“Overall, fewer than 30% of all entrepreneurs expect to add more than six employees in the next five years, but there is a substantial gender gap in that 18.7% of women entrepreneurs expect high growth compared to 29% of men entrepreneurs” GEM 2018/2019 Women’s Entrepreneurship Report.
Transcript
What is the growth mindset? Personally, I would summarize it with the philosophy of lifelong learning. It’s the ability to regularly leap out of your comfort zone and enjoy the process by actually having the excitement when you’re in the so-called learning zone. This directly links to entrepreneurship because learning includes making mistakes. And so does entrepreneurship, most entrepreneurial undertakings include the potential for failure. We can read about it all the time in the media. And it’s really important to always be aware of the fact that failure or mistakes can happen, whether or not it is a failure. That’s sort of a definition question. And it’s also in how you take it.
Well, when thinking of the difference between a fixed and the growth mindsets, what came to my mind was this amazing book by Carol Dweck. I found this book, by accident when I was in the bookstore on the Stanford campus two years ago while I was there. And that honestly, it looked at me because it’s all about how we can learn to fulfill our potential. And what’s special about it is it was in the business department, but you have parenting school, relationships and business. So the mindset not only affects us as entrepreneurs. It affects us as humans. And as the description says if something is fixed, it also means that we’re likely to suffer from any deviation from what we expect or what we define as normal, but honestly, such is life. There’s so many unexpected things. At the time of the recording of this video, half of Europe is just staying at home, and honestly who would have thought that just six months back. So it’s really about learning how to cope with unexpected situations and challenges, and not entering what we call the panic zone, but really going there to take it as a new challenge and learning.
The importance of the growth mindset is quite manifold. On the one hand, if you have it, the key point is that you’re less likely to give up if you know that it is a learning process and not a failure. So let’s reverse it. It also means you’re much more likely to succeed, basically. And if we compare what is a growth mindset with what is a fixed mindset? Let’s say the growth mindset means you will embrace challenges while in a fixed mindset you’re more likely to just avoid any type of challenge. That also means with the growth mindset, you’re more likely to learn from feedback and even criticism. And the fixed mindset is going to be just ignoring criticism. And feedback is a special thing. You always have to weight, how much of it has to do with you and how much of it has to do with the person giving the feedback. There is this great saying what Peter says about Paul, or I should say what Petra says about Paula has much more to do with Paula than it has to do with Petra. And it’s true because we give feedback based on our universe and maybe the person that we are giving the feedback lives in a different system and totally doesn’t see what we think. It’s really about not giving up. So that’s the key part.
