Here’s some devil’s-advocacy that comes to mind. You say:
As a final caveat, there are of course a great many perils associated with learning-mindset too. Learning can easily become divorced from real-world goals; picking the right actions to learn the information you actually is no small challenge.
Suppose that you adopt the “learning mindset”, and undertake some learning-focused actions. As you say, there’s a danger of “lost purposes”—but this can actually manifest in multiple, importantly different, ways!
One version of that failure mode is simply continuing to learn, indefinitely, without ever doing anything. (This, arguably, is much of modern academia.)
Suppose you avoid that failure mode, and, having learned something, you declare a victory. Fine; but how do you know that what you’ve learned is of any use? How do you know it’s not just nonsense? (This, arguably, is also much of modern academia.)
The solution seems obvious: if you think you’ve learned something, switch to “doing mindset”, and do the thing, applying what you’ve learned. If your learning was worth anything, then your doing will bear that out. Right?
Well, that may be true if what you’ve learned was about how to do the thing. But what if the key questions, and the ones which you were (or should have been!) most interested in, were not how to do the thing, but which thing(s) to do, and how to evaluate what you’ve done, and other, trickier, less practical (but more globally impactful) questions?
Then you may think you’ve learned something useful, and do things on that basis, but actually what you’ve learned is either wrong, or, more insidiously, not enough (cf. “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”). If you’d’ve kept learning, you’d’ve discovered that; but you were in a hurry to do…
Thus it seems to me that “learning mindset” must perpetually thread this needle—between “how do I know I’ve learned anything”, and “how do I know I’ve learned enough”. And it is difficult to say whether “doing mindset” will suffice to keep you on that straight and narrow path…
In the lean startup paradigma, the idea is that you have assumptions about your bridge project before you start the bridge project.
After you build the bridge you automatically find through empiric feedback which assumptions turned out to be right and which assumptions were wrong.
Once you have empiric evidence that the assumptions are correct you go to out and fundraise based on being able to argue that you have evidence that your assumptions for Bridgr.io are correct.
If the investors are convinced that you learned that the assumptions of the company are sound they will think that it’s a good investment and pour money into it to allow you to scale up.
Excellent post!
Here’s some devil’s-advocacy that comes to mind. You say:
Suppose that you adopt the “learning mindset”, and undertake some learning-focused actions. As you say, there’s a danger of “lost purposes”—but this can actually manifest in multiple, importantly different, ways!
One version of that failure mode is simply continuing to learn, indefinitely, without ever doing anything. (This, arguably, is much of modern academia.)
Suppose you avoid that failure mode, and, having learned something, you declare a victory. Fine; but how do you know that what you’ve learned is of any use? How do you know it’s not just nonsense? (This, arguably, is also much of modern academia.)
The solution seems obvious: if you think you’ve learned something, switch to “doing mindset”, and do the thing, applying what you’ve learned. If your learning was worth anything, then your doing will bear that out. Right?
Well, that may be true if what you’ve learned was about how to do the thing. But what if the key questions, and the ones which you were (or should have been!) most interested in, were not how to do the thing, but which thing(s) to do, and how to evaluate what you’ve done, and other, trickier, less practical (but more globally impactful) questions?
Then you may think you’ve learned something useful, and do things on that basis, but actually what you’ve learned is either wrong, or, more insidiously, not enough (cf. “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”). If you’d’ve kept learning, you’d’ve discovered that; but you were in a hurry to do…
Thus it seems to me that “learning mindset” must perpetually thread this needle—between “how do I know I’ve learned anything”, and “how do I know I’ve learned enough”. And it is difficult to say whether “doing mindset” will suffice to keep you on that straight and narrow path…
In the lean startup paradigma, the idea is that you have assumptions about your bridge project before you start the bridge project.
After you build the bridge you automatically find through empiric feedback which assumptions turned out to be right and which assumptions were wrong.
Once you have empiric evidence that the assumptions are correct you go to out and fundraise based on being able to argue that you have evidence that your assumptions for Bridgr.io are correct.
If the investors are convinced that you learned that the assumptions of the company are sound they will think that it’s a good investment and pour money into it to allow you to scale up.
Thanks for the link! Sorry to change from the term “mindset” to “intention” on you.