer honestly.

Thank you for reading.