Be growth minded. 3 practical tips from my Cloud Software engineering career

A lot of people want to be growth-minded, but they fail. They fail because they lack a proper action plan. That’s why I want to share practical tips to be growth-minded. Please try to implement these tips in your life, and see the improvements. By the way, in one of the previous posts, I discussed how the growth mindset made my life much easier and my work more enjoyable, and what the term growth-minded means. You can read it here

Accept that you don’t know “everything,” and your memory betrays with you

• It will help you to take feedback easily and discuss it with others.
• You won’t take feedback as a personal attack because you have accepted that you don’t know everything
• Your ego will be less hurt, and you will be able to avoid unnecessary debates

You can do the followings:

• Ask others to give you feedback on a task you are doing. Asking for feedback removes your ego and shows signs that you want to improve yourself. If anyone provides a different solution than yours, ask “Why” and “What”? E.g., you might say:Thanks for your feedback. I want to discuss to better understand your point.Why do you want to do in this way? What benefits do you think it will bring?

“Why” and “What” will prompt others to give you their expertise. Based on their response, you might find they were thinking in a direction you missed.

Your voice tone is very important when you discuss or ask for clarification.

• Your voice shouldn’t sound like you are attacking them.
• Your voice should sound with genuine interest.

Learn new skills and block time for that

You can do the following:

• Fix some time every week to learn a new skill.
• Decide what you want to learn. AI, ML, Cloud, soft skills, etc.
• Find the best time for you; for example, my best time is after praying fajr and 2 hours before going to sleep at night.
• If you can invest 30 minutes daily, it will be 10 hours in a month! Believe me, you can learn a lot in 10 hours.
• If social media distracts you, block social media for that time period I use the Pomodoro technique to keep my focus. This technique is very simple, start a timer for 25 minutes. Only focus on your learning on those 25 minutes, don’t do anything else. After 25 minutes, take a break of 5 minutes. Just relax in those 5 minutes, and don’t think about your work or learning. You can also learn for 45 min, then take a 15 min break.

Make Prototypes/POC, and don’t aim for perfection

• If you have a new idea, then create a small prototype
• Don’t think about a perfect product because perfection will cost more time, but the gain will be minimal. Our target is not to create production-ready software, we are just trying to prove our concept
• Share this prototype with your network, and ask for feedback. This feedback will help you to learn more and grow.
• You can also work on prototypes, and POC (proof of concept) at your job to show a new project idea. Or to solve a problem in a different way. Or to use new technology.For example, you want to use cloud technologies. You can make a POC with the cloud and show your management the benefits it brings. This will help to convince and on board others with your idea.

A growth mindset will help you to learn from any situation and from anyone. You will convert mistakes into learning. Follow the above tips and find a better version of yourself!