Want to Succeed Forever? Develop This

It's not brain surgery.  But if you want to succeed at everything you do?  Listen up.

We've heard it all.  Meditate.  Live in the moment.  Get enough sleep.  Accomplish the goals you -- and your boss-- set out for yourself.   Maybe even over-perform. But what if there were a mindset you could develop that would allow you to succeed forever?

Well, now, a new study reports that we also need one additional "important psychological tool, a  “strategic mindset”, according to newswise.com.

The study found that those who ask, "How else can I do this?" or "Is there a better way to do this," rather than just doing what they've always done to achieve success make out far better.

But it's not just work that these kinds of people use this mindset for.  Stanford University psychologists report that this research shows that, as a result, people with this mindset "tend to apply more effective strategies when working towards their goals in life – including educational, work, health and fitness goals. In turn, they achieve higher school grades, make greater progress towards their professional, health, and fitness goals, and even perform a novel challenging task more efficiently," newswise explains.

The National University of Singapore also contributed to the study.

“These findings are exciting because psychological science has long known that having a wide repertoire of strategies matters. But until now, we hadn’t understood why some people use their strategies more than others at the right time. We developed our research on the strategic mindset to explain why this might be,” the website quotes Asst Prof Chen, lead author of the study. 

Can people learn a strategic mindset? Yes, the researchers found that a strategic mindset can indeed be taught. "In an experiment, they randomly assigned some people to learn about a strategic mindset through a brief training session. Later, they gave these people a novel, challenging task to accomplish as quickly as possible. Compared to other people in the study who were not exposed to these strategic mindset ideas, those who had learned about a strategic mindset later applied more effective strategies to accomplish the task," newswise says. 

Their strategic behaviors, in turn, translated into faster task performance. Additionally, these people who had learned about a strategic mindset also voluntarily practiced the task more before they had to perform it under timepressure – suggesting that a strategic mindset also has important implications for practice. 

How does the strategic mindset work? Co-author Professor Carol Dweck from the Department of Psychology at Stanford University tells newswise, the good news is, people can immediately apply this insight to their lives. Asst Prof Chen notes, “As you approach whatever challenging goal you are pursuing, you can ask yourself, ‘What are things I can do to help myself (and others)? Is there a way to do this even better?’ If something you have been working on isn’t going so well, can you step back and ask yourself, ‘How might I go about this differently? Is there another approach I can try to help this go better?’”

So, instead of beating yourself up the next time a task doesn't work out the way you want it to, think, How can I do this better?  What else can I try to make the outcome fly?  No guarantees, but it sure beats sitting in the dark, depressed, the next time your boss says, "This isn't what I want."