In our last +1, we hung out with the WD-40 chemist in his lab and then joined Thomas Edison in his lab.
When I pictured those scenes, everyone’s wearing a lab coat. For whatever reason, that lab coat perfectly captures the spirit of an experimenter.
And, it reminds me of Michelle Segar’s wisdom from her great book No Sweat. She calls the experimenter’s mindset a “learning mindset.”
She tells us: “With a learning mindset, setbacks and failures don’t enter the picture. They are naturally reframed as opportunities we mindfully learn from. The first time a child touches a hot stove, she doesn’t consider herself a failure—she simply learns not to touch the hot stove again. She adds that bit of learning to her lifetime store of knowledge and then moves right on to something else. In this mindset, we’re not sapping energy by adding up our failures but fueling ourselves with the positive energy that comes from figuring out new ways we can do things. We discover strategies and build skills and resilience that we can use when we inevitably encounter new challenges in the future. And it can even be fun because we get to be creative when we devise novel ways to negotiate with our challenges.”
“A learning mindset.”
I LOVE THAT.
When we have a LEARNING mindset, there is (echo!) no such thing as failure. It’s all just reframed as “opportunities we mindfully learn from.”
That’s Today’s +1.
Experience any setbacks lately?
Throw on your lab coat. (Again!) Grab your clipboard. Look at the data with an experimenter’s/learning mindset.
What can we learn?
How can we Optimize?
Awesome.
Let’s keep the lab coat on Today and get back to work!
👨🔬 👩🔬
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