Hello and welcome to the Pibytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I am Bob Baldebos. If you're looking to improve your python, your career, and learn the mindset for success, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. Welcome back to the Pybads podcast is Bobbeldeboss, and this is the second of a three parter mindset episode series with Alejandro Beresenio. And today we're going to talk about having a growth mindset. You might recognize the term from Carol Dweck's mindset book and work, but yeah, in this episode, you will find a good distillation why you should adopt a growth mindset. So let's welcome Alejandro and enjoy this episode. Welcome back, everybody, to the Pibytes podcast. This is Bob Baldebos. I'm still not here with Julian. He's on holidays, enjoying himself. But I'm back here with Alejandro Brisenio, as we announced last time to do our second episode. And this week we're going to talk about growth mindset. Alejandro, welcome back. How are you doing? Hello again, Bob. I'm really, really good. I'm excited to be joining you again in this podcast. Happy for you to be here. And yeah, as last time, you shared so much cool stuff about self talk. So let's extend the conversation and talk growth mindset today. So let's dive straight in. What does it mean to have a growth mindset? It's a nice topic, you know, for this podcast because it's something that I'm really excited and passionate about. You know, when we speak about growth mind thinking, we're speaking about how do we break the barriers of our mind? How do we break the limited beliefs that we have? You know, is grown mind thing is about the opportunities that we have as human beings to learn new skills, to develop ourselves and to show the world that we have a lot of talents. And sometimes we're really afraid to show it because we are not capable of. And you might be thinking, who is resistant? Who is holding us back? Well, you, you are the only one who is doing that. Because sometimes we have so many beliefs about things that we're not capable of doing new things because of ourselves. So a fixed mindset is when you think that all your capabilities, all your talents, all of your skills are not, you cannot move it, you cannot be better, you cannot do something new. That's actually a lie, and it's a lie that you're telling to yourself. So a growth mindset is when you're able to step out of your comfort zones and do magic happening and make magic happen, you know, and create something new to learn new skills, to learn new capabilities and to be more confident with yourself, you know? Right, cool. So simple example, I'm going to the gym, I can lift 60 kilos and I think that's it. This is it for life. Growth mindset is like, I know I can get to the 80 to 100 if I do ABC progressively. I like that example. I'm going to steal it from my talks. But it's true. Sometimes people think that, oh, I'm only going to get 60 kilo for the rest of your life. It's not going to happen. You have a progress. Things take time. Sometimes we want the instant reward when we do something new. We want to learn how to cope in one week. Those kind of things do not happen in real life. That could happen in a movie, you know? But when you want to learn something, you need month to learn to master a new skill. Right? But of course your mind is always telling you, I want to achieve things fast, fast, fast, fast. Because you want to feel the happiness in yourself. You want to feel the joy of learning something new. But you know, what happens is that the motivation only lasts one, two weeks. But then what is really important is to be to have a lot of discipline. Sorry, you need to be, you need to have the discipline to achieve the things. And in order to do that, you need to break some barriers in your head like, oh, I'm not going to be able to learn it. No. Yes, you're going to be able. Why? Because you're going to put time and effort. So time, effort plus discipline is the best strategy to achieve a growth mindset. When we have a growth mindset, we are capable of learning new things, but also we are capable of creating a new universe of topics for ourselves, you know, to learn new topics, to meet new people. I think that I want to highlight something. People think that the only way they can learn is by reading or listening to a class. No, also by practicing, by meeting new people, by joining communities. Those are other ways to learn. There might not be the classical way, but they are another way they can get new knowledge and also improve themselves. Yeah, awesome. I think that already hits upon the second question we have. So how can growth mindset influence personal development and goal achievement? If you're saying people seeking these other ways of learning, that obviously gets you richer experience. But maybe you can talk to that as well, yeah, now that they're saying this, you know, it reminds me of when we speak about professional and personal development, I think both things are related a lot. Why? Because when you improve yourself personally, when you pay a course of self help, when you pay a lesson about leadership, or when you watch a movie about honesty, you are learning things that are going to be helpful for your work. So personal development is important for your professional development because people who are working for others, people who are leaders, people who are managers, they need to get this kind of knowledge, to put it into practice on their daily basis. They need to learn these new skills because then they can put it in their work and it's going to be beneficial for them. So I think that personal development and professional development