How Successful People Think 

Being a successful or unsuccessful person doesn’t only have to do with your motivation, it also depends on the way you think. Your brain fires off countless thoughts and interpretations every second. Your thoughts influence your feelings, then your feelings influence your actions and interactions with people around you. If you’re not in the right frame of mind for success, you’ll never get there.

Having a growth mindset is a major predictor of success, according to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck who consolidated twenty years of research into her widely popular book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. In it, she explains that your mindset—essentially your philosophies about life and yourself—is a major predictor of your success. Your mindset tells you who you are and what you believe. It’s your general attitude. 

Having a growth mindset means that you can embrace challenges and setbacks as learning experiences. You take criticism in stride, allowing yourself to be human but also digesting the feedback in a healthy way in order to become a better version of yourself. 

The opposite of this is being ridge, unimaginative, giving up in the face of adversity and staying close minded to any ideas that don’t match your own. This mindset will likely make you wildly unsuccessful. 

Successful people not only have growth mindsets, they are usually positive people who are largely optimistic about themselves and their goals. They’re of course realistic about the hard work they’ll need to put in in order to be successful, but they really do believe that they will do great things. They don’t put themselves down, they lift themselves up.