When you get frustrated about something you’re doing, do you quit or do you push through? The feeling of frustration sucks and nobody likes it, but understanding what’s underneath that feeling and choosing to embrace it is what separates the victors from the victims in life.
There’s plenty of research on the benefits of having a growth mindset over a fixed one. This is something I’m very careful to try to cultivate in own my children. Rule 2 speaks directly to that by re-framing what I see as the main contributor to the fixed mindset: fear of frustration.
I remember seeing mention (in a long lost article on the internet somewhere) of frustration being the physical feeling of your brain building new neural pathways. I don’t know if this is true, but but I like the idea of it. Suddenly, frustration isn’t something bad that we must try to avoid, but instead it’s just what learning feels like. Feeling frustrated? Good, that means your brain is still working. Give it time, and that task that seems like an impenetrable wall now, will seem minuscule later. Take it a step further and lean into frustration, understand it’s part of the process, and you’ll be unstoppable.
This story is part of an ongoing series diving into the origins of each of rules outlined in Octavo (My eight-fold principles of life and work). Click here to see the full set of rules and to download and print your own copy of the rules and Zine.
Octavo (8vo) is both a format and a philosophy; it is a sheet of paper folded into 8 equal sections to form a book, and it is a philosophy folded into eight principles to form the architecture of how we work and live. Keep these principles posted wherever your work is done and refer to them often. Keep the zine in your back pocket at all times and refer to it when tempted to stray. Both the principles and the zine are provided here for free and can be printed from any monochrome printer that accepts legal-sized paper. Distribute as you see fit to your friends, family, and colleagues (but do not modify).