Built Dffrnt: Week 17 – Growth vs. Fixed

When I was five, my biological mom left and I went to live with my dad. I showed up at school ahead in math and behind in reading. Somewhere in there I picked up a story about myself and carried it for years:

“I can’t read.” So I didn’t. I avoided books altogether, straight into adulthood. I had decided who I was, and I protected it.

Then I met the woman who would become my wife, and her family. In their world, reading was just part of becoming a great leader and a serious person in business. I wanted in, and I wanted to add value to their family. That was the big why (and let’s be honest, it’s always a girl, isn’t it). That why was bigger than my old story, and the bigger the why, the easier the how. The guy who “couldn’t read” became a reader. I have probably put away a hundred books on mindset and performance since.

Here is what I did not have words for back then: why does one person stay trapped behind a story like “I can’t,” while another breaks out and grows? A Stanford psychologist named Carol Dweck spent thirty years on that exact question, and she found the difference is bigger than talent, luck, or how hard your childhood was. It is the story you run in your head about whether you CAN change.

Watch which one you run, because you can hear it in the words. Fixed mindset hides from hard things because hard things might expose it. Growth mindset walks toward them because that is where it gets stronger. Same job site, two kinds of people:

Read the top line of each column again. That is the whole game, and it is one word apart.

Dweck tells a story about a Chicago high school where students who failed a class did not get an F. They got a grade of “Not Yet.” Think about what that does to a kid. An F says this is who you are. Not Yet says this is where you are on the way. One closes the door. One holds it open.

You already know this in my own language. Can’t never could. The second you decide you can’t, you have made yourself right and closed the book. “Not yet” is the same truth pointed the other way. You have not arrived, and you are still moving. That is a growth mindset in three words a five-year-old can understand.

Paul wrote that from a prison cell. He had every excuse to be fixed, to let his worst chapter define him. He chose to strain forward instead. That is the choice in front of every one of us.

Years later, my son Austin’s teacher handed us a book on the growth mindset. Reading it, yeah, reading, the kid who “couldn’t,” put a name to everything I had lived. And here is the humbling part. It also showed me I still do it. I still catch myself ducking challenges that might expose that old “I’m not good at this” and bruise my ego. The fixed voice never fully leaves. You just get faster at catching it, and braver about walking straight at the thing anyway.

One more picture, because it is the whole book in one image. A caterpillar in the cocoon has to fight like hell to get out, and the struggle is the point. Science shows the harder it fights, the stronger it lives. Help it out early and it dies. The wrestling is what builds the wings. That is why what doesn’t kill you CAN make you stronger. Not automatically. Only if you choose to grow through it instead of getting stuck under it.

THIS WEEK, SIT WITH THIS:
Catch one “I can’t” and add the two words.

This week, listen for the fixed voice. “I’m not a numbers guy.” “I’m bad with clients.” “I could never run that job.” When you catch one, stop, and finish the sentence honestly:

• “I’m not good at that yet.” Then: what is one rep I CAN take this week?
• What did my hardest year teach me that I’d never have learned the easy way?

You don’t rewire a lifetime of self-talk in a week. You just start catching it. Every “not yet” is a door you left open. Phase 1 was waking up. Phase 2 is going in, and this is the ground floor: you are not finished, you are becoming. Bring some fire. Let’s get after it in life, family, and business!

Lots of love, Nate