Do you have difficulty dealing with failure? Or have you ever wondered why some people have an immense ability to overcome challenges faster when compared to other people? Carol Dweck not only thought about these questions but also made the subject a bestseller called Mindset.

In this book, the author discusses the power that beliefs and worldview have over our personal and professional lives, radically valuing effort and deconstructing the myth of talent. To simplify this discussion, the author divides our thinking style into two basic models, the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.

According to this analogy, people with a fixed mindset believe that things are the way they are and that intelligence is finite, with no possibility of expansion. They are fatalistic people who attribute their gift or talent to the ability to perform a task well. As a result, they tend to easily give up on a task when they encounter an obstacle, using excuses to not put more effort into that action.

On the other hand, people with a growth mindset have a tendency to persist. For them, intelligence is something that can be improved at every moment, depending only on the effort used. They attribute success to a succession of attempts, including failures as part of the learning process. They do not use their time to regret, but rather create new strategies and put more effort into new challenges.

In practice, we have both types of mindset. Yes! We have a growth mindset for some situations and a fixed mindset for others. For example, I may believe that I am “too old” to learn a new language and that I will not be able to absorb the information – fixed mindset.

But, at the same time, I see a challenge at work as something that is part of my professional development process and, therefore, I do not put obstacles in the way of developing new skills at work – growth mindset.

So, the way we see our ability to face a challenge and the size of the effort we invest in it is what will directly influence our results. And this style of thinking will give us reasons to continue or give up.

Understanding that failure is part of the learning process and persisting, putting more effort into achieving a result, is what will make the difference between a person who overcomes challenges more quickly and those who give up at the first obstacle.

And now, do you still believe you are not capable of learning something new?