What Is a Growth Mindset Really? (Fact vs. Fiction)

What if the thing everyone keeps telling you to have isn't what you think it is at all?

In this episode, George and Liz tackle one of the most overused and misunderstood terms in personal development: growth mindset. George admits the more research he did, the angrier he got, because what the internet calls growth mindset isn't what he means at all. Together, they separate the corporate hack version from the real thing, explore why discomfort is the doorway to transformation, and lay out a 12-point framework for cultivating a growth mindset that actually works.

The Problem with "Growth Mindset"

George opens with a warning.

"If you just hear me say, yes, you gotta focus on growth mindset, you're gonna go to the internet, and you're gonna find the wrong stuff."

What he found in his research made him angry. Most of what's out there treats growth mindset as an educational hack or an organizational strategy to extract better scores from students or more value from employees.

"It's another topic, kind of like ownership mentality, where it gets wrapped into this business conversation instead of this individual methodology or this individual tactic or strategy or core tenant for your personal life."

This episode is about reclaiming the term. What George is talking about isn't a productivity trick. It's an inner core, a superpower, a tenant of value that pushes and pulls on everything else in your life.

Fixed vs. Growth

To have a conversation about growth mindset, you need to understand its opposite.

People with fixed mindsets believe their intelligence or personality cannot change. They're more likely to focus on performing well on familiar tasks and shy away from challenges. They're less resilient in the face of failure.

George shares his own experience: "My math teacher told me I'd never amount to anything. Okay. I guess that's truth. I'll never amount to anything. So what do I do? I shy away from challenges in math areas for years, and I paint a false narrative around my brain's ability to do mathematics."

He lived in that space for a long time. Hanging on by a thread. Never going to amount to anything. Not good at math. Better get his box of crayons out because that's probably what he's good at.

Now? That sounds boring. The ultimate of boring lives.

People with growth mindsets believe their intelligence or personality is malleable. They see change as an avenue to improvement. They're better prepared to learn because they believe in themselves, believe in their brain, and are open to the idea of malleable change.

"Your belief becomes that you can form yourself into the future you. It's a 'not yet' mindset. It's a 'can' mindset. It's a future. It's a seeking."

The Van Gogh Quote

George starts the episode with a quote from Vincent Van Gogh that captures everything:

"I am always doing what I cannot do yet in order to learn how to do it."

Two phrases stand out: "cannot do yet" and "how to do it."

That's the growth mindset in its purest form. Not a denial of current limitations. An acknowledgment that limitations are temporary if you're willing to learn.

Creating Your Own Discomfort

Here's where George pushes against conventional thinking.

"The world will give you hard times and you can wait around for the world to give you hard times and you can have growth through those hard times. But here's my question to you as a listener. Can you create the hard times that you need?"

He's not talking about drama or making life harder than it needs to be. He's talking about something specific.

"There are people out there listening to this podcast that are in their third year of being a doctor that never wanted to be a doctor, but their parents wanted them to be a doctor. There are people who have been working so hard to make a relationship work, but they'll just keep banging their head against the wall or they'll just leave it how it is because that's the way that it's always been."

What George means by creating discomfort is forcing yourself out of patterns that aren't serving you.

He shares his own example: "I used to say I'm not good at math. I'm not the math guy. I'm the creative guy. But I purposely went and signed up for 4 different classes that are around the process of know your numbers when it comes to business. I'm forcing myself into a time of discomfort to grow myself to be somebody who understands the numbers."

He calls this forced personal growth: "The ability to create those zones of uncomfort to push you in a direction that you know you wanna go."

Who Will You Be on the Other Side?

George has a mental trick he uses when hard times come, whether manufactured or delivered by life.

"I play a trick on my mind because I go, who will I be on the other side of this? Meaning, I fundamentally know that there's going to be a change. And because I believe and know that there's going to be change, then I have a growth mindset."

If you felt doomed and nothing could ever be different and you were going to be stuck forever, that would be a fixed mindset.

The growth mindset doesn't deny the difficulty. It reframes it as a doorway.

The Canvas, the Paints, and the Easel

Liz makes a point that stops George in his tracks: A growth mindset is not about transforming yourself from a big lump of sad fail into something palatable and amazing. It acknowledges that you are, as the sum of your raw materials, already incredible.

George expands on this.