are really, they have a lot of correlation. Interesting. Yeah. I read about one of the best copywriters, Swartz, and he was a voracious reader. Right. If you see people who are the best in the field, right. They're very curious. They always ask a lot of questions and they don't, you know, feed themselves. Yeah. They're seeking new knowledge from all kinds of places and experiences. Right. And so in that sense, yeah, you can say professional, but personal, professional kind of overflow. Right? Yeah. It's like a personality trait of people who are really curious. Usually they are really good on the things they do. So I think that if you read a lot, if you get to meet a lot of people, then you start to getting more and more knowledge and with that knowledge you're going to be capable of having better ideas. So you are more creative when your mind is not always thinking about that. You have to follow the rules. Yes, you have to follow the rules for some processes, but then again, you can also do things differently or in another way because you have learned new skills and new ways to do things. Imagine that we are still thinking like 50 years ago. Then we wouldn't have so many detailed products, we wouldn't have ux designer, we wouldn't have new developers, new languages of coding. I think that by learning new things and stepping away from the comfort zones, we're going to be able to create beautiful designs, beautiful products, beautiful services. Yep. Awesome. And what are some practical ways then to develop and cultivate a growth mindset in our daily lives? I think that there are many ways. I think that I'm not going to follow the book. I'm going to tell you what I think. It could help you to improve your mindset, to make it a growth, to make it be a growth mindset. So traveling is an important thing to do, you know, learning new cultures, getting to know new people into your. Into your life. Like, I don't know, I've been in Japan and I thought that Japan, I wasn't going to like it. But when I was there, I learned a lot about their culture and most of the things that I didn't know about Japan, now I know it. And trust me, I didn't know that I could be so quiet when I was in Japan. Almost universal street, there were signs saying, please be quiet. And I was like, why? Because they are relaxed. They don't do everything in a rush. They take their time for everything. For the tea, for to eat is so different to our culture, at least to the spanish one. So Spain is pretty loud, right? Exactly. Especially in the summer. Exactly. So I think that traveling is one thing also reading, but not reading. I think you don't have to read only novels or business books. You can read the newspaper or whatever, or a magazine, but you need to be curious. So try to read the things that you like the most, because you need to see what's happening, what are the trends. So reading, traveling and meeting people in the right drive, meaning that you need to join communities. I know that I'm insisting into this, but communities are important for you to understand that the work is not only the company you're working with. Sometimes people, the only thing they do is family and work. Well, I don't think that's the only thing you have in life. In life, you can also join associations. In life, you can also join communities, foundations, helping other people, helping others, volunteer programs, do things that you're not used to do. It will be a way for you to have a new mindset, for you to have a growth mindset. I think those are the strategies that I've been following in my life. I just wanted to share it with you. Yeah, cool. Quick plug, then Highbytes community. Of course you should join that. And also, yes, of course, hit you up. I will be happy to do it. It's a challenge for me. It's a challenge for me because I think the first time we met, I told you that I wanted to learn how to cope. And now I'm into that. So you know what? I'm going to do it because I have the time and I'm willing to do it. It's something that at the beginning I thought it was going to be a challenge, but then I remember I was studying engineering. Why should I be afraid of this? But I was afraid because I already have a job. I already have a good life because it's a challenge. So as a challenge, then I'm going to face it and I'm going to do it because I know I can. Nice mindset. How can a growth mindset help us navigate setbacks and failures? You know, in life you're going to be facing a lot of challenges. Life is not an easy path. It's not something, it's not a smooth for everyone, maybe even if you were born rich or not. I met a lot of people in a conference of millionaires that I went in, in the US and it was so funny because they were worried about things that I would never be worried about, you know, like I'm not worried about having friends, so I have tons of friends. They were worried about being alone in the future. So the growth mindset can help you to address failure because imagine that you were doing a startup or you were running a project and suddenly your code doesn't work, or maybe your startup doesn't work. Well, you know, in life, failures are a way to learn. And having this mindset, that failure, sometimes you learn, sometimes you fail, I think sometimes you learn and sometimes you keep learning when you, when you fail is another, is the way that life is telling you that you're failing again. But it's a learning because now you know that it's not going to happen again because you already failed. So the growth mindset will allow you to know where you have to put focus the next time. You know, I think that's what I would like to say about this opportunity