FOR a minute, imagine that none of us will be here tomorrow; that today is the last day granted to us on this earth. What would the mind’s natural response be? It would drift away, instantly, from the unwanted complexities into which it has needlessly entangled itself, and place us in a condition where we value life more than we ever have, treating our final moments as the most expensive treasure we possess.
This happens because the mind values what turns scarce. Living under the perception that time is unlimited, it throws us into whims and desires and squanders the one resource that can never be recovered. Steve Jobs told Stanford’s graduating class in 2005 that remembering he would be dead soon was “the most important tool I’ve ever encountered” for making the big choices of life, because in the face of death all pride and all fear of embarrassment simply fall away. Scarcity is not the enemy of ambition; it is its origin.
The growth mindset values every moment and compels a human being to move towards his destiny, directing energy to constructive use and averting the negativity the mind naturally carries. The term belongs to Carol Dweck of Stanford, whose 2006 book Mindset separated two views of ability. The fixed mindset treats intelligence as an inheritance, as unchangeable as height. The growth mindset treats it as a capacity that expands through effort and instruction. The first fears difficulty, because difficulty exposes a limit; the second seeks it, because difficulty is the only place where growth occurs.
Consider the individual. James Dyson, irritated that his vacuum cleaner lost suction as its bag clogged, borrowed cyclonic separation from a sawmill. By his own account it took fifteen years and 5,127 prototypes, of which 5,126 failed, before the first bagless cleaner reached the market in 1993 and founded a company now worth billions. A fixed mindset reads failure as a verdict on the self; a growth mindset reads it as data about the problem. That is the distance between quitting at attempt nine and persisting to attempt five thousand.
Nations behave no differently, and Pakistan need not import its examples. In 1995 six businessmen put their own money into five schools in Karachi slums that lacked electricity and clean water. Thirty years later, The Citizens Foundation runs over 2,200 school units, educates some 320,000 children and employs an all-female faculty of some 16,500, the largest private employer of women in the country. A UK Aid assessment found that 83 per cent of its Class Five pupils could read a story in the local language, against 37 per cent provincially in Sindh. Six citizens who did not wait for a saviour.
Against that stands the arithmetic of neglect. Some 25 to 26 million children remain out of school, the second largest such population on earth, two years after a National Education Emergency was declared. Education receives roughly 0.8 per cent of GDP against the four to six recommended internationally; research and development receives 0.16 per cent. These are not the statistics of a nation short of talent. Two-thirds of Pakistanis are under thirty, and where that energy is given direction it answers at once: technology exports rose nearly twenty per cent last year. Potential is not the constraint; the mental model applied to it is.
Why, then, do human beings make choices that harm them? The answer lies in comparison. Leon Festinger established in 1954 that where objective standards are absent, people measure themselves against others; research since has found that such upward comparison, magnified today by social media, breeds envy and diminished self-worth. The fixed mindset is what turns comparison toxic. If ability is fixed, achievement is fixed too, and every success belongs to somebody else’s share. Life becomes a zero-sum contest in which a neighbour’s rise is a personal defeat, and the cheapest way to feel tall is to make others appear short. The growth mindset performs the opposite conversion: another’s achievement is not a theft but a proof of possibility. Societies reside in chaos precisely where the first reading prevails, and energy that could have built is spent demolishing rivals.
The remedies begin in the classroom and end in the state. Teachers must praise the process, not the person: telling a child he is brilliant teaches him to guard a reputation, while telling him his method worked teaches him to improve it. Failure must be treated as evidence, not disgrace. Education financing must be restored towards the international threshold, research funded as investment rather than ornament, and merit defended in appointment; nothing entrenches a fixed mindset faster than the public spectacle of connection defeating competence.
Return, then, to the thought with which this began. If today were the last day, the mind would discard everything that does not matter and reach for what does. That clarity is not a gift of death; it is a discipline of the living. The growth mindset is not optimism. It is the harder conviction that ability is made, that failure is information, and that the distance between potential and reality is crossed only by those willing to begin. Nations do not rise because they were gifted. They rise because they decided, at some identifiable moment, to learn.
—The writer is Commoner from 44th Common Educationist — Founder of WHI Institute.based in Sargodha.