"You are the canvas. You are the paints. You are the easel. Like, you're already the fundamental things that you need to be. When we're talking about growth mindset and a lot of these other things, it's just the strokes that you need to understand to create the masterpiece that is you."

This isn't about replacement or diminishment. It's about learning the brush strokes to paint the life you want with materials you already possess.

The Dark Side of Growth Mindset

George issues a warning he's earned the hard way.

"Anything in life, too much of it is a bad thing. Growth mindset is a good thing, but too much of it can be a bad thing. You can break your brain."

He shares what happened to him. He used to say education trumps entertainment, and he would spend more time educating himself than entertaining himself. He went deep into inspirational and motivational content.

"I got to the point where I broke my brain. I didn't like the way that I felt about myself. I didn't like who I was. I was never going to achieve the things that people were saying that people were achieving."

He had to roll back to an earlier version of himself. Version 2.9 of George was broken. The coding he'd done into the mainframe of his cranium had short-circuited the things that were actually important.

"You have to be the pilot of that growth mindset. You have to be the conductor of the orchestra. You can't just be willy nilly with what we're talking about right now."

His advice: Put constructs around it. Understand that it's for certain topics or certain places in your life. And always be aware if you feel like you've allowed yourself to go too far.

The Caring Matrix

Liz asks how George pushes through the moments when embracing challenges, being patient, and staying persistent gets hard.

His answer is a framework he's used for over a decade.

"I would care about what was important. More importantly, I wouldn't give a crap about what wasn't."

When he goes to create his 700th tutorial or 500th podcast, he doesn't care about the opinions of those who might be listening. He cares about the action they might take.

He doesn't care if they look at his mustache or his eyes. He cares if they get value from the words coming out of his mouth.

He doesn't care about the individual metrics of one video or podcast episode. He cares about where that one piece will get him in 2 years, 4 years, or 10 years down the road.

"It's a healthy dose of caring about yourself and about the other folks that you're trying to help in a massively large dose of not giving a crap."

The 12-Point Framework

George lays out 12 elements for cultivating a growth mindset. He asks listeners to get their notepads out.

1. Embrace challenges. View challenges as opportunities to learn and grow rather than obstacles to avoid. You are not seeing a life filled with potholes and hurdles. You are seeing a life filled with opportunities and growth moments.

2. Be patient. Napoleon Hill talked about patience, persistence, and perspiration making an unbeatable combination for success. Patience is one of the most important superpowers you can add to your life, especially in a society that is so immediate, so now, so throwaway.

3. Stay persistent. Cultivate resilience and perseverance in the face of challenges, setbacks, and doubts. No matter what, do the thing that you know you need to do. Consistency.

4. Learn from setbacks. George deliberately doesn't use the word failure. Analyze the lessons from what you're experiencing as stepping stones to improvement. His first video tutorial was jank, a photo of him leaning against a wall followed by a screen share that didn't zoom or move once. It was the worst tutorial. It was also the best tutorial because it was the first step.

5. Effort is key. Understand that effort and hard work are essential for progress and mastery. You can't climb Everest with a lift. You can't get in a gondola and go to the top. You have to climb it.

6. Embrace experimentation and focus on process. Concentrate on the process and the journey, not just the end results. George has a sign in his office that says "You've come a long way since 2013." He never wants to get to the top of the mountain. He just wants to be climbing his entire life.

Eric Thomas says practice makes permanence. Ten years of tutorials. Ten years of podcasting. All practice. All permanence.

7. Continuous learning. Curiosity and creativity. Seek out new knowledge and skills to consistently expand your capabilities. George downloaded an audiobook about Buddha because he was curious. He's spent most of his life understanding Christ. He wanted to understand the differences and similarities.

8. Set healthy expectations. What do you expect from yourself? Have you ever asked yourself that question? Have you ever sat down at the base of a tree and thought, here are my expectations of me?

This is where George's 1% better each and every day comes from. He expects that he will grow. He expects that he will become someone special. He expects that he will help hundreds if not thousands of humans while he's on the planet.

9. Get to know yourself better and practice positive self-talk. Replace negative self-talk with affirmations that reinforce your abilities and potential.

10. Celebrate progress. Take time to acknowledge and celebrate even small achievements along your journey. These are the fuel to your future success. Daily victories matter.

11. Inspire others. Share your growth experiences and inspire others to adopt a growth mindset. This podcast, this community, the newsletter, all designed around this principle of inspiring others to live the dreams they've never dreamed, felt guilty for dreaming, or dreamt and haven't been able to achieve.

12. Embrace constructive criticism. Feedback is the breakfast of champions, but only if you have a growth mindset. If you don't, constructive criticism becomes a difficult destination of death because you don't want to hear it. You don't need it. Just let me do my thing in my comfort zone.

Liz's Revelation About Expectations

When George mentions setting expectations, Liz has a visceral reaction.

She explains: "Historically, I've been very hard on myself to the point of stalling out. I didn't grow up in a very positive environment, so I had negative expectations baked into myself all the time."

As George talked about aspirational, positive, uplifting expectations, she realized something.

"Not only have I really not sat down and said what are my explicit expectations of who I want to be. I'm walking around with a lot of baggage, waking up every morning with a subconscious expectation of failure, that I'll be the disappointment that I was taught when I was younger."

She names the challenge many listeners may face: "It's so easy to say who you don't wanna be, but in the absence of who you don't wanna be, who do you want to become? Depending on your upbringing, your mindset, your relationship with fear and anxiety, whether or not you had trauma or abuse, it can be really hard to feel that you are deserving of expectations that are greater than yourself."

George adds to the note file: They need a future episode on how to set healthy expectations and another on the reasons you deserve the life of your dreams.

The Cost of a Fixed Mindset

Liz asks what life looks like if you stay fixed.

George paints the picture.

"Imagine being 70 years old. You've been a doctor your entire life, and the only thing you ever wanted to be was a fly fisherman. The amount of regret that you'll have for not chasing the thing that you always wanted to do."

He gets a little morbid, intentionally.

"When I'm laying on my deathbed, I wanna know that I've laid it all out there. I wanna know that I've pivoted and transitioned in ways that got me and my family into the places and spaces that once we believed were never possible. I would want to know that I had not left anything. No stone unturned."

He runs through the things he's checked off: rapping from stage, learning guitar, rappelling. Then he realizes he probably needs to go skydiving at some point and admits he's scared in front of everyone.

"What can you push yourself into that you get to the end of this life and you're not sitting there with regret or you're not sitting there with the ghost of ideas that you had and you were the one to give birth to them, but they're gonna just sit there and die with you? I don't wanna be that guy."

Charles Swindoll said: "Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it."

The 90% is where you need to lean into the 12 things. The 90% is where you need to lean into a positive growth mindset.

Quotable Moments

"I am always doing what I cannot do yet in order to learn how to do it." — Vincent Van Gogh

"You are the canvas. You are the paints. You are the easel. You're already the fundamental things that you need to be."

"Forced personal growth is the ability to create those zones of uncomfort to push you in a direction that you know you wanna go."

"Care about what's important. Don't give a crap about what isn't."

"Practice makes permanence."

"Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it."

"If you have a closed mindset, you most likely are not listening to this podcast. But if you are, please work on the transition."

Your One Thing

George's takeaway: The first 20 to 25 years of his life, he had a closed mindset and was a victim. Why is this happening to me? When am I gonna see the blessings? Why why why why why? Slowly but surely he transformed into a growth mindset and what he calls victor in his own life. Making things happen. Creating magic moments. Experimenting. Growing in the ways he needed to grow. If you feel like you're straddling the fence between fixed and growth, even if it's just 25% fixed, make the jump.

Liz's takeaway: By virtue of the fact that you want to better yourself, you are already the person you want to become. If you're listening to this podcast right now, it doesn't matter what mistakes you've made in the past. You are already who you want to be. The growth mindset is how you get there.

Reflection Questions

1. Where in your life are you stuck in a fixed mindset? What beliefs would you have to change to move forward?
2. Are you trying to look smart, worried about looking dumb, or just gathering information and distributing it to those around you? What does your answer tell you about your current mindset?
3. What discomfort could you manufacture right now to push yourself in a direction you know you want to go?
4. Have you ever sat down and asked yourself: What are my expectations of me? If not, what's stopping you?
5. George asks: Are you grateful for the life you're living and the person you're able to become? If that's hard to answer, what would need to change?

Ready to go deeper? Press play above and hear George walk through the 12-point framework for cultivating a growth mindset that actually works. If you've been told you need a growth mindset but never quite understood what that means in practice, this episode will make it clear.