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Your Biggest Asset Is a Growth Mindset

Susan Kelley
4 min readMar 18, 2020

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Photo by Christian Bisbo Johnsen on Unsplash

There are so many cliches in the world aimed at driving people to success that I could just write a list of them here and move on, but to me, they all boil down to a single essence, and that is: if you are willing to grow, you will grow. If you are unwilling to approach the world with a sense of ambition, then you’ll stay stock-still where you are.

The cool thing about humans is, we actually have that option. We are not antelopes in the wild where, if we stand still for a period of time, a predator will soon come along to eat us. No, for us, if we stand still, we’ll be okay, we will just stagnate financially or intellectually. And you know what? For some, that is just fine. Some humans find comfort in that, stability, even.

For many years, in our industrial society, it was admirable to take on a job and work at it for thirty years, retire, and take pride in the comfort of that stability. That was the path for some, and it was indeed admirable. I can use the example of my ex-husband, a teacher, who is still after thirty years, teaching in the same role in the same school doing the same thing he was doing when we first met. He finds this satisfying. I find it stultifying.

I approach the world with a sense of ambition, he is stock-still. We agree on different ways to define success.

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Susan Kelley
Susan Kelley

Written by Susan Kelley

Susan is a runner, a mom of 3 grown children, and an avid traveler. She writes about humans, and wrote a book about false accusations of sexual assault.

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