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What high-growth companies get right
High performers are highly driven, attacking each goal with enthusiasm and focus. They minimise energy wastage and channel their efforts into tasks that matter.
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty four days now without taking a fish.”
What can we learn from Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and The Sea, a story of Santiago, a down- on-his- luck Cuban fisherman and his ordeal with a giant marlin? In today’s terms, would we say the old man had ‘grit’? Is the fisherman’s eventual triumph proof of an underlying ‘growth mindset’ and a demonstration of the 10,000-hour rule? If you procrastinate are you following in the footsteps of the great creatives?
Grit, written by the psychologist Angela Duckworth is required reading for anyone striving to succeed. Packed with surprising insights, she demonstrates that the path to success may not be in the direction you think. Nothing like perseverance and just sticking with it. No, follow-through appears to be practice of many high achievers.
At work, how often have you spoken to a colleague and felt uplifted by their sense of possibility? Or, has the person taken a more doctrinaire, ‘by the book’ more closed fixed view of what can be achieved? Read the following four statements and consider how much you agree or disagree with each:
Your intelligence is something you can’t change very much. You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are. No matter how much intelligence you have , you can always change quite a bit. You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.
If you found yourself nodding affirmatively to the first two statements, but shaking your head more in disagreement with the last two, then you lean toward fixed mindset. If you had the opposite reaction, then psychologist Carol Dweck would say you tend toward a growth mindset.
Do people really change?
“I like to think of a growth mindset this way: Some of us believe, deep down, that people really can change. These growth-oriented people assume that it’s possible, for example, to get smarter if you’re given the right opportunities and support and if you try hard enough and if you believe you can do it. Conversely, some people think you can learn skills, like how you ride a bike or do sales pitch, but your capacity to learn skills – your talent – can’t be trained,” she outlines.
“The problem with holding the latter fixed-mindset view – and many people who consider themselves talented do – is that no road is without bumps. Eventually, you’re going to hit one. At that point, having a fixed mindset becomes tremendous liability,” explains Duckworth.
But it’s not as black and white simple as that. The reality is that most people have an inner fixed mindset pessimist in them, alongside our inner growth mindset optimist. Just that over time, and in certain situations, it’s likely that one mindset is likely to dominate.
What about your workplace?
If we have mindsets resident in our heads, do the organisations we work for lean toward a fixed and growth mindset? How would you be able to tell whether your company is more padlocked in approach, or open to adapting and possibility?
“In fixed-mindset companies, employees agreed with statements like ‘When it comes to being successful, this company seems to believe that people have a certain amount of talent, and they really can’t do much to change it.’ They felt that only a few star performers were highly valued and that the company wasn’t truly invested in other employees’ development. These respondents also admitted to keeping secrets, cutting corners, and cheating to get ahead.
By contrast, in growth-mindset cultures, employees were 47 percent more likely to say their colleagues were trustworthy, 49 percent more likely to say their company fosters innovation, and 65 percent more likely to say their company supports risk taking,” explains Duckworth.
You will be hard pressed to try and find a Kenyan organisation that does not say they can do the corporate equivalent ‘of walking on water’. PR like hype is standard practice in fixed mindset workplaces. “You are what you do, not what you say you do,” advised Carl Jung.
Research and practices reported in Angela Duckworth’s 2016 best seller suggests that there is no replacement for practice, being in action, honing one’s craft.
First popularised by Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, the research suggests that roughly 10,000 hours of ‘deliberate practice’ are required to achieve mastery in any complex skill. Consistent, focused effort - not innate talent - is the primary driver of world-class expertise, often requiring years of training.
Creativity counts
On one’s gritty journey of deliberate practice it helps to remember that efficiency and effectiveness are two different things. Efficiency is simply a measure of output over input.
Problem is that you may be quite efficient, very busy working on the wrong task. Often to be effective, creativity, a touch of imaginative thinking comes into play.
First published in 1952, Hemingway’s classic The Old Man and The Sea played a part in his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kenya and Tanzania was the scene for a number of his novels, where he often stayed at hotels like The Stanley in Nairobi.
If you procrastinate, have trouble completing tasks, meeting deadlines don’t feel bad, you are in good company. Both Hemingway and polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci had problems with procrastination.
Ernest Hemingway took a - break with tradition - creative approach in being an effective communicator. His writing style is defined by its ‘brutal simplicity’ characterised by short, direct sentences, concise language, and an objective, journalistic tone.
His sparse, action-oriented prose avoided excessive emotion, letting the reader imagine the deeper meaning, beneath a deceptively simple surface. Quite simply – ‘doing more, with less’.
If you procrastinate, have trouble completing tasks, meeting deadlines don’t feel bad, you are in good company. Both Hemingway and polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci had problems with procrastination.
Leonardo was commissioned in 1494 by the Duke of Milan to paint The Last Supper, said to represent the moment when Jesus tells the assembled apostles “One of you will betray me”.
Upset with Leonardo’s slow progress on the painting, he was summoned by the duke, they ended up having a discussion of how creativity occurs. Leonardo even threatened to portray Judas, with the face of the duke.
“Sometimes it requires going slowly, pausing, even procrastinating. That allows ideas to marinate,” Leonardo thought. Intuition needs nurturing. He told the duke “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least.”