that offers you the growth mindset. You can learn from mistakes, you can learn from failures. And in the next time you're going to do something, a project, startup, whatever, then you're going to do it better. Yeah, they say like, you learn more from your failures than from your successes, right? So you think it's true that if you see somebody that's very successful that they accepted more failures? That's true. I was speaking about this in my lunch time with a friend. He told me, Mark Zuckerberg, he did a lot of mistakes. He has been doing a lot of failures. But I'm not telling that Mark is the best, the most amazing leader. I'm just telling you guys what I was talking to my friend. He said he is in constant failure. For him, his growth mindset is always about, I'm failing, I'm failing, I'm failing. But for him, I'm learning, I'm learning, I'm learning. What was their motto? Like ship fast or break fast? Cool. Yeah, that's clear. So yeah, I think as last time, the final question, can you share any examples or success stories where adopting a growth mindset, how it's helped you personally booking some significant achievements? I'm going to say something that in the last podcast, I said in the last episode, I said that I was a really good public speaker. Right? Well, when I was young, I was not. I was actually pretty bad. Like really, really bad. Like I was the guy who was always shy in the classroom. I was the guy who was really like a geeky. All my friends at the school, they look at me and I was like, he's geek, he's weird. No one talks to him. And suddenly my professor, he said, oh, we're gonna do a role play and you are gonna be part of the role playing, you're going to be an actor and you have to say these three words. You know what happened? I couldn't speak. I was so afraid of public speaking, I didn't do it. So everyone started laughing at me and they were, you know, as we were kids, I was twelve years old and they were all, you know, saying, criticizing me or whatever. So what did I do? Instead of putting my mind into this mode of I'm gonna cry and I'm gonna take revenge? No, I wasn't gonna do that. You know what I said to myself, I'm going to learn. So in that moment, we didn't have Internet like we have right now. So I didn't go into YouTube, I went to something called Encarta. It was like a digital library, but you needed to have a PCU and a CD, you have to install it. And that was the first time I. Pretty old school. Yeah, it was like a Google for in that time, but not connected to the Internet. So basically I put like how to speak in public. Nothing happened. So I put the art of speaking in public and something like that. And I started reading and practicing a lot. So my revenge was not against the people who make fun of me. My revenge was, I'm going to be the best one. That's the reason why I've been working in my public speaking skill more than ten years. So when people say, oh, he's really good, yeah, I'm really good because I've been practicing a lot. So it's not like math that you can learn it in a specific time, in a specific period, you know that it has to give you a specific result. That's a technical skill, soft skills, and as I like to call them, powerful skills are harder to learn, and they just. And in order to learn it, you need to have that growth mindset, because imagine I was scared of public speaking, and now it's something that I really enjoyed. Like, I really, really enjoy publicly speaking. So I think that's an example of me using the growth mindset in my life. Amazing. Inspiring. I like that saying. Like, an overnight success after ten years of hard work. Ten years. People do not believe it, but trust me, my mom, she's not a good public speaker. My dad is in my brothers, and when they see me, they're like, are you part of the family? And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing. So would you say. Would you go as far as saying that if it wasn't a growth mindset, given that you were pretty bad at it at first, if it wasn't for that mindset, you might have dropped it halfway? Yeah, I would say that. And also I would say that most of the things that I've learned in my life, I've been learning those things because I committed a failure or because I needed to step out of my comfort zone. So I don't like to be in a comfort zone. I like to be comfy. I like to always challenge myself. And that's the reason why I have my growth mindset in moon. I always need to learn. I always need to get to meet new people. I like to meet people. And I don't know, I like to be surrounded by people who inspire me or to have connections with people that I know that they are really good at in what they do. So they can also show me what they do and I can learn from them. Love it. Always ask what's next? What's next, right, exactly. Yeah. Talking about what's next, what's coming in the next episode. Pygmalion effect. That's true. I almost forgot what we were going to speak about in the next episode, but, yeah, we're going to speak about a positive psychology concept called pygmalion effect. Yeah. Awesome. Shall we leave that for the next one? Yeah. We're on fire. Yeah. Thanks so much, Alejandro, for, again, sharing very interesting insights. I think it will really help our audience from a mindset perspective, and I think, yeah, growth mindset. I mean, they don't teach that stuff at school. Right. But if you see who succeeds, how people succeed, and I think it's a critical piece, you know? So thanks for sharing it with us. Appreciate it. Thank you, Bob. All right, talk in the next one. We hope you enjoyed this episode to hear more from us. 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