As the saying goes, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.” I do believe this to be true and also believe that a key ingredient to staying active and engaged in any pursuit is to maintain a mindset of continual improvement. Basically, when you stop growing, you start dying. I think that we are first challenged by this when we hit “middle age” and loose that growth mindset. We become complacent in what we do and stagnate in our personal growth. We shy away from testing ourselves, learning new things, and taking on new challenges. It’s just “too hard” with all of the other things that go on in our lives. We become complacent and stuck in a very small comfort zone.
The reality is that growth, at least after puberty, is a personal choice. The first step is to make the decision and choose to learn something new. This is a mental step and is to overcome the internal barrier that often holds us back. This is more than it sound like as it is so easy to drop into a complacent life without venturing into new activities, learning new things or allowing change to be faced. Often the security people have in the consistent lifestyle keeps them locked into that and they are afraid to change it as it seems to threaten that security. If you want to develop yourself, you must decide that you are ready and willing and commit yourself to making it happen!
But, a choice on its own still has to backed up by action. You still must put those thoughts and ideas into action for them to ever become reality. One of the hardest things in learning something new is just how to start or to take that initial step or action. Just get started and take a few actions at the start and then continue to make recurrent progress.
All those small actions that you take will move you closer and closer to mastery and will begin to shift into a need to repeat and practice more of the same to really understand and be competent and confident in your new learned skills/tasks/etc. The more you repeat something the easier it will become and you will slowly learn to make it a repeatable skill.
One of the best methods to create lasting change around a new skill is to teach it to someone else. This is the contribution portion of the cycle. Write about it, show someone or guide a group to learn something that you have already done. This will truly have you thinking and explaining why something is important, how to learn it most effectively, what are the things that helped or hindered you along the way and last but not least, it proves that you know your stuff.
In my opinion, the goal is to continually cycle through the growth and contribution process. Challenge yourself to learn a new skill (growth) and then teach it to someone else (contribution). Your growth may be provided by someone else’s contribution, and your contribution may provide someone else’s growth.
Where in your life have you become stagnate? How can you use the growth and contribution mindset to learn, master, and teach a new skill?
GRIT 
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