The Student Mindset

Having a student mindset means being open to the idea that you will keep learning throughout your life. It is important to understand that learning is a lifestyle. Don’t close the doors to your mind once you are out of school.

Why is it important ?

People when they think of learning see themselves sitting in a classroom reading a textbook or listening to a lecture. That is not the case. Learning is not confined to the classroom, it’s the bare minimum. The classroom is where your interests are formed and cultivated. It’s not where learning ends.
As times change, the relevancy and significance of certain knowledge changes.

Example

This may be surprising to some young folks out there, but many people didn’t even participate in the internet boom of the 2000s and to this day don’t know what the internet is and how to use it. To stay relevant and be a person of significance you must have significant knowledge concerning the times. When such revolutions take place, some jobs are lost, and some jobs are created. The problem does not lie in not knowing but lies in not wanting to know. You can never know everything, but you should want to know more.

Everything cannot be learned in the classroom.

Sometimes the syllabus being taught in schools may seem repetitive but the important lesson that school teaches us is ‘learning’- the habit. You must carry this habit throughout life. This habit of analyzing, visualizing, understanding, researching, and then meticulously applying a concept or idea should be implemented everywhere in life. Once you graduate from college, don’t stop learning, and don’t close your mind to new ideas. Be open to learning new things from your colleagues and clients.

You are a student of life. Everything you learn isn’t going to come from a book, you can learn from real-world experience. Often difficult concepts or skills in a book don’t resonate with us until we have experienced the need for that particular skill in real life.

Self-education

This is a habit that makes the biggest difference in the world. You are not going to have a teacher and classmates all the time. Some things must be learned on your own. You can learn from books, YouTube videos, podcasts, and courses. Most people complain about self-education not being organized, but that’s the specialty of it, you can change the syllabus however you want. If you find something interesting, you can dive even deeper without having to attend to a rigid syllabus. Knowledge never goes to waste.

Self-education may seem lonely, but you can always find communities through Discord, YouTube, Telegram, Twitter, etc which are learning the same skill. The internet is an infinite source of information, your job is to extract valuable information and use it to develop a skill that you can use in your life. Eventually, this skill that you implement should make your life better.

Arrogance

The biggest enemy of learning is arrogance. You should never judge a person who is giving you knowledge based on their background but judge the person based on the knowledge they are giving you. That person may be younger than you and even less experienced, but what matters is what they are telling you. Never fall into the trap of only listening to the people you feel are superior to you.

Listen to what everyone has to say as they may have the solution to your problem. If you feel like someone’s advice is wrong, don’t use it, if someone’s advice is right, learn from it and let them know that their advice benefitted you. Everyone can be a teacher to you if you just listen to them with the intent to learn. Don’t throw away good advice or a good idea just because it came from a person you don’t like or don’t consider your superior or equal.

Growth Mindset

To even adopt a student mindset, you must have a growth mindset in the first place. A growth mindset is a state of mind in which, when you encounter challenges that put you in difficult situations, you see them as growing or learning opportunities. In every problem, you see an opportunity to grow, which is what you do throughout your life.

Fixed Mindset

Having a fixed mindset means you view problems and certain circumstances as limitations and feel like your situation is unchangeable and irreconcilable. If you have not been able to get out of a fixed mindset, I would recommend reading books about the Growth mindset. It is not that you don’t want to change, it is that you don’t have the right knowledge or information to do so .

Conclusion

A growth mindset means you believe you can improve your capabilities and habits, but you need a student mindset to get the required knowledge to improve and hone these capabilities and habits. A growth mindset creates the desire to grow but a student mindset creates the desire to find the knowledge needed to grow.

“A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.“

Bruce Lee

On to the next.

-Akash Gaonkar-