Having a Growth Mindset

• Your goals end abruptly and you don't have any further plans. 

Once your goals are met, they’ve served their purpose and become redundant. For example, getting your first rated level. Once you obtain that goal, now what? Where can you go from there? How can you further develop?

• Not knowing what you want to pursue. 

Without a temporary “end-goal” in sight - a guiding compass to your path - thinking becomes unorganized, unclear and confusing. There is no structure or basis that leads up to anything.

• Overthinking or overcomplicating things

You might fail to realize the current reality of your situation, and bite off more than you can chew. Imagine going from point A to Z without working out the details in between. You'll start projects without realizing how ambitious they are, and end up getting demotivated.

• Comparing yourself with others.

While it’s natural to constantly evaluate and judge, the issue is information asymmetry. You don’t know about these skilled creator’s stories, their unfair advantages or struggles in creating their levels. You might downplay yourself rather than using this as encouragement. As a result, it’s demotivating. Like looking at an iceberg, you are comparing your worst bloopers with their best highlights.

Regardless of how good you think you are, your task will always be to get better and improve constantly. Your job is to utilize your experiences and leverage your failures so that you can perform better next time: avoid giving in to failure and accept it for what it is. Acknowledge that failure.

Second, note that constant improvement doesn’t mean linear improvement. There are some days when life catches up to you, and other days when all you have in store is Geometry Dash. So avoid pressuring yourself to improve all the time at the same rate.

Third, your abilities are almost entirely up to how you choose to learn, perceive and behave. It’s alright if you have a slower or more unconventional way of learning that no one else would use. You do you to progress. If you seek wisdom, reach out to someone.

Achieving a goal takes time, the growth mindset is set for small increases over time which builds up into significant results. Initial efforts will mostly yield disappointing results, so patience is needed to keep going. This isn’t a “get rich quick scheme” where just learning one thing drastically yields change. You must be willing to work hard and smart to get to where you want to be.

• Consistency: How much time will you spend practicing Geometry Dash?

There are many forms of practice, but it is key to do it consistently. As mentioned by the previous guide, you are here to learn, explore, discover new things, concepts and ideas, AND make mistakes. As bad as making mistakes sounds, each one is a learning experience.

• Hard Work: How much of your effort will be for practicing Geometry Dash?

This goes hand in hand with consistency. Any journey to mastery will never be an effortless task; time and effort are required to obtain the results that you want.

• Focus: What do you want to practice on? Block design? Structuring? Gameplay Sync? Atmosphere?

It is also fundamental to know where you want to develop and additionally have a purpose as well. Without a set location or reason, refinement becomes difficult if not impossible. You can’t become a master of anything unless you focus on something to start.

• Curiosity: What do you want to explore?

 A strong foundation to grow and learn stems from asking a question, finding an answer, and repeating that cycle. Maybe an effect caught your interest, and you want to replicate it, or you want to try looping spawn triggers. You don’t have to focus on one thing forever, otherwise you’ll have trouble doing new things. Like solving a Rubik’s Cube, you incrementally solve each part of the cube, and learn helpful algorithms for each step before moving on to the next step.

• Time Management: What’s your schedule? 

This is key as well because with time comes skill, so allocating a portion of your time solely on practicing is important as well. Time management is heavily linked to hard work and consistency. This will be further explained in a later guide.

• Misinterpretations

Before concluding this guide, there’s a disclaimer that needs to be said: Like any other guide that deals with mindset, philosophy, and mental energy, the messages and applications pointed out in these guides are only as strong as its interpretation. Naturally, even the benefits coming from the growth mindset can be misinterpreted. In effect, this harms your learning. Dweck herself had to make posts to clarify people’s misinterpretations and pitfalls when applying this mindset:

• Effort Isn't Everything - While it’s true that effort plays a major role in cultivating the growth mindset, focusing strictly on effort can be misguided. For example, what if you are putting effort on an inefficient strategy? There are those who try hard and still don’t reach their goals. And instead of reflecting on their strategies and working smarter, they are told to try harder, which misses the point, and ties in with the next misinterpretation.

• A lack of success doesn’t come from a lack of effort - Correlation doesn’t equal causation: there can be other factors at play such as luck, and circumstances beyond your control. Even so, when people face these things, their next assumption is to blame themselves for their failures, and that is damaging to self esteem.

• Fixed and growth mindsets are a spectrum - especially when learning something new, you won’t have 100% fixed mindset, nor 100% growth mindset; a majority tend to have a bit of both. The ideal is to adopt more growth mindset habits than fixed mindset habits. Accept that a part of you will have those fixed mindset habits and recognize those triggers.