The stories we tell ourselves about what we can't do

How much of our potential is just belief?

Hi friends,

I'm finally reading Mindset by Carol Dweck, after hearing about it for years (including in the Yale happiness course I loved, where it features prominently). I'm about a third of the way through and it's been eye-opening—particularly as I prepare for my cochlear implant surgery at the end of August.

!!!

The TL;DR of the book is this:

There are two kinds of mindsets—fixed and growth. People with a fixed mindset believe their abilities, intelligence, and talents are static traits that can't be significantly developed. They avoid challenges because failure feels like proof of their limitations.

People with a growth mindset believe these same qualities can be developed through effort, learning, and persistence. They embrace challenges because they see them as opportunities to improve.

(Dweck is the first to admit that we all have elements of both mindsets within us, so it’s not an either/or, clean and tidy proposition. It’s a WHICH WOLF WILL YOU FEED situation.)

My favorite detail so far is this one:

Alfred Binet, the creator of the IQ test, didn't design the test to separate the "gifted" from everyone else. He created it to help underperforming children that French schools were failing. The test we think of as the ultimate sorting hat for intelligence was actually born from a desire to lift people up, not weed them out.

Isn't that wild?

The Calculus of quitting

This got me thinking about my own relationship with challenge—specifically, the time I quit calculus at sixteen. I'd taken advanced math classes all my life. Math had always been easy for me. Then suddenly, it wasn't.

I barely passed my final exam the first semester. My boyfriend tried to help, but he "got" it intuitively and couldn't explain what felt obvious to him. I went to my teacher, who was impatient and mean (though I'd gotten an A in her algebra class two years before, so it wasn't just her teaching style).

After she brushed me off, I didn't seek out tutoring or study groups.

When faced with my first real academic challenge, I did what felt impossible to imagine at the time: I quit.

Not just the class—I literally never took math again. I majored in Creative Writing and tested out of whatever rudimentary math requirement they had for English majors. My entire LIFE, post-Calculus, has been math-free! That’s how thoroughly I quit.

Based on this one hard thing.

Here's the kicker: That same year I took the SATs and scored higher in math than in English. English! My favorite subject and chosen profession! Yet I'd already internalized the story that I was "bad at math"—a story that became self-fulfilling the moment I stopped trying.

The neural pathway forward

Now, as I bolster myself to become a cyborg, I'm facing a different kind of challenge. I've been deaf for so long, trying everything under the sun to be "less deaf"—hearing aids, auditory rehab, lip reading, therapy, a sweat ceremony, etc.

I finally landed on acceptance, sort of. (I’m learning ASL. I use LiveTranscribe. I know my limitations and try to give myself a fucking break once in a while.)

Because spoiler alert: There's no way to be "less deaf" when it's genetic. The hair cells in my ears are damaged, and no amount of willpower or straining to discern the difference between win and when can undamage them.

But cochlear implants will bypass those damaged cells entirely. I'll have to train my brain to "hear" again in this completely new way, to create new neural pathways and connections that will take months or possibly years.

I don't know what my potential will be—CIs don’t restore "normal" hearing. But how much can I accomplish if I approach this with a growth mindset—with radical optimism—instead of the resigned pragmatism I've carried for so long?

I think of a friend who shattered their wrist. The physical therapist was convinced they'd never regain function, though thankfully did not share that opinion. My friend worked their ass off to relearn the smallest tasks—like picking up a paper clip—and eventually succeeded in getting back nearly full motion of their wrist and hand.

I think of Christopher Reeve (aka Superman), who was in a terrible accident that left him completely paralyzed below the neck. The doctors told him to "get used to" it. He didn't. He started a demanding exercise program, moving his paralyzed body with electrical stimulation.

For five years, nothing happened.

Then, slowly, he began to move his hands, then his arms, then his legs, and then his torso. He wasn't "cured," but he achieved things no one thought possible and opened up entirely new research avenues for spinal cord injuries.

The uncomfortable truth about potential

Would I have an exciting career in some math-dominant field if I hadn't quit Calculus? Probably not—I never had great passion for math, even though I had an aptitude for it.

But it's fascinating to consider what we're capable of versus what we think we're capable of, and how much of that gap is filled by belief.

This isn't to flatten the very real disparities people face—racial, economic, ableist prejudices that create genuinely uneven playing fields. Dweck doesn't shy away from acknowledging these realities.

But even accounting for systemic barriers, research proves we achieve far more when we try, when we work hard and don't wilt at the first signs of struggle. When we accept that we are dynamic beings who are capable of phenomenal change, growth, adaptation, and learning.

The stories we tell ourselves about our limitations become our limitations.

The question isn't whether we'll encounter challenges—it's whether we'll shrink in the face of them or plod the fuck ahead anyway.

I'm choosing to plod ahead. My brain is about to learn how to hear again. What's your brain ready to learn?

Anna

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